From a long benevolent position towards Russia to an admission of “collective naivety” in the face of the ambitions of Vladimir Poutinethe French extreme right and its leader Marine Le Pen changed their discourse on the Ukrainian question.
In February 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine embarrassed major far-right movements in Europe, who oscillated between ideological loyalty to Vladimir Putin and solidarity with kyiv, while pointing out the responsibility, in their eyes, of the West in the conflict. Thursday, on the eve of the anniversary of the outbreak of the war, the president of the National Rally (RN) Jordan Bardella recognized, in everyday life L’Opinion“a collective naivety with regard to the expansionist will of Vladimir Putin”.
Marine Le Pen has not hidden an interest in Vladimir Putin
Two weeks earlier, the MEP had risen in the hemicycle of Bruxelles to applaud the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky against the advice of other RN parliamentarians. MEP Thierry Mariani, one of the most Russophiles of French elected officials, had skipped the session. Marine Le Pen surprised herself by going to a dinner organized by the President of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Piveton the occasion of the visit to Paris of his Ukrainian counterpart.
Cantor of a “diplomatic resolution of the conflict”, Marine Le Pen constantly castigated the delivery of French weapons to the Ukrainian troops, in particular the Caesar guns. Armament supplies that Jordan Bardella no longer disputes en bloc.
Now is the time for discretion on the issue. “People get tired…”, observes Renaud Labaye, secretary general of the RN group at the National Assembly and close to Marine Le Pen. If the latter “came to the front when Emmanuel Macron showed himself a little warmonger, we did not reach a degree where it would deserve to put a stop to the President of the Republic”, continues- he.
The strategists of the National Rally have also found that their bet a year ago on a mistrust in public opinion vis-à-vis the French aid brought to Ukraine has proved to be a loser. According to a survey Ipsos published on Tuesday, 56% of French are “in favor of France’s continued support for Ukraine until all Russian forces have withdrawn from territory claimed by Ukraine” (23% against), support which drops to 42% among RN sympathizers, but still higher than the 39% who oppose it.