After her meeting with the new prime minister, Marine Le Pen gave her view of the current political situation in France in a long interview with Le Parisien. She painted a pessimistic picture of the coming months, pointing to the heavy responsibility of the president of the republic for the current chaos, and explained that she expected early presidential elections.
While the Rassemblement National (RN) has been France’s leading party in terms of voters and number of MPs since the July 2024 elections, Marine Le Pen claims a strategy of balance and caution. For the time being, she is sparing the new prime minister, with whom she hopes to engage in constructive dialogue. She hopes, by virtue of what she calls her “blissful optimism,” that he will not repeat the mistakes of his predecessor Michel Barnier. She explains: “François Bayrou comes after Michel Barnier, so I think he’s likely to see what can happen when you ignore 11 million voters. He invited the RN first, as a symbolic gesture, taking into account its political weight.” However, she remains cautious: “He tells us he’ll listen, but he’s not the first to say so…,” and stresses that for the moment, in the absence of a government, he has given no guarantees.
In her interview, Marine Le Pen stressed the difficulty of the prime minister’s political positioning. He is not there to conduct his own policy, but to strike a balance between three groups that are essentially opposed to each other. The balance between opposites must not be achieved at the expense of coherence, for example on sensitive issues such as immigration and crime: “Appointing a minister of justice who spends his days contradicting the minister of the interior does not seem to me to be a good policy,” she points out—referring to what happened in the previous team.
One major point of convergence seems to be emerging between François Bayrou and Marine Le Pen: reform of the electoral code to introduce proportional representation in legislative elections, which would make it possible to obtain a national assembly that is more faithful to the state of opinion than it is at present. The current electoral system, which favours alliances, leads to over-representation of the left-wing coalition, which obtains the largest group of MPs despite having only 7 million voters—compared with 11 million for the RN. François Bayrou is in favour of full proportional representation, while the RN is campaigning for a minimum threshold, as is already the case in the Senate.
While she gives the impression of going easy on the prime minister and waiting to see him in action, Marine Le Pen does not spare President Macron, for whom she has some very harsh words: “Emmanuel Macron, it’s over, or almost,” she asserts lucidly. The fact that François Bayrou has imposed himself as prime minister through a kind of blackmail is, for her, proof that the president is at the end of his tether, stripped of his power, both at home and abroad: “By his own doing, he’s lost the upper hand internationally, he’s fallen out with everyone. He no longer has any influence in the European Union,” she sums up.
Her conclusion is simple: given the immense difficulties encountered by the president, who no longer has the means to govern, and who is himself responsible for this, we must expect an early presidential election. Macron still has two and a half years to go, and although he is categorically opposed to resigning, he is in fact no longer in power. Marine Le Pen’s challenge is therefore to prepare herself as well as possible for this forthcoming event, when the early polls show her in the lead—a lead that she must not squander.
