Maréchal Launches New Right-Wing Party

I wish her luck with her endeavours, but the Left will unite against her just as they did against her just as they did against her grandfather and her aunt.

From The European Conservative

By Hélène de Lauzun, PhD

Her goal for the IDL party is creating an Italian-style unity of the French Right, but observers fear further fragmentation.

After carefully building up the suspense in recent weeks, MEP Marion Maréchal just announced her decision to lead a new right-wing political party, working to unite the French Rights.

Since her stormy departure from Éric Zemmour’s Reconquête party, where she headed the list for the European elections, it seemed obvious that Marion Maréchal would sooner or later set off on her own.

She made it official on Monday, October 7th. In an interview with Le Figaro, Marion Maréchal announced the creation of a new movement, called Identité-Libertés. Although there were rumours that she was considering joining the Conservative Movement, led by Maréchal’s ally MEP Laurence Trochu, she decided instead to launch her own party.

Her aim is very clear: “to work on a structured coalition alongside Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella and Éric Ciotti.”

Marion Maréchal says she wants to draw inspiration from scenarios that have ensured success for the Right in other European countries: she is thinking first and foremost of Italy, which in September 2022 brought Giorgia Meloni to power at the head of a coalition of three right-wing parties.

For Maréchal, a coalition is the best way of preserving the ideological specificities of each party while ensuring effective collaboration. The MEP has been a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group since June 9th along with three of her former colleagues who have also broken with Zemmour. She defines her programme as “a civilisational right that is anti-woke, anti-assistance and anti-tax racketeering”—a position that could be summed up as liberal-conservative in French politics.

The title of her movement, Identité-Libertés, sums up its two main thrusts. Defending identity means fighting immigration and the Islamisation of French society, but also promoting France’s traditional Christian heritage. The defence of freedoms covers areas such as freedom of expression, freedom of education and free enterprise.

In terms of her political heritage, Maréchal claims to be the heir to figures such as Philippe de Villiers and François Fillon, whose electorate she believes to be “orphans” today. She believes that she is also appealing to a sociological segment of the right-wing electorate: “the votes of more urban, older and retired French people,” who have not managed to take the step of voting for the alliance already formed by Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella and Éric Ciotti.

In her interview, Maréchal takes note of the balance of power currently in favour of Rassemblement National (RN) within the French right. While there is no question of her joining its ranks, as she left in 2017, it is nonetheless clear that she must lend her support to Le Pen, her aunt, as the candidate of the National Right in the 2027 presidential elections.

She explains:

It’s the French who are telling us that the RN must be the heart of this coalition having placed it as the leading party in France. It is therefore logical that Marine Le Pen should be the legitimate candidate of the national camp. That’s why I will support her and work with her to build a majority in the National Assembly in which the civilisational right that I represent is represented.

Marion Maréchal is claiming the presidency of this new movement, in which she will be assisted by those who were elected to the European Parliament alongside her, or who were elected to the French National Assembly in July on her behalf. While she does not deny Éric Zemmour’s contribution to French politics in recent months, she considers that there was a fundamental “political disagreement” which prevented her from continuing alongside him:

The Reconquête leadership wanted to make Jordan Bardella our main adversary when I wanted to tackle the Left first.

This disagreement resulted, in her words, in an “exclusion” and a “smear campaign” against her—an attitude that led to an “impasse.”

Marion Maréchal’s new commitment has been met with mixed views in the French political world. On X, Zemmour’s supporters have made no secret of their annoyance, predicting a ‘satellisation’ of Marion Maréchal by the Rassemblement National. Outside observers now highlight the risk of extreme fragmentation of the French National Right, divided between the formations of Marine Le Pen, Éric Ciotti, Marion Maréchal, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, Florian Philippot and, of course, Éric Zemmour.  

Pictured: Marion Maréchal