🇫🇷Weekly Dispatch - Fratricidal Le Pens
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🇫🇷Weekly Dispatch - Fratricidal Le Pens
10/09/2023 - How you can support Moroccan aid efforts, Marion Maréchal continues fratricidal tradition, Darmanin announces “National Investigation Unit”, and New Caledonians gather at Elysée
The Weekly Dispatch is your weekly update on major events in French and European politics, published on Sundays to give you the ideal summary of current affairs.
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This week
🇲🇦How you can support Moroccan aid efforts
🗡️Marion Maréchal continues fratricidal tradition
👮Darmanin announces “National Investigation Unit”
🇳🇨New Caledonians gather at Elysée
🇲🇦How you can support Moroccan aid efforts
Alright ladies and gentlemen, time to do some good.
This week saw a huge earthquake in the Moroccan region of Marrakesh-Safi, which has proved to be the most deadly in the country since 1960, affecting over 300,000 people and causing over 2,012 deaths and 2,059 injuries (at the time of posting).
As there is a very clear need for support, here’s a list of the local NGOs that is being circulated by those in the know:
If you can, please consider donating some money to those in need of support at this moment in time.
🗡️Marion Maréchal continues fratricidal tradition
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s start this weekly dispatch with some good (or terrifying) news: the Le Pen’s are now fighting amongst themselves for the EU Elections.
This week, we discovered that Jean-Marie Le Pen’s granddaughter, Marion Maréchal Le Pen, will be taking the #1 spot on Eric Zemmour’s European list for next year, putting her directly into conflict with her aunt, Marine Le Pen.
Formerly a deputé for the Front National in the 2012 - 2017 mandate, she came out of her self-imposed political break in 2019 alongside Éric Zemmour in an attempt to force a far-right and right-wing unification for the 2022 elections.
Having become a figurehead of the Union des droites (union of the rights), and having seen the failure of the project (at least in the short-term), Marion Maréchal then threw her weight behind Zemmour in 2022, moving against her aunt and her family.
This has since developed further, with Marion Maréchal having become an advisor to Zemmour, regularly working with him and supporting his initiatives, which has now paid off with her becoming his tête de liste for the EP 2024 elections.
The problem, however, is that this came at the expense of her maintaining her position as Marine Le Pen’s successor, giving up her position within her own party which could have led to a strong possibility of a presidency.
Regardless, we have two big possibilities here:
Firstly, the Rassemblement National and Reconquête could theoretically damage each other, hacking away at each other’s vote share as they compete for similar electors.
This would be an unwelcome distraction as, in his quest to strengthen the position of the RN and position his party as the opposition, Jordan Bardella would find himself effectively engaging in friendly fire with an allied party that could support them,
The problem with this is that, as you can see in the summary below from the 2022 Presidential Election, the numbers don’t quite support this view, and Zemmour’s outfit is actually only nipping at their ankles.
And in the most recent polling for the 2024 elections, IFOP has found that Reconquête will only attract 6.5% of the vote, compared to Rassemblement National’s 25%.
On the second front, could this situation lead to a merger between the parties?
This is a complicated possibility due to several factors, such as a rancour between the Zemmour and Le Pen outfits, and the fact that Reconquete was the landing point of a lot of politicians who were considered too extreme for the RN.
Unfortunately, we can only wait to see how this plays out like much of the next election's candidates.
👮Darmanin announces “National Investigation Unit”
Moving onwards from fratricidal shenanigans, we move onto something more serious: the fight against drug trafficking.
Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, announced this Friday that a new unit would be created, the National Investigation Unit’, and will pull from members of the Gendarmerie national and the standard police forces.
This will be based on the model of the elite CRS-8 (Compagnie républicaine de Sécurité numéro 8), a unit of 200 men and women that focuses on combatting urban violence and drug trafficking, which was created in July 2021.
This new unit, will be comprised of “around a hundred personnel including police officers and gendarmes” and is intended to be “much more offensive”:
“[We must] be much more offensive in the area of investigation, on investigations, despite the incredible work of the investigation services … We have to contain the octopus. This is the Battle of Stalingrad”
The plan for their usage is to be able to send members of this new National Investigation Unit into areas of high concern for several weeks, to support local forces in working to dismantle drug trafficking outfits.
“It goes beyond cleaning up a deal point because it involves dismantling networks and defining targets … Our challenge is to continue strengthening the judicial system to take in-depth action and put these criminals out of harm's way in the long term”
This has become an increasingly important situation for the French government, not only because of the resurgence of violence in cities like Marseille and Nimes, where gangs are engaged in turf wars and gang warfare to maintain their power.
There’s also a political aspect to this action, with the French government actively trying to remove the label of being “pro-security” from far-right actors who abuse these situations for political relevance.
Darmanin also has a lot at stake personally within these situations as he tries to build up his presidential profile as a man who has made France more secure from the local dangers that make their lives harder on a day-to-day basis.
🇳🇨New Caledonians gather at Elysée
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And one final story to send you all off for your week:
With the ongoing discord between New Caledonian separatists and loyalists, these two groups of political actors had not met since 2019, despite attempts to bring them together to discuss the independence referenda of 2020 and 2021, which separatists boycotted
These referenda had delivered a pro-union vote on both occasions, with the 2021 referendum having a lopsided 96.50% due to the boycott, which itself likely due to it being the third and final independence referendum and the ‘yes’ vote likely to win.
It’s for this reason that French President Emmanuel Macron wanted to bring the parties together at the Elysée to discuss the future of the archipelago and the now-scrapped referendum on New Caledonia’s legal status, which was planned for this year.
Whether negotiations are possible between the three parties to this discussion is not certain, with even the Elysée commenting that the meeting this week was to “take stock” instead of making any outright progress in discussions.
Serious bridge-building needs to be done to bring everyone together in a coherent and stable manner that will lead to genuine results and progress in the archipelago’s political situation.
However, this is increasingly difficult as the separatists refuse to recognise the 2021 referendum and will likely make the price of any discussions a re-run of the ‘final’ vote, which they will want to repeat ad infinitum until they win.
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🇫🇷Weekly Dispatch - Fratricidal Le Pens
I once two colleagues who were French language teachers when I was working in India. One has from New Caledonia and the second one was from French Guyana but both were very dissatisfied with France regarding governance and politics. For me it was a unique experience since Sweden does not really have a colonial history.
One thing I do not understand. Why do many in France believe that Le Pens are "people" politicians when they in fact are a family of elitists :p ?