France’s Marion Maréchal has made the “defence” of European civilisation and fighting against the “Islamification” of Europe a cornerstone of her platform as she leads the far-right Reconquest party’s candidate list in the European elections. Maréchal is the granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the far-right National Front, and the niece of Marine Le Pen, who leads the National Rally party, as the National Front was rebranded in 2018.
In the run-up to the June 6-9 elections for the European Parliament, national tragedies and dramatic crimes have provided opportunities to send a political message.
A day after two officers were killed in an armed attack on a prison van that helped drug kingpin Mohamed Amra escape, Marion Maréchal went to the Bordeaux-Gradignan prison facility, a visit she recorded on social media.
Maréchal was seen chatting with officers at this notoriously overcrowded prison that houses twice the number of inmates it is designed for. Photos were quickly posted on X, Facebook and Instagram. They show the candidate listening to prison officers and denouncing a “failure of the state”.
The move was viewed as genuine empathy by Maréchal’s supporters, and political expediency by her opponents: Maréchal has been on the lookout for troubling incidents during the electoral campaign and has even taken the time to honour the anniversaries of past tragedies, whether in France or elsewhere in Europe.
Crimes involving foreign-born suspects are a feature of her social media posts, from the March 22 attack on a concert hall in Moscow claimed by the Islamic State group to the 20th anniversary of the Madrid train bombings in March 2004.
Maréchal has used these tragic events to play the law-and-order card, all the while emphasising the foreign nationality of the assailants.
It is not a new strategy, but one that still resonates with right-wing and far-right voters who see immigration as a key cause of French and European ills.
“France is becoming a narco-state. I urgently call for exceptional anti-mafia laws to punish these criminals, eradicate trafficking and stop immigration," Maréchal wrote on X after the prison van escape in Normandy.
‘Fighting Islamification’, a European cause
Maréchal has promised to strengthen borders to prevent migration and wants to enshrine “Europe's Greek, Latin and Christian roots” in EU treaties.
She feeds the narrative of a “clash of civilisations” and buys into the “great replacement” conspiracy theory.
As a candidate she has also embarked on a tour of France and Europe speaking out on “Islamification”.
She has spoken out against the Ramadan decorations installed by the mayor of the German city of Frankfurt, the presence of what she called a “noxious Koranic school with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood” in Château-Chinon, and has accused certain elected representatives of French conservative party Les Républicains of being “Islamo-rightist”.
“We are the only ones to make the defence of our civilisation the cornerstone of our programme,” Maréchal said at a May 13 press conference, vowing to “fight Islamification” as part of a “common European cause”.
Banning ‘the promotion of woke ideology’
The Reconquest party has the support of between 6 percent and 8 percent of voters, according to polls. Founded in late 2021 by far-right pundit Éric Zemmour, the party has proposed installing a “triple border” to protect Europe from immigration and “the end of free movement for non-Europeans”.
The party wants “a naval military blockade in the Mediterranean” and a “border beyond our borders, through cooperation agreements with Mediterranean countries” to combat immigration from, notably, north African nations.
But the Reconquest platform also wants to protect France from the European Union. It rejects anything that could lead to a European “federal state”: no common European debt issuance, no European taxes, no European army. And among the key proposals is the abolition of the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch.
“[EU Commission President] Ursula von der Leyen will never be our leader; she is our employee and must remain so,” insisted Zemmour, a former presidential candidate, in presenting his party’s programme on May 13.
He castigated those “masters of Europe” who are guilty, in his view, of wanting to “centralise all power in Brussels”.
Despite the anti-EU rhetoric, Zemmour and Maréchal are in favour of cooperation between European states, and intend to join forces with the European Conservatives and Reformists group to move the European Parliament clearly to the right.
Their civilisational battle is also being waged on the societal front: Maréchal has promised to ban “the promotion of woke ideology” in Europe and to cut all funding to what she called “militant LGBT associations”.
This story is a translation of the original version in French.
