Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The National Front loses its golden girl

The golden girl of the National Front has gone and with her go the grassroot hopes for an alternative to Marine Le Pen. The decision of Marion Maréchal-Le Pen to withdraw from political life wasn’t entirely unexpected, rumours first emerged earlier in the year, but it is nonetheless a heavy blow for the party rank and file just days after their disappointing presidential election result.

And it was a disappointment, no matter how Marine Le Pen tries to dress up her 34 per cent share of the vote in Sunday’s second round against Emmanuel Macron. The truth is that she was trounced by a political novice with a manifesto that is worryingly vague in certain key areas. Many of the far right faithful therefore saw Maréchal-Le Pen as the pretender to the National Front throne but the 27-year-old has, in the words of Le Figaro, ‘thrown in the sponge’.

In a two page letter published in Wednesday’s edition of Le Dauphine, the 27 year-old Maréchal-Le Pen, one of only two National Front MPs, explained her reasons for quitting politics, saying they were ‘personal and political’. Recently divorced, Maréchal-Le Pen said her political life had entailed lengthy separations from her young daughter and it ‘is essential that I devote more time to her’.

She also talked of a possible future career in business but allowed her supporters the glimmer of hope she might one day be back. ‘I am not giving up the political fight forever’, she said, the youngest of the 577 MPs in the National Assembly when she was elected for the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region in 2012. ‘I cannot remain indifferent to the suffering of my compatriots’.

According to the French tabloid, Le Parisien, Maréchal-Le Pen informed her aunt, Marine, on Tuesday afternoon who responded by saying she ‘respects her choice…I know what politics demands and the sacrifices it requires’.

Maréchal-Le Pen’s grandfather, Jean-Marie, the man who founded the National Front in 1972 was less compassionate, calling

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