The crisis currently ripping apart Reform is nothing new to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party.
Indeed, the reason her party is called the ‘National Rally’ is a result of her ‘dédiabolisation’ strategy, which aimed to soften the party’s image. Le Pen ditched its original moniker, the National Front, in early 2018, a few months after her comprehensive defeat to Emmanuel Macron in the presidential election run-off. Her father, Jean-Marie, who had co-founded the National Front in 1972, was furious, saying it was ‘totally absurd… a betrayal of the movement’s history’. It wasn’t the first time that father and daughter had fallen out over the party’s direction; in 2015 she had expelled him from the party because of inflammatory comments.
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