Even after a Paris court overturned his expulsion on Friday night, turmoil on the right continued, leaving it unclear who controls Mr Chirac and Mr Sarkozy’s parties.
As the power struggle drags on, Le Pen, who is eyeing the 2027 presidential election and wants Bardella to govern, acknowledged that her party is preparing a “national unity” government with experienced conservatives from outside the party. Bardella said the coalition will field candidates in “70 constituencies” together with Le Roux, but it is unclear at this stage who those candidates will be.
Like Ciotti, Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal, is also seeking to capitalise on the RN’s growing popularity and has been working towards a formal alliance with her own Reconquista party since calling general elections on Sunday.
But Eric Zemmour, a TV commentator who founded the party in 2021, was visibly shocked when she announced the plan on live television.
“Let’s put the interests of France above the interests of our party,” she said.
An infuriated Mr Zemmour later said the vice president had “broken the world record for betrayal”.
“New People’s Front”
In a further blow to Macron’s camp, the French left miraculously set aside the bitter divisions over Europe, Ukraine and the Middle East that had been simmering during the European elections to form the New Popular Front, a party reminiscent of the pre-war left-wing alliances formed to keep out fascist sympathizers.
On Wednesday, Macron portrayed his party’s most radical members, Relentless France, as a “dangerous” threat on par with Le Pen, but those threats have garnered little support: In an Ellerbe poll, the Left Front had 28% of voters’ intentions, Rally had 31% and Macron’s Renaissance had 18%.
LFI and its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 72, an ardent Trotskyist who admired Hugo Chavez and refused to call Hamas a terrorist organisation, comprise the largest left-wing group in parliament but its presence in the government coalition has been a thorn in the side of many in the moderate Socialist Party.
Macron denounced the new alliance as “unnatural, bizarre and vulgar” and said he questioned how League voters would reconcile LFI’s support for Gaza, anti-Semitism, hostility to the EU and NATO, and support for President Vladimir Putin with the Socialist Party’s pro-EU and pro-Ukraine stance.
But that line of attack was dealt a serious blow on Friday when former political journalist and film director Raphael Glucksmann, from the Plus Public group whose Socialist party came third in the EU elections, declared his support for the Left Coalition.
“We cannot leave France to the Le Pen family,” Glucksmann, 44, the son of a French philosopher, told French broadcaster France Inter.
He said a new coalition government was the “only way” to prevent “the triumph of the far right” in future elections, and reassured voters that someone more agreeable than Mélenchon would be elected prime minister.
