Less than a week after the failure of its plan to take power through legislative elections, the first heads are dropping at the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party. Officially, the party promised a simple "examination of conscience" after a legislative campaign marred by dozens of xenophobic, racist and anti-Semitic candidates, not to mention those who shunned the media and debates for fear of contradiction. The party denies there has been any "purge" and has postponed the reshaping of its leadership structure until September.
Away from the microphones, the first "black sheep" – the term used by the party president Jordan Bardella for his problematic representatives – have already been excluded. Defeated on July 7 in the 2nd constituency of Aveyron in southern France, Marie-Christine Parolin left the ranks of the RN on the Occitanie regional council a few days later, where she now sits among the non-attached members. "She has left the group and will be summoned to appear before the conflicts committee," the party told Le Monde.
In a debate organized by local radio station CFM in May, which resurfaced during the parliamentary elections, Marie-Christine Parolin responded in the affirmative to an opponent accusing her of wanting to replace the Republican motto ("Liberty, Equality, Fraternity") with that of the Vichy regime ("Work, Family, Fatherland").
Laurent Gnaedig, who is no longer a member of the RN group on the Grand-Est regional council in the east of France, has also suddenly joined the ranks of the "non-attached." A candidate in the 1st constituency of Haut-Rhin, Gnaedig said, on July 3, in a debate on a regional station of television channel BFM, that the founder of the Front National (now RN), Jean-Marie Le Pen, describing the gas chambers as "a minor detail in the history of the Second World War" was not "an anti-Semitic remark" but "a very poor choice of words, (...) a serious error in communication and above all in understanding the opposing camp." Gnaedig did not reply to Le Monde's request for comment. Nor did Laurent Jacobelli, president of the RN group on the Grand-Est regional council and RN spokesperson.
The two regional advisers will not be the only ones to fall after the failure of the legislative elections. Le Monde has learned that other members of the party have been summoned to appear before its conflicts committee at the end of July. For the time being, the RN had only admitted the exclusion from its group in the Assemblée Nationale of Daniel Grenon, MP for Yonne, who was re-elected after claiming that French North African binationals had no place "in the high places of the Republic."
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