

The far-right Rassemblement National (RN) has emerged from a pile of smoldering embers, forming Jordan Bardella's stepping stone to Matignon, the official residence of the French prime minister. This is the backdrop that Marine Le Pen has been contemplating in recent days. She believes that since President Emmanuel Macron's dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale, "history is accelerating." The far-right leader is observing the political situation in France with the satisfaction of a pyrotechnist before the finale of fireworks.
"Les Républicans [LR, right] are imploding, Reconquête! [far-right, Eric Zemmour's party] is imploding, the government is imploding," she rejoiced, speaking to Le Monde. "A bloc-against-bloc confrontation is setting in. A general recomposition is taking place against the backdrop of the decomposition of France," she said, turning the page on Macronism and her duel against the president, mutually constructed over the past seven years. Le Pen believes the week between the two rounds of the parliamentary elections on June 30 and July 7, as well as the post-election period, will prolong the explosion of all camps... except her own.
The incumbent MP for Pas-de-Calais, in northern France, continues to pretend that she is not on the right, and rejects the "union of the right," while in fact practicing it. She accepted the allegiance of Les Républicains leader Eric Ciotti, as well as her niece Marion Maréchal, who was excluded from Zemmour's Reconquête! party. Although Ciotti agreed to the alliance with RN on his own, which had the effect of uniting his entire party against him, Le Pen told Le Monde that she thinks the recent unity at LR will not hold up in the coming elections. She believes a handful of other right-wing MPs could join the RN coalition, should it win a majority in the Assemblée. "The cordon sanitaire between LR and us is like a dam under water pressure. The important thing was to deliver the first pick-axe blow. We did it with Eric Ciotti. The pressure of the water, meaning the voters, will do its work," she said.
While the united left, gathered in the Nouveau Front Populaire alliance, hopes to block the far-right's path in the parliamentary elections, Le Pen argued that radical left La France Insoumise leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon "is trying to collapse everything, wanting the destabilization of everything: his camp, the institutions, the elections." She said: "He's pushing the limits of what's acceptable, telling himself that he's increasing his room for maneuver and that, from the dislocation, he'll come out on top on the left." Le Pen described the leader of LFI as an engineer of chaos, which Le Pen claims to be the opposite of, despite the fact that the far right's manifesto consists of a major upheaval of the European Union, the rule of law and social relations. Le Pen still sees Mélenchon as her most likely adversary for the 2027 presidential election, but predicts that one day, "the Revolution will eat its children: the communitarian vote it has gone after will replace it as soon as it can."
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