By Elizabeth Pineau
PARIS (Reuters) – France’s far-right National Rally is negotiating with potential allies to put together a team that could run the government after an upcoming snap election, bringing in representatives from its ranks and beyond, a lawmaker told Reuters on Thursday.
Opinion polls project that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) could, for the first time, top the June 30 and July 7 vote but without enough seats to win an absolute majority and govern on its own.
The shock snap election, called at very short notice by President Emmanuel Macron after his centrist alliance was trounced by the RN in Sunday’s European Parliament ballot, has upended French politics, with parties rushing to field candidates, prepare platforms – and try to survive.
For the RN, the challenge is to transform popularity into a win at home, and to convince voters it can be trusted to govern, after decades on the margins.
“All the work carried out by Marine Le Pen over the past years has turned us into a party that can be in government,” National Rally lawmaker Laurent Jacobelli told Reuters.
“We’ve been working for months on a ‘Matignon’ plan,” he said, referring to the prime minister’s official residence. Part of that plan including fielding candidates for all of France’s 577 constituencies, he said.
Dozens, he said, would come from the ranks of the conservative Republicans (LR), which is in the process of imploding after its leader, Eric Ciotti, called for an alliance with the RN, and the rest of the party leadership rebelled and kicked him out.
LR sources have cast doubt on whether Ciotti could bring in that many LR candidates with him.
Jacobelli said that while the RN does not have a shadow government with a full list of potential ministers, it was looking at a cabinet line-up from within and beyond party ranks.
“What we want to do is a national unity government,” he said, using a term that usually applies to a wide range of parties but would likely include RN members, hardline conservatives and non-party affiliated candidates.
The RN has been kept out of power for decades by voters mistrustful of the far right and its radical policies, as well as by a decades-old consensus among mainstream parties to join forces against it.
But under the helm of Le Pen and new party leader Jordan Bardella, they have worked to detoxify their image and woo a growing number of voters across the board.
The RN calls for protectionist “France first” economic policies and a radical cut in immigration. It would restrict childcare benefits to French citizens and withdraw residency for migrants who are out of work for more than a year.
It has also proposed higher public spending, despite already significant levels of French debt, threatening to further raise financing costs at banks.
Meanwhile, France’s weakened, long divided leftwing parties, were working on a joint platform after agreeing to share out constituencies in a bid not to lose too many.
Prime Minister Gabriel Attal was meeting with his ministers and allies on Thursday to work on their own platform.
(Reporting by Elizabeth Pineau, Dominique Vidalon, Tassilo Hummel; Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by Ros Russell)
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