With Marion Maréchal Le Pen at the head of the list, the Reconquest party hopes to enter the European Parliament with several elected officials after the 2024 European elections. Who are its candidates and what is its program?
Created in 2022 for the presidential election, the Reconquest party has since been represented in each election. This time it is to sit in the European Parliament that Eric Zemmour’s party is running and it is none other than the party’s vice-president, Marion Maréchal Le Pen, who was named head of the list. If Reconquest represents a second path for the far right in addition to the National Rally, the two parties do not have the same projects in the European Parliament: each plans to sit in one of the two conservative groups in the hemicycle: Identity and Democracy for the RN, European Conservatives and Reformists for Reconquest.
But if the Zemmourist party aims to impose itself in the European Parliament, it must obtain a sufficient result at the end of the vote. However, the European election polls are not optimistic regarding the score that candidate Marion Maréchal Le Pen could obtain. The head of the list must focus more on surpassing the 5% threshold necessary to have elected representatives than thinking about doing better than the other lists.
The choice of Marion Maréchal Le Pen to be the head of the list of the Reconquest party in the European elections is not a surprise. The niece of Marine Le Pen and former FN deputy has shown her support for Eric Zemmour’s party since its creation. She had already been a candidate for the legislative elections in 2022 on behalf of the polemicist and had thus marked her return to politics. The one who has already sat in the French Parliament, is this time trying to enter the European Parliament to make her still conservative ideas heard. She is also campaigning on the favorite themes of the far right such as the fight against immigration and Islamism, not without evoking the Zemmourist theory of the “great replacement”.
The complete list of candidates for the Reconquest party was only revealed a few days before the latter was made official by the Ministry of the Interior. Like all the others, the list has 81 names, but only one former MEP is present. This is Nicolas Bay, initially elected with the National Rally in 2019 before he changed sides during the last presidential campaign. Of these 81 names, only a handful can hope to be elected if Marion Maréchal obtains more than 5% of the votes. Otherwise, none will enter the European Parliament.
A list must obtain at least 5% of the votes in the European elections to see some of its candidates elected. The number of people elected out of the 81 candidates present on the lists of each party is proportional to the result obtained on election day. A minimum of 5% gets 4 seats, 10% gets 8 seats, etc.
Thus according to the results of the polls, Marion Maréchal Le Pen appears able to win between 6 and 7 seats in the European Parliament, compared to only one today after the defector of an RN MEP from Reconquête. It is worth remembering that poll results and projections are only predictions representing voting trends at a given time and cannot be understood as reliable predictions.
The Reconquest party plans a profound revision of European policy and some of its institutions. If the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is strongly criticized by the party, the latter especially says it wants to abolish the European Commission deemed “pro-LGBT” and “wokist”. This reluctance towards institutions goes hand in hand with the refusal to make the European Union a “federal super-state”.
The fight against immigration is one of the priorities of Marion Maréchal Le Pen’s program, which proposes the establishment of a “triple border” formed by “the end of free movement for non-Europeans”, “the military blockade naval in the Mediterranean” and a “border beyond our borders, through cooperation agreements with the countries around the Mediterranean to fight against emigration”. But the head of the list also insists on another fight: that against Islamism which must become a common European cause. Faced with Islamism, the Reconquest party also proposes to include the “Greek, Latin and Christian roots of Europe” in a treaty.
So many struggles in Marion Maréchal’s program since her party also says it wants to put an end to “propaganda [and] pro-LGBT, woke subsidies” as well as the normalization of surrogacy (GPA). Fights that echo the very traditional vision of family and heteronormative relationships dear to the party.
