Marion Marechal, former French MP and the niece of populist National Rally (RN) leader Marine Le Pen stated she will not be voting for her aunt in the presidential election and may back conservative pundit Eric Zemmour.
The former MP told French media that she was reluctant to support her aunt Marine Le Pen, the leader of the populist National Rally (RN), who came in second during the presidential elections in 2017 and is a favourite to face off against current president Emmanuel Macron in the second round of this year’s elections.
“I’m thinking, no decision has been made,” Marechal told French journalists and stated that lending public support for conservative writer and television pundit Eric Zemmour was something she was considering but noted that “supporting him is a real choice, a heavy decision,” France Bleu reports.
Marechal added that her aunt Marine Le Pen had undergone ideological changes and that she had been interested in possibly getting back into politics for the last year but said she had no desire to “recreate family fractures.”
Marion Marechal Calls for French to Resist ‘Great Replacement’ https://t.co/e5lwcWlJup
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) October 1, 2019
Marechal left politics in 2017, following the presidential election after there had been some conflict between her, Ms Le Pen, and Le Pen’s former advisor Florian Philippot, who also left Le Pen’s party to form his own party Les Patriotes.
Since 2017, Marechal formed her own political school, the Institute of Social Sciences, Economics and Politics (ISSEP) in Lyon and has appeared alongside Eric Zemmour at a conference in 2019, in which she called on her supporters to resist the “Great Replacement.”
Zemmour has also spoken out about the Great Replacement, a theory coined by French writer Renaud Camus that claims rapid demographic shifts have been undertaken by elites who view human beings as replaceable things, rather than human beings.
Marine Le Pen commented on her niece’s comments on Friday saying, “I have a special story with Marion because I raised her with my sister for the first few years of her life, so obviously it’s brutal, it’s violent, it’s difficult for me.”
“It is a political misunderstanding because she had indicated that she would support the one who is best placed, and undoubtedly I am much better placed than Eric Zemmour since I am a given to get in the second round,” Le Pen added.
Recent polls show Le Pen in a tight race with conservative Les Republicains candidate Valérie Pécresse, although some new polls have shown Le Pen breaking away slightly in the lead.
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