Marion Maréchal-Le Pen

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Marion Maréchal-Le Pen
File:Marion Maréchal-Le Pen (25614980787) (cropped).jpg
Member of the National Assembly
for Vaucluse's 3rd constituency
In office
20 June 2012 – 20 June 2017
Preceded by Jean-Michel Ferrand
Succeeded by Brune Poirson
Personal details
Born Marion Jeanne Caroline Le Pen
(1989-12-10) December 10, 1989 (age 34)
Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France
Nationality French
Political party National Rally (2008–present)
Spouse(s) Matthieu Decosse
(m. 2014; div. 2016)
Relations Jean-Marie Le Pen (grandfather)
Marine Le Pen (aunt)
Samuel Maréchal (father)
Roger Auque (biological father)
Marie-Caroline Le Pen (aunt)
Children Olympe (b. 2014)
Residence Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine, France[1]
Alma mater Panthéon-Assas University, Master of Laws (2012)
Occupation Politician
Religion Roman Catholicism[2]
Website Marion Maréchal-Le Pen

Marion Jeanne Caroline Maréchal-Le Pen (French pronunciation: ​[maʁjɔ̃ maʁeʃal ləˈpɛn]; born 10 December 1989) is a right-wing French politician and a member of the Le Pen family. She is the granddaughter of National Front (FN) founder Jean-Marie Le Pen and the niece of National Rally current Leader Marine Le Pen.

Maréchal-Le Pen is also a member of the National Front, and served as the member of the National Assembly for Vaucluse's 3rd constituency from 2012 to 2017. Aged 22 years at the time of her election, she became France's youngest parliamentarian in modern political history.[3] During the 2015 regional elections she was the top candidate on the FN list in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, finishing second behind The Republicans led by Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi. She became a regional councillor and the FN Leader in the Regional Council.

On 9 May 2017, she announced that she would be taking a break from politics, would not seek to renew her mandate as a member of the National Assembly, and would resign as a regional councillor of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur.[4] She is currently involved in the education sector and financing the creation of a private school project.[5]

Family background

She was born on 10 December 1989 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Yvelines, Île-de-France.[6]

Her grandfather, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founded the Front National party on 5 October 1972. Her aunt Marine Le Pen has been FN president since 16 January 2011, with Jean-Marie Le Pen first becoming honorary chairman and later excluded in August 2015.[7] Her mother Yann Le Pen, Jean-Marie Le Pen's second daughter, does not carry out any official duties within the FN. Her father Samuel Maréchal had been the leader of the Front National Youth movement (FNJ) for seven years (1992–1999).[8] She featured with her grandfather in a campaign poster at the age of two.[9]

In a book entitled The Conquerors (Les Conquérantes) launched on 18 November 2013, the French journalist Christine Clerc revealed that Samuel Maréchal is not her biological father.[10] On 7 November 2013, the French weekly news magazine L'Express disclosed that her biological father was Roger Auque, a Mossad agent and investigative journalist who died in September 2014.[10] On 8 November, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen announced that she was suing L'Express for a "serious invasion of her privacy".[11][12] She won her case in April 2015.[13]

Maréchal-Le Pen married businessman Matthieu Decosse on 29 July 2014, at the Saint-Cloud town hall.[14] Their daughter was born that September.[15] They divorced in 2016.[16]

Academic studies

Until 2012, she was enrolled in Panthéon-Assas University's masters of public business law.[17] On 14 November 2012, she wrote in an official statement that she had decided to put aside her studies in order to dedicate herself to her office.[18]

After retiring from politics in 2017, Marion Marechal-Le Pen enrolled in a Master of Business Administration (MBA) at EMLYON Business School.[19]

Political career

About her early interest in politics, Maréchal-Le Pen explained: "Contrary to what everyone thinks, in my family we didn’t talk about politics at home and we were free to make our own choices. I became interested in politics around 15 or 16 and in various approaches, not necessarily FN". As a teenager she once attended a meeting addressed by Nicolas Sarkozy, "out of curiosity" because he "intrigued" her. She added: "I very quickly came down to earth." At the age of 18, she became a member of the FN.[20]

Early career (2008–2010)

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She was a candidate in seventh position on the FN list in Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine, in the 2008 municipal elections.[21] She was not elected, for the FN list only got 6.29% with one municipal councillor elected from the first round.[22]

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In the 2010 regional elections, she figured in second position on the FN departmental list in the Yvelines, Île-de-France.[23] Marie-Christine Arnautu's FN list, which polled 9.29% in the whole of Île-de-France in the first round,[24] could not take part in the run-off, given that a list must cross a threshold of 10% of the valid votes at a regional level. Because of the process of elimination, she was not elected in the Île-de-France's regional council.[25]

National Assembly (2012–2017)

Vaucluse's 3rd constituency highlighted in green

Maréchal-Le Pen's parliamentary candidacy in Vaucluse's 3rd constituency was publicly confirmed on 25 April 2012, between the first round of the presidential election and its run-off.[26][27] After her candidacy was made official by the FN nomination committee, she then campaigned in this constituency which includes the southern part of Carpentras.[8][20][25][28] In the first round of the presidential elections, Marine Le Pen had achieved her highest national performance in Vaucluse (27.03%)[29] and most notably in this constituency (31.50%) where she outdistanced the UMP incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy (27.60%).[8][25][28]

In the run-off on June 17, 2012, she defeated the incumbent MP Jean-Michel Ferrand who had continuously sat in the National Assembly for twenty-six years (Rally for the Republic: 1986–2002, Union for a Popular Movement: 2002–2012).[30] At the age of 22, she became the youngest citizen to enter the French Parliament in modern political history (Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, at 24 years old in 1791, was the previous youngest MP).[8][31]

She is the only member of the National Front since 1997 to have served in the National Assembly.[3][32] A member of the FN from 1972 to 2005 and an MP for Vaucluse under the eighth legislature (1986–1988), Jacques Bompard, was also elected as an MP for Vaucluse's 4th constituency.[33][34] Gilbert Collard, a member of the Rassemblement bleu Marine, a political association that supports Marine Le Pen, was also elected as an MP.[35]

Rise within the FN (2012)

File:Marion Maréchal-Le Pen - avril 2012.jpg
Marion Maréchal-Le Pen in 2012

In early July 2012 Maréchal-Le Pen became a member of the National Front's executive board.[36] On 23 September 2012, she made her first public speech in front of 1,000 participants at the FN summer school in La Baule-Escoublac.[37]

Local politics: Sorgues (2013–2014)

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During a press conference held on 30 October 2013, she officially announced her appearance as a fellow candidate on a municipal list at Sorgues, a town of 18,000 inhabitants located to the north of Avignon in the western part of her constituency.[38][39] She decided to figure in tenth position on this local list led by Gérard Gérent, then an independent councillor belonging to the UMP municipal majority and a former deputy mayor of Sorgues.[40][41]

In the first round of the 2012 presidential elections, Marine Le Pen had polled 36.02% at Sorgues[42] whereas Marion Maréchal-Le Pen got there 37.65% in the first round and 44.36% in the run-off of the following legislative elections.[43]

In the first round on 23 March 2014, the FN list led by Gérard Gérent, which was defeated by the one of the UMP incumbent mayor Thierry Lagneau, came second with 33.80% (2,861 votes) with the election of five municipal councillors and two community councillors.[44] Consequently, she was not elected as a municipal councillor at Sorgues.

Regional candidacy in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (2015)

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Electoral posters in Saint-Didier, Vaucluse

In April 2015, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen was chosen by her party to be the leading FN candidate in the southeastern region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur in that year's regional elections, after her grandfather was expelled for his remarks on the Holocaust.[45] She did not support his expulsion.[46] The elections came a month after an Islamist terror attack which killed 130 people in Paris. Maréchal-Le Pen reacted on television by declaring that "Today, we can see that immigration has become favorable terrain for the development of Islamism".[47]

In the first round of voting, she won 40.55% of the vote, becoming one of six FN candidates to lead a region.[48] Socialist candidate Christophe Castaner then withdrew, to avoid splitting the vote for The Republicans' mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi.[49] In the second round of voting, no FN candidate won a region, with Maréchal-Le Pen losing to Estrosi by 54.78% to 45.22%.[50] She received the best result for a National Front candidate, Marine Le Pen in comparison obtaining 42% in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region.[51][52]

Political views

Maréchal-Le Pen's political, cultural and foreign policy views reflect the general consensus of her party.[53]

Social positions

Maréchal-Le Pen has stated that her party has supported the 'defense of the family' for a very long time.[54] Along with Gilbert Collard and other FN senior executives, she took part in the mass demonstrations against same-sex marriage organized in Paris by La Manif Pour Tous movement in the first half of the year 2013.[53][54]

Maréchal-Le Pen believes that Muslims can only be French if they follow the Christianity-shaped culture, saying that "In our country, we don’t wear djellaba clothing, we don’t wear a veil and we don’t impose cathedral-sized mosques".[46]

She is opposed to the reinstatement of capital punishment: "In a private capacity, I am against the reinstatement of capital punishment, since this would impose an extremely difficult choice on judges. And whatever happens, the horrifying possibility of a miscarriage of justice is ever-present, no matter how minimally. I prefer the alternative of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole."[55]

Academic Cécile Alduy described Maréchal-Le Pen as a "paradoxical character" who dresses and speaks in a modern way while promoting social conservatism.[46] Conservative American former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin praised Maréchal-Le Pen for her societal beliefs, and compared her to Joan of Arc.[56] Former Counselor to the President and former executive chair of Breitbart News Steve Bannon also praised her, referring to her as "the new rising star"; afterwards Maréchal Le-Pen said on Twitter that she was willing to work with him.[57]

Foreign policy and EU issues

Maréchal-Le Pen was a member of the France–Russia[58] and France−Ivory Coast[59] parliamentary friendship groups.

On 10 December 2012, Maréchal-Le Pen took part in an international parliamentary forum organized in Moscow by the State Duma.[60] On 22 January 2013, she was present in the Reichstag at the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Élysée Treaty by French President Charles de Gaulle and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.[61] In a written statement, she said that the treaty was originally based on the cooperation and partnership between two sovereign states and denounced the "forced march towards a German federal Europe".[62]

On 29 September 2013, Maréchal-Le Pen attended a political event organized by the Vlaams Belang in Boom, near Antwerp.[63] On this occasion, she explained: "It is important that a front of patriotic and euro-critical parties form in sight of European elections, which is the case, and get some good results in order to lead resistance to Euro and globalism".[64]

Parliamentary career

Along with Gilbert Collard, Maréchal-Le Pen introduced on 7 December 2012 a constitutional private member's bill concerning the appointment of the members of the Constitutional Council of France.[65]

For the beginning of the fourteenth legislature, Maréchal-Le Pen cosigned four private member's bills[6] including one constitutional forbidding marriage between same-sex persons[66] and one organic which aims at enforcing the article 68 of the Constitution of France establishing a process of impeachment for the President of the Republic.[67]

According to the rules of the National Assembly, an unregistered person sitting in Parliament can question the government orally every eight sessions.[68][69] Maréchal-Le Pen asked three oral questions for the beginning of the legislature: in 2013, to Manuel Valls, Minister of the Interior about the policy regarding Romani people[70] and to Marisol Touraine, Minister of Health and Social Affairs about the fight against welfare fraud;[71] in 2014, to Nicole Bricq, Minister for Foreign Trade about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.[72]

In a written parliamentary question addressed in May 2013 to Valérie Fourneyron, Minister of Sports, Youth Affairs, Popular Education and Community life, Maréchal-Le Pen drew her attention to the poor treatment rugby league receives in France from the government and the media, regretting the banning of this sport during the Vichy regime.[73][74]

In April 2015, because of his intense anti-FN campaign in the departmental elections, Maréchal-Le Pen criticized the "cretinous contempt" ("mépris crétin") of Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls in parliament. Valls responded with a trembling hand and an apparent fury.[75][76] After it had become a viral video, Maréchal-Le Pen explained it was a reference to Michel Onfray, who had called Valls a "crétin" when the Prime Minister accused him of "losing his landmarks".[9][77][78]

Political mandate

Benches in the hemicycle of the French National Assembly; during the 14th legislature (2012–2017), seat number 67 was allocated to Marion Maréchal-Le Pen
  • Member of the National Assembly for Vaucluse's 3rd constituency, 20 June 2012 – 20 June 2017 (14th legislature)[6]
    • Member of the standing committee for cultural affairs and education, 28 June 2012 – 30 September 2013[6] — Member of the standing committee on Foreign Affairs, 1 October 2013 – 20 June 2017[79]
    • Member of the study groups Heritage[80] — Policies on rurality[81]Shale gas[82]
    • Member of the friendship groups France–Russia and France−Ivory Coast

One of the six youngest members of the new Assembly, Maréchal-Le Pen served on 26 June 2012 as a secretary during the opening of the fourteenth legislature presided over by the most senior member François Scellier.[83]

Maréchal-Le Pen was a Non-Attached member of the National Assembly. Her seat (number 67) was located between the ones of Gilbert Collard (number 66, on her right) and Jacques Bompard (number 68, on her left).[84] The National Assembly has included eight unregistered MPs since 30 August 2013.[85][86]

References

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Further reading

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External links

Institutional website

Complementary source

Personal websites