On Friday night, the meltdown on the Right continued after a Paris court annulled his exclusion, leaving it unclear who is in control of the party of Chirac and Sarkozy.
As the power struggle dragged on, Ms Le Pen – who is gunning for the presidency in 2027 and wants Mr Bardella to run the government – confirmed that her party was preparing a “national unity” cabinet with experienced conservatives from outside its ranks. Mr Bardella said the Rally would field joint candidates with LR in “70 constituencies” but for now it is unclear who they are.
Like Mr Ciotti, Ms Le Pen’s niece Marion Marechal has sought to capitalise on the RN’s rising popularity and has been striving for a formal alliance for her the Reconquest party since the snap election call on Sunday.
But Eric Zemmour, the television pundit who founded the party in 2021, was clearly shocked when she announced the plan live on Television.
“Let’s put the interests of France before those of the party,” she said.
An incensed Mr Zemmour later said his vice president had “beaten the world record for betrayal”.
A ‘New Popular Front’
In a bigger blow to the Macron camp, the French Left has miraculously set aside vitriolic splits over Europe, Ukraine and the Middle East that festered during the EU elections to forge a “New Popular Front” – a nod to the pre-war Left-wing alliance to keep out fascist sympathisers.
On Wednesday, Mr Macron depicted its most radical member, Unbowed France, as a “dangerous” threat equal to Ms Le Pen but such scaremongering has gained little traction. The Elabe poll showed the Left-wing front on 28 per cent of voting intentions, compared with 31 per cent for the Rally and 18 per cent for Mr Macron’s Renaissance.
Unbowed France, or LFI, and its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 72, a fiery Trotskyite who admires Hugo Chavez and who refused to call Hamas a terrorist organisation, has the largest Left-wing group in parliament but its presence in the coalition is a bugbear to many in the moderate Socialist party.
Mr Macron slammed the new alliance as “unnatural, baroque and indecent”. He wondered, he said, how its voters would square LFI’s support for Gaza, their antisemitism, hostility to the EU and Nato, and approval of President Vladimir Putin with the Socialists’ pro-EU and pro-Ukraine stance.
However, that line of attack was seriously dented when Raphael Glucksmann, a former political journalist and film director whose Socialist-backed Place Publique group came third in EU elections, threw his weight behind the Left-wing alliance on Friday.
“We can’t leave France to the Le Pen family,” Mr Glucksman, 44, son of a French philosopher,” he told broadcaster France Inter.
The new coalition was the “only way” to prevent a “far-Right victory” in the forthcoming polls, he said, reassuring his electorate that a more consensual figure than Mr Mélenchon would be picked as prime minister.