Marion Maréchal’s plan to save Europe

Covid-19 shows the dangers of an excessively connected world, but it also presents huge political opportunities for critics of globalisation. And who better to seize the moment than the latest scion of the Le Pen political dynasty: Marion Maréchal, the 30-year-old granddaughter of the National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen and the niece of the party’s current leader, Marine Le Pen?

Maréchal broke with her family in 2018, shedding the symbolic and highly controversial patronym ‘Le Pen’. She may yet break, too, with her grandfather’s National Front, since rebranded National Rally, and form her own party. Yet she is in many ways the inheritor of a political tradition. She wants to save Europe, not through the mechanism of the European Union but through a pan-Europeanism of shared national interests. She believes in reviving agriculture and the local economy.

In common with her aunt, she is focused above all on restricting immigration. She is careful, however, in how she expresses it.