The National Rally presented its manifesto to the French people on Monday ahead of Sunday’s first round of voting in the parliamentary election. ‘I have made my priorities very clear: purchasing power, restoring security and controlling immigration,’ was how the party’s president, Jordan Bardella, summarised the manifesto. ‘I want to embody unity, to bring people together, and I aspire to be the Prime Minister of the French who did not vote for the National Rally.’
The manifesto has been eviscerated by Bardella’s political and media opponents. ‘An economic shipwreck’, was the headline in the left-wing Liberation. Underneath was a tribune signed by ‘The Appalled Economists’, a collective of French thinkers and economists opposed to the neo-liberal orthodoxy. In their view the National Rally’s ‘economic and social proposals create mechanisms for rejecting and stigmatising immigrants and foreigners, which are contrary to the values of the Republic.’
Such a response would have been expected by Bardella.
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