Presidential 2022: Marine Le Pen facing the sponsorship wall – Le HuffPost

via Associated Press

POLITICS – Presidential candidate seeks signatures of elected officials. In a video posted on YouTube Thursday, November 4, Marine Le Pen relies on the members of the National gathering, to help him get the 500 referrals for thepresidential election 2022. “If you yourself know a mayor who would agree to sponsor us, contact us”, launches the candidate RN, who affirms that it is “more and more difficult” to find elected officials ready to grant their sponsorship to the Lepéniste party .

The fault, according to her, to the transparency established in 2017, which would lead local elected officials to give up their names alongside the far-right formation. “We demanded that their names not be published, because it does not help. Apart from allowing certain extreme left associations to put pressure on them, ”deplores the member for Pas-de-Calais, who had completed her sponsorship only three days before the deadline during the previous presidential election. It must be said that in this year 2017, only 34% of the authorized elected representatives had brought their sponsorship. “In nearly three quarters of the cases, they were elected municipal and inter-municipal officials”, details the Directorate of Legal and Administrative Information.

Controversy and competition

In fact, the argument of a possible negative effect of transparency does not only concern Marine Le Pen. “Local elected officials will have a hard time giving someone sulphurous. This can pose a problem to Eric Zemmour from this point of view because his profile is subject to controversy ”, noted in The Express the political scientist of CNRS and Cevipof Bruno Cautrès, before qualifying: “but local elected officials are great servants of public affairs”. At the same time, Marine Le Pen faces another difficulty, a little less admirable: the loss 142 regional and departmental advisers between 2015 and 2021. This, mechanically, affects its sponsorship potential.

Another obstacle for the RN candidate, competition in her political space. At the beginning of October, when the Zemmour application surpassed for the first time that of Marine Pen in a poll, an executive of the Lepenist party confided to the HuffPost his fear of seeing godfathers formerly acquired by the LePéniste party to set their sights on the adventure of the polemicist. A competetion to which are added those of Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, Florian Philippot and François Asselineau.

“Each time there are more or less 5,000 elected officials ready to sponsor a presidential candidate. It’s a very small cake. If 1,500 of them are in favor of a nationalist candidacy, it is already enormous ”, explained recently to the Figaro a source involved in this signature hunt. Also with the daily, one of these candidates affirmed, on condition of anonymity, that it is impossible, in the end, for all to be present on the starting line. April 10, 2022.

“We are not very worried”

But internally, the time is not yet for panic. “Basically, we’re not very worried. We left early, things are progressing well and we should get there ”, relativizes to the HuffPost a member of the national office of the RN, who adds: “afterwards, it is not without danger. We have feedback from mayors who say ‘I’m giving it to someone else because it’s sure that Marine will have them’. If many of them think like that, that will be a problem ”.

In this long-distance race, the president (on availability) of the National Gathering still has time in front of her. The sponsorship collection period will end no later than the sixth Friday before the first round. In the meantime, Marine Le Pen will also have to overcome the other great difficulty of her campaign: that of financing.

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