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PARIS — Several key players from French President Emmanuel Macron’s party have expressed concerns over a meeting between one of the Elysée’s aides and Marion Maréchal, a prominent member of the far right in France.
On Sunday, Le Monde reported that a lunch meeting was held in October between Bruno Roger-Petit, Macron’s adviser on historical memory issues, and Maréchal, the former MP who is the granddaughter of convicted Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen and the niece of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally party.
Maréchal, who left the party in 2017 after Le Pen’s second-round loss to Emmanuel Macron, recently launched a think tank to “feed public discourse” ahead of the next presidential election in 2022.
Bruno Roger-Petit said the meeting was set up on a personal initiative and that the goal was to survey Maréchal’s political opinions.
“I wanted to know what she had to say and whether it echoed the state of opinion — which it did not. I found out that we disagreed,” Roger-Petit told Le Monde, adding that conservative politician Xavier Bertrand also recently met with the far-right author Éric Zemmour.
The Elysée did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Many within Macron’s La République En Marche (LREM) criticized the meeting for its alleged incompatibility with the party’s liberal values.
“With the far right, we do not discuss, we do not compromise. We fight it,” tweeted Hugues Renson, vice president of the National Assembly and prominent member of Macron’s party La République en Marche (LREM). The lawmaker also added a quote from former President Jacques Chirac, who said during the 2002 presidential elections that he “could not accept the trivialization of intolerance and hatred.”
“There are people that we don’t ‘probe’ on an ‘individual initiative,’ we fight them collectively. Marion Maréchal and her entire clique are clearly part of it,” said Astrid Panosyan, LREM’s treasurer.
LREM MP Jean-Michel Mis said it was a “mistake” and added that nothing should be done out of “individual initiative” when “one is lucky enough to hold an eminent position in the first circle of power.”
Roger-Petit, a former government spokesperson, is often criticized within the majority group. According to Le Monde, he remains an influential voice at the Elysée, where he wrote a note to Macron suggesting that the president should forge a closer relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
A “symbolic and grandiose” ceremony with the Russian president in May 2021 “would allow to triangulate advantageously the positions of all your opponents who claim to be following Putin’s example, obliging them to welcome the initiative,” Roger-Petit reportedly wrote.
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