As Emmanuel Macron champions Europe, a nationalist school set to open in France

Bloomberg

Across the continent, from Finland to Portugal, Emmanuel Macron is leading the charge against Europe’s nationalists. He might want to look closer to home. In western France, Marion Marechal has ambitions to train the next generation of anti-establishment, anti-European French leaders. From September, Marechal is starting her own graduate school, where she’ll seek to shape the politicians of the future to help spread her vision.
“We need to win back the influence and the elite in France and our youth—those who have a vision, roots and are patriotic—have to work to succeed and engage in the national debate,” Marechal, 28, said.
Until a few months ago, Marechal went by the name Marechal-Le Pen. The granddaughter of National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, she’s been touted as a rising star of the right. She spoke at the US Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland in March, and has been praised as “one of the most impressive people in the entire world” by former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
She dropped the Le Pen and put her political career on hold after her aunt Marine Le Pen lost to Macron last year, Marine Le Pen’s second failure in a presidential election.
As Marechal seeks a new means of influencing the debate, Macron—the 40-year-old poster child of liberal Europe—is railing against her nationalist peers. In recent months he has taken his pro-EU message to Denmark, Finland, Spain and Portugal as he campaigns for May elections to the European Parliament.
“I won’t retreat in front of the nationalists and those preaching hatred,” Macron said in Copenhagen. “If they want to see me as their main opponent, they’re right.”
Next year’s European elections are emerging as a contest between the “illiberal” policies espoused by the likes of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the liberal establishment parties. The Parliament that results will have a key role in approving the next European Commission, the EU’s executive, meaning Europe’s future direction is at stake.
For Marechal, the French president is the enemy. “Macron is an anomaly in this great historic movement that we are seeing in Europe now,” she said. “There is nothing new about him—he is from the same elite, of money and power. His ideology is liquid, it’s scraps and bits of the failed multicultural model.”