She also said she would soon present a plan to cut some €125 billion in spending, including on budget items associated with migration, “useless” public agencies, and France’s contribution to the EU. Le Pen will present her detailed platform in the fall, but Jean-Philippe Tanguy, a member of Parliament for the National Rally, told POLITICO this would be accomplished in “less than five years.”
But Le Pen has yet to explain in detail how those savings would be achieved, and rivals are already questioning whether the numbers add up. “Marine Le Pen will ruin France,” Bruno Retailleau, a conservative candidate from Les Républicains, told reporters shortly after the Medef event.
The tension has also surfaced inside her own camp. As Le Pen was outlining her economic agenda at the Medef event, news broke that François Durvye, one of her key economic advisers and a leading advocate of greater fiscal discipline, was leaving the campaign.
Internal cracks
Durvye, who has informally advised Le Pen for five years, has been credited with building bridges between her party and the business world. A former fund manager, he was a key voice in the party on economic issues.
But his push for more fiscal discipline and economically liberal policies ran against the instincts of the party’s old guard, which remained wedded to the party’s populist positions. He was also a special advisor to National Rally President Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s protégé who was expected to take the campaign’s reins if Le Pen had been judged ineligible to run because of her guilty verdict for embezzlement of EU funds.
Bardella has been working to move the party toward the center on economic issues, including softening Le Pen’s pledge on the pension age — something that Durvye had been advocating for internally.