Imagine being too right-wing and insane for even Le Pen.
I think you are looking at this the wrong way. This is a purely PR move.
Her entire reason for entering politics was to distance herself politically from her father (she was sidelined a lot at law school for having her father's last name + has infamously fallen out with him)
Her entire political project since taking charge is dédiabolisation and distancing yourself from the AfD a few weeks before an EU election is a great way to show some random misinformed voter 'well she clearly isn't a Nazi/pétainiste since she's sticking one to the German far right". It's free political points
Really though, RN is still for me a far right party with extreme right elements. Just go look up any of their major meetings and there are literal bona fide neo-fascist thugs who are still there, and many times in an official capacity. And unlike AfD they are not scrutinised or forced into covert operations. When Le Pen/RN comes to power (it is a matter of when not if IMO), these neo-fascist groups will have relative free reign.
That the EU far right parties struggle with each other is also just a matter of personal grudges a lot of the time. I think we tend to underestimate it vs actual political differences.You can put it down to a wide range of sociological factors. For example, far right politicians are often not as English-speaking or polyglot as centrist politicians in the EP, so it is much harder for them to break bread. They really just have the groupings because it affords them more money in the end, and its a testament to the fact that for all the influx of "far right intellectuals" that are desperate for a National Conservative Internationale to combat the broad stroke issues of immigration, crime, etc, its simply unfeasible when Le Pen runs on a program of shutting the Franco-Spanish border...they are all incapable of looking beyond narrow nationalism, and that's ultimately their downfall.
I still fully expect Von Der Leyen and the EPP to let in the clown car far right groupings to form alternate majorities at the EP on the issues that rile people up the most. Some in the EPP are desperate for RN to eventually be the grand party of the Right that UMP/LR was and to join the European political mainstream.
Also agreed with this
But the far right becoming mainstream and establishing them as more mainstream parties, also in branding, is something we already see in Italy and the Netherlands now.
And distancing herself from her antisemitist father has a big part to do with this. Her pro-Israel position is also a way to compensate for that fact, to highlight that even more and also to polarize that debate and win the pro-Israel voters domestically.
She clearly knows what she's doing. And yes, fully agreed that it's not a question of if, but of when.
Le Pen is incredibly talented, she'll succeed where her father didn't. The question is more whether her father would still be alive to see that day.
