French far-right leader’s top strategist says he has been ‘ridiculed’ as he departs amid tensions with his boss after election defeat

The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has suffered a blow to her crisis-stricken Front National party after her top strategist quit amid bitter infighting over Europe and identity politics in the wake of the presidential election defeat.

Florian Philippot, the young, media-savvy civil servant who was Le Pen’s intellectual right-hand man for eight years and architect of the party’s pledge to quit the euro currency, announced he was leaving the party in an angry breakfast TV interview, saying he had been pushed out.

Hours earlier, Philippot had warned that the far-right Front National was making an “absolutely terrifying” return to the dark days of its most hardline past, which was “panicking thousands of people”.

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Philippot’s decision to storm out of the party comes after weeks of public mud-slinging as Le Pen attempts to rebuild the troubled Front National following her crushing presidential election defeat by the centrist Emmanuel Macron in May.

At play is a fierce battle over what ideological lines the far-right party should now push if it is ever to have another chance at winning the presidency. Many in the anti-immigration, anti-European union party want to see it emphasise the most hardline, nativist, far-right stances of its past and drop Philippot’s attempts to broaden its appeal.

Philippot, 35, was credited with executing Le Pen’s plan to “sanitise” the Front National and move it away from the jackbooted, antisemitic imagery of the past, reaching out to new voters after she took over the party from her ex-paratrooper, Holocaust-denying father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011.

The two turned the party to the left in its economic policies in order to win over swaths of working-class voters in the de-industrialised north and east. Philippot – a gay man in a party whose co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen once called homosexuality “a biological and social anomaly” – also sought to make the party appear more open-minded on abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage.

The strategy to repackage the far-right, xenophobic, anti-immigration, anti-European Union party as “neither left nor right” was credited with bringing in large numbers of new voters and building a grassroots.

Le Pen won more than 10m votes – double her father’s score in 2002 – in the final round of the presidential election in May, but her 33.9% share of the vote was seen as a disappointment for a far-right party that had hoped for a huge showing in the wake of the UK’s vote to leave the European Union and Donald Trump’s election as US president.

Le Pen’s catastrophic presidential TV debate with Macron – in which she performed so erratically that some cringing party members struggled to stay tuned – still pains many in the party.

Key figures inside the party think the Front National has won over as many leftwing voters as it can and should push its unabashed far-right, nativist and socially conservative roots and drop any pretensions of courting disgruntled communist voters. Many also want to drop the pledge to quit the euro – an unpopular policy among voters but one that the anti-European Philippot staunchly clung to.

Le Pen had this week ordered Philippot to step down from an association he had set up within the Front National called the Patriots, which he insisted was just an internal thinktank but Le Pen saw as a rival party. She then stripped Philippot of his responsibilities as head of strategy and communications – but stopped short of expelling the man she was once so close to that she was thought to rarely make a decision without consulting him.

To save face, Philippot jumped ship. “I don’t like being ridiculed,” he said on TV. Le Pen said he was “playing the victim”. She said his accusations that the party was rolling back towards the extremism of its beginnings “made absolutely no sense” and were “partly defamatory”.

Philippot’s departure highlights how Le Pen has been weakened by her presidential election performance. She insisted she was still “the strongest and best-placed” to lead the Front National for the next presidential election in 2022. But, although she firmly controls the party, which has been run with an iron hand by the Le Pen clan for more than 40 years, questions remain over her policy ideas.

Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, a former far-right MP who is extremely popular among the party faithful, has stepped back from politics to learn English, study business and take a private sector job. But she is a standard bearer for the hardline, socially conservative identity politics of the far-right of old. If the Front National takes that direction, it would further Maréchal-Le Pen’s chances if she decides to return.

Louis Aliot, Marine Le Pen’s partner and a senior party figure, slammed Philippot as a “vain and arrogant” character “trying to muzzle our ability to debate”.

Philippot, a member of the European parliament, and head of the Front National grouping in the Grand Est regional council, will take a few elected officials with him.

But the Front National has seen many internal splits in its long history and no departing figure has ever presented a real threat to the party from the outside.