The niece of the Front National leader, Marine Le Pen, is opening a finishing school to train the future luminaries of France’s far right.

Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, one of the populist party’s two MPs in France’s previous parliament, withdrew from electoral politics following her aunt’s heavy defeat to Emmanuel Macron in last year’s presidential elections.

But the 28-year-old’s new “academy of political sciences” is set to open this September in central Lyon, one of her close allies, the regional councillor Thibaut Monnier, told LyonMag.

A key figure of the Front National’s more traditionalist southern current, Maréchal-Le Pen is far more socially conservative than her aunt and close to the party’s founder, her grandfather Jean-Marie. She is seen by some as a future party chief.

The “free and independent” institution sets out to to “detect and train the leaders of tomorrow who will have the courage, intelligence, discernment and competence to act effectively … in the service of society,” she wrote in the rightwing weekly Valeurs Actuelles earlier this year.



Open to “all the political currents of the right”, the school says it will provide “the intellectual, cultural, legal, technical and media skills to our young people that will allow them to perform as well as possible in both the business and political arena”.

It appears to be inspired in part by the Institute for Political Training, a private, part-time college in Paris that has offered seminars on “How the euro is destroying Europe”, “Islam and Islamism” and “How to translate your values into action” since 2004.

Providing a full-time education, Maréchal-Le Pen’s school aims eventually to award its students state-recognised diplomas; however, to do this it will initially need to work with an establishment already approved by the French education ministry, which could prove challenging.

Her family name may also be an obstacle. According to L’Obs news weekly, several rightwing intellectuals have already turned down offers to teach at the school, put off by the presence of a Le Pen on the managing board. “The name is the kiss of death, and she knows it,” one told the magazine.

But commentators argue that whether the project is a success or not, Maréchal-Le Pen’s profile can only benefit. A recent opinion poll gave her a public approval rating of 19%, one point more than Marine, and a remarkable score for someone no longer in elected office.

The FN, riven by internal divisions, has been at pains to stress the project is not a return to frontline politics for Maréchal-Le Pen. “Marion was considerate enough to warn Marine Le Pen and tell her it was a personal and professional initiative, not at all a political comeback,” the party’s spokesman, Sébastien Chenu, said.



She and the school’s rightwing backers, who include Monnier, are believed to have chosen Lyon because the FN has long done well in France’s third city. The city is already home to other rightwing, nationalist or conservative Catholic groups such as Action Française, Génération Identitaire and Sens Commun.