Marion Maréchal says Yellow Vests infiltrated by violent leftists

Maréchal, a former MP for Le Pen’s party, withdrew from the public political sphere last year to set up a political administration establishment in Lyon, called the Institut de Sciences Sociales Economiques et Politiques (ISSEP).

Her last public appearance had been in February, when Maréchal was invited to give a speech at the American Conservative Union’s CPAC conference to an American audience in Washington DC on the state of France.

She has since rarely commented on current political affairs, but Maréchal – who has dropped the “Le Pen” from her name – has broken her long silence saying felt she had to speak up for the Yellow Vests.

“Faced with the attitude of those in power, their elite contempt for the ‘Yellow Vests’ and their surrealist response to their demands, I could not help it,” she was quoted as saying by French daily Le Figaro.

French police had to fire tear gas and water cannons to disperse vandals in Paris on Saturday, as thousands gathered in the capital and staged road blockades countrywide.

She underscored that by the time violence erupted on the Champs-Élysées, the real members of the Yellow Vest movement had already left. Leftists took paving stones from the avenue to hurl at riot police, who were wearing gas masks and tall plastic shields.

Maréchal had arrived shortly after 2 pm, she said. “When I arrived on the Champs-Élysées, the real Yellow Vests were long gone. The movement was totally absorbed by left-wing activists. We heard: ‘death to capitalism!’ If this is the ‘far-right’, it has changed.

“It is a popular movement and completely apolitical. If that had not been the case, I would not have acted in the same way and not have provided the same support,” she added.

Her aunt, Marine Le Pen, has been a vocal supporter of the Yellow Vests. Le Pen lambasted President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday following his speech to the movement saying, “The total confusion of the presidential speech and the absolute emptiness in terms of solutions are striking.”

When Macron announced an increase in the national fuel tax, the French found themselves at breaking point. Fuel prices in France are already extremely high at 1,50 Euros per litre. The discontent has united rural and urban France, because all French are compelled by certain things: taxes, fuel prices and, more broadly, inflation.

The French President has furthermore urged nations to eschew nationalism and embrace globalism. But President Donald Trump dismissed his call: “The problem is that Emmanuel suffers from a very low Approval Rating in France, 26 percent, and an unemployment rate of almost 10 percent. He was just trying to get onto another subject.”

Meanwhile German Finance Minister and Vice-Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Wednesday proposed that France give up its permanent seat on the UN Security Council and turn it into an EU seat to allow the bloc to speak with one voice on the global stage.

“I realise this will take some convincing in Paris but it would be a bold and smart goal,” Scholz said in a speech given in Berlin on the future of the European Union.

To lessen the pain of losing its powerful seat, France could become “the permanent EU ambassador to the United Nations”, Scholz told Channel News Asia.