RN's replacement candidate, Jordan Bardella, is looking for his troops

The train speeds through the Morvan, where the network bars flatten as the landscape swells into small mountains bristling with fir trees. Jordan Bardella has just appeared in the bar car, and the photos are popping up regularly—a bunch of guys in suits, a pot-bellied fifty-year-old, two athletic-looking young people, no sign of hostility. This Thursday, May 15, the president of the National Rally is making a return trip to Saône-et-Loire, where a by-election is putting the mandate of a National Front MP, elected in July 2024, at risk. Marine Le Pen hasn't endured this kind of trip for a long time. Nor did she have to sit through the 8 p.m. news on France 2 the day before to react to Emmanuel Macron's very pointless evening on television. The natural candidate of her camp, sentenced in the first instance to a penalty of ineligibility which she appealed, is becoming as rare as her protégé is multiplying.

She shuns the press and the media, not warning them when, on the eve of May 1st, she inaugurates a permanent office in Perpignan with Louis Aliot. On the very morning of the Narbonne meeting, she refuses to sacrifice the traditional off-the-record exercise with the journalists, in tandem with Bardella. There's no point in giving the same recital of out-of-tune violins twice: