Julien Odoul, head of the RN list in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, is in turmoil after mocking the suicide of a farmer – SEBASTIEN BOZON / AFP
- Julien Odoul, head of the National Rally in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté list, mocked the suicide of a farmer.
- Since then, the controversy has swelled on this very sensitive subject.
- But what consequences can this affair really have?
In December 2019, Julien Odoul, candidate for the National Rally in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, quipped about the suicide of a farmer: “Is the rope French? He asked with laughter during a meeting of his party group at the regional council.
A joke in very bad taste that reported this Friday Release, citing an audio recording. It did not take more to put the candidate for the regional, but also the whole of his party, in the embarrassment. But up to what point?
Few national consequences
At the national level, this should not move the lines so much, the RN being a party too firmly established in the votes to collapse. “This is not going to weaken the party on its existing base, it is not going to give up on that,” prophesies Stéphane Rozès, political scientist and president of Advice, Analysis and Perspectives (CAP). But this controversy can, according to the specialist, compromise his progress towards new voices.
The same goes for Gilles Ivaldi, researcher at Science Po Paris and specialist in populism and the far-right: “Nationally, this controversy will quickly be chased away by another. “If the subject is sensitive, it does not touch one of the two central themes of the RN vote for the researcher: security and immigration issues, which greatly reduces the consequences of this” joke “.
Nonetheless, for 2022 and the possible shock facing Emmanuel Macron, the subject could stain. While LREM is pointed out by the National Rally as the party of the rich and powerful, making fun of the suicide of a member of a disadvantaged category is easy to exploit by Emmanuel Macron. “But by then, things will probably have settled down,” says Stéphane Rozès.
But a cost for the regional
The controversy comes on the other hand only a few days before the regional elections, the first round of which takes place on June 20. And Julien Odoul is even at the top of the list. Did he doom himself with this joke? “The issues of security and immigration are also the two central themes of the vote of the regional, it is therefore possible that Julien Odoul finally gets away without too much damage,” says Gille Ivaldi.
A hypothesis to which Stéphane Rozès adheres less: “Locally, it can be expensive, especially in rural voting”. And particularly in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté. According to
an INSEE study of 2018, it is the first rural region in France ahead of Brittany. “As of January 1, 2018, 55% of the regional population resides in a rural commune against only a third at the national level”, quotes the study in particular.
Should the National Rally keep Julien Odoul at the top of the list or sanction him? For Stéphane Rozès, the question, so close to the election, does not arise: “To remove Julien Odoul would be to decapitate the campaign and this time, to weaken the party”. Sorting through the ranks after a controversy is not part of the habits of the house. Gilles Ivaldi recalls: “The tradition of the extreme right in the face of a controversy is more to victimize itself, to say that it is proof that it disturbs or that it is anti-system. To punish Odoul would be to prove this controversy right. “
A symptomatic crisis
The candidate’s joke will therefore perhaps have no consequences, neither for him nor for the party, but it remains symptomatic of certain difficulties of the National Rally. “The RN is Marine Le Pen. This is its strength and its weakness: the party is struggling to find other headliners. This harms its credibility and reinforces the image of a party incapable of governing because it lacks competent people. This Odoul affair clearly shows the difficulty for Marine Le Pen to have senior executives up to the period and the challenge of power, ”underlines Stéphane Rozès.
Blame it on a party in decline, according to Gilles Ivaldi: “Since 2017, the National Rally has been entangled in many affairs, it has lost a lot of funding and members. He is forced to brew wider, which results in this kind of highlighting of questionable profiles. “Julien Odoul has thus taken the head of the RN in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté since the ousting of the party of Sophie Montel in 2017, considered too close to Florian Philippot, vice-president of the RN who abandoned him in 2017 to found his own party. The Julien Odoul affair does not put the National Rally in crisis, it already was.