Everything was prepared in detail.

All millimeters to stage the change in the leadership of the National Rally (RN) at the sweetest moment for the historic party of the extreme right in France.

Its 18th congress this Saturday was to represent one more step on the long road towards normalization, from the ideological margins of society to respectability.

There was no room for error.

But the script was broken 48 hours before the name of the new president of the RN was announced, the young Jordan Bardella, elected by the militants with 85% of the votes against 15% for the mayor of Perpignan, Louis Aliot.

The deputy Grégoire de Fournas - one of the 89 who, since the June legislative elections, constitute the first opposition party to Emmanuel Macron - shouted on Thursday during the government control session something like: "Go back to Africa!" “Let him go back to Africa!”

or “Let them go back to Africa!”

The pronunciation is similar in French in all three cases.

And, suddenly, the headlines and comments in the corridors of the Mutualité, the Parisian hall where the congress was held, were no longer focused on the novelty of seeing a 27-year-old man leading the first opposition party, nor on that, from now on, Marine Le Pen will dedicate herself exclusively to the National Assembly and to the conquest of power.

The unknown De Fournas, accused of racism by the left and by the macronistas, dominated the conversations.

Bardella, in his speech after the election, denounced "a real manhunt" against the deputy.

Philippe Olivier, special adviser to Marine Le Pen, minimized, in the corridors of the Mutualité: "It is a parliamentary adventure."

"We would have been angry with Grégoire de Fournas if we had considered that there was a minimum of racism in his words, but there was not," he said.

It is not clear if, with his outburst, De Fournas was referring to Carlos Martens-Bilongo, the deputy of African origin who was speaking in the chamber at the time, or if he was talking about the migrants rescued in the Mediterranean that Martens-Bilongo was talking about. Bilongo.

The words of De Fournas have earned him the maximum disciplinary sanction in the Assembly: two weeks of expulsion and two months with half salary.

And they have revived the original identity of the RN that its leader, Marine Le Pen, has been trying to erase since succeeding her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a decade ago.

Marine kicked Jean-Marie out.

She reneged on his father's racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic outbursts and softened his more unsympathetic angles.

He renamed the party: from National Front to National Regroupment.

He embraced the figure of General de Gaulle, founding father of contemporary France and sworn enemy of the founders of the FN, a coalition of former collaborators with Nazi Germany and nostalgic for French Algeria.

More recently, he reneged on an unpopular promise to leave the European Union and the euro.

After the success of the legislative elections, he forced the deputies to wear ties.

It was a symbol: he doesn't want to be identified with the racket, but with order.

It is no longer anti-system.

In his speech this Saturday, Le Pen cited De Gaulle, the left-wing philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, and the slogan of the Popular Front - the union of the French left that won the elections in 1936 and achieved social conquests such as the generalization of paid vacations and the 40-hour work week―, “bread, peace, freedom”.

Le Pen sees herself closer to her goal every day: the majority in legislative elections, if they were anticipated, that would take her to the head of government.

Or victory in the 2027 presidential elections. "We must be prepared to exercise power at all times," she warned.

Marine Le Pen hugs Jordan Bardella, this Saturday in Paris.Lewis Joly (AP)

'Ideal son-in-law', hard line

Bardella (Drancy, 27 years old), Marine Le Pen's successor at the head of the RN, is the child prodigy of French politics: devoted to the party since adolescence and without university degrees, he has an oratorical ability that allows him to shine on television, and at the same time an image of the ideal son-in-law who, with a friendly and conciliatory tone, promotes the usual ideas of his political field on issues such as immigration.

If the RN has two souls -one more social and the other identity-, Bardella is identified with the latter.

Steeve Briois, heavyweight of the party and mayor of the municipality of Hénin-Beaumont, denounced, after being excluded from the new executive on Saturday, "a beginning of purge against those who defend the social line."

Le Pen's favorite, Bardella won Aliot (Toulouse, 53 years old) in an online election among the militants.

Of Italian origin and raised in the

the multicultural suburb of Paris, he embraces the idea, promoted by racist politicians and theorists, of the

of the native population by immigrants.

"He points to a reality," he told EL PAÍS in April.

"Where I grew up there are French people who no longer recognize the country where they grew up, including French people with an immigrant background."

For the first time in half a century of the RN's existence, a person without the surname Le Pen holds the presidency.

It will no longer be so easy to describe it as a family SME in which the public and the private are confused.

And yet, an inbred air persists.

Bardella is credited with a relationship with Nolwenn, a niece of Marine Le Pen.

Her rival, Aliot, was Le Pen's partner.

And Olivier, his special adviser and husband of his sister, is both the father of Bardella's girlfriend: her father-in-law (an extreme that, at the Mutualité, the adviser neither confirms nor denies).

For Olivier, the relay at the top "is a test of maturity."

But he adds: "Marine will remain the moral authority of the in-laws."

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