Marine Le Pen closed the National Rally congress in Orléans on Sunday 25 October with a 45-minute speech to about 8,500 elected officials and activists inside the Co’Met Arena. The city had been sealed off for two days by a large police deployment that included CRS 8, the unit specialised in urban violence. A demonstration against the far right the day before had drawn 26,000 people.
The candidate, ahead in first-round voting intentions and presented as the winner of a runoff against any opponent, set the 2027 campaign under the sign of a renaissance in the city of Joan of Arc. Beside a tricolor flag she said that no defeat is final as long as a people refuses to resign itself to it, and that she was not offering to remake yesterday’s France but to conceive and build the France of tomorrow.
Sovereignty ran through the diplomatic section. She promised a powerful national army, a nuclear deterrent kept exclusively French, and a refusal to send young French people into wars that are not theirs. The account set that deterrent against Emmanuel Macron, who sees it widened to protect European partners. Ukraine was not named, though the report tied the remark to Le Pen’s wish to stop aid to Volodymyr Zelensky.
She also promised zero tolerance, automatic expulsion of foreign offenders, a double French and European border, and national priority written into the Constitution. She confirmed Jordan Bardella, re-elected party president on Saturday with 98.98 percent of the vote, as prime minister of a government of national union, and said she was leaving the same day the presidency of the RN group in the National Assembly.