Arriving at the National Front in 1987, Gilles Pennelle helped establish the party in Brittany. He was close to the identity movement, before working to demonize the RN.
At 61, Gilles Pennelle enters the European Parliament thanks to his 15th place on the National Rally list and his victory in the European elections on June 9, 2024. This former history and geography teacher is none other than the director general from the party of Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen. He joined the National Front for the first time in 1987, before leaving it in 1998, returning in 2013, taking over as head of the Ille-et-Vilaine federation. In 2015 and then in 2021, the party’s choice to make it its head of list in the regional elections in Brittany sparked controversies linked to its past close to the identity movement.
He is in fact credited with having been active in the very right-wing Parti des Forces Nouvelles during his university years in Rouen, then with a brief stint in the small neopagan group Terre et Peuple. Gilles Pennelle has in any case long been a fervent defender of the identity line of the party of Marine Le Pen, even if he has converted to his strategy of demonization in recent years. When he joined the RN national council in 2018, he was close to the ideas of Marion Maréchal and Nicolas Bay, both of whom left to join Eric Zemmour in 2022.
Virulent remarks against immigration
“If you want to define me politically, I am a Bonapartist: attachment to a powerful sovereign State, a great social dimension and love of the nation”, summed up Gilles Pennelle in World in 2023, upon his appointment to the position of number 2 of the National Rally.
The new MEP has always taken a very anti-immigration line. In 2002, on the question of Turkey’s membership in theEuropean Unionhe declared, according to The world : “If we do nothing, they will settle in our cathedrals, they will sleep with your daughters.” Words that he wanted, more recently, to put back into the “context of the time”, without however denying his “fight against immigration policy”.