The niece of the Front National leader, Marine Le Pen, is opening a finishing school to train the future leaders of France’s far right.

Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, one of the populist party’s two MPs in France’s previous parliament, withdrew from electoral politics following her aunt’s heavy defeat to Emmanuel Macron in last year’s presidential elections.

But the 28-year-old’s new “academy of political sciences” is set to open this September in central Lyon, one of her close allies, the regional councillor Thibaut Monnier, told LyonMag. A key figure of the Front National’s more traditionalist southern current, Maréchal-Le Pen is far more socially conservative than her aunt and close to the party’s founder, her grandfather Jean-Marie. She is seen by some as a future leader.

The “free and independent” institution sets out to to “detect and train the leaders of tomorrow who will have the courage, intelligence, discernment and competence to act effectively … in the service of society,” she wrote in the rightwing weekly Valeurs Actuelles earlier this year. Open to “all the political currents of the right”, the school says it will provide “the intellectual, cultural, legal, technical and media skills to our young people that will allow them to perform as well as possible in both the business and political arena”.(theguardian)…[+]