The National Rally (RN) is hiring a specialist company to search the digital profiles of its future legislative candidates and avoid "black sheep"

Anticipating a possible future dissolution of the Assembly, the National Rally is sorting through its candidates for the legislative elections.

The National Rally (RN) recently hired a company specializing in digital reputation to analyze the profiles of its future candidates in the legislative elections, franceinfo learned from concordant sources on Friday, July 4.

From July 8, Emmanuel Macron will be able to dissolve the National Assembly again, if he wishes. Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella's party, which is preparing particularly for this possibility, wants to avoid at all costs the " black sheep ," an expression used by Jordan Bardella himself to describe former candidates caught red-handed last summer after racist, anti-Semitic or homophobic remarks, often on social networks.

The National Intelligence Service (RN) is now working with this company to practice what is called " open-source intelligence ," a set of techniques used by recruitment firms, among others, to dig into the digital past of a specific target. The RN thus hopes to find any compromising photos, videos, or posts that could be unearthed from the web.

Each candidate the party wants to nominate is scrutinized, using several filters: racist, homophobic, or anti-Semitic remarks, but also comments on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or even Russia and Vladimir Putin. So far, around 300 files have been scrutinized, and according to a well-informed party official, only " a few problematic cases " have emerged.

According to franceinfo, hiring the services of such a specialized company is costing the National Rally a lot of money. " We're going all out ," asserts one of Jordan Bardella's advisors. The price tag is a few hundred euros to analyze a single candidate's digital history. A total of 577 euros must be invested.

Outgoing MPs will be subject to the same rules as new recruits in the event of another dissolution, confides a regular at RN strategy meetings, who says he is " fed up " with seeing all the work done internally to clean up the party " fall apart with each new affair revealed by the press ." To ensure that nothing escapes the RN, the digital profiles of all candidates will be regularly scrutinized until the next legislative elections, whatever the date.

If all this isn't enough, a close friend of Jordan Bardella points out that the party also organizes interviews for each candidate " with trick questions ." " But there's no such thing as zero risk ," concludes a spokesperson. " We're dealing with human beings! "