Nicolas Bay

Nicolas Bay, 2016

Nicolas Bay (born December 21, 1977 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye , Yvelines department ) is a French politician of the Rassemblement National . He has been a member of the European Parliament since 2014 . He was Secretary General from 2014 to 2017, then Deputy Chairman of the Front National until 2018 and Co-Chairman of the Europe of Nations and Freedom Group in the European Parliament from 2017 to 2019 .

Bay grew up in a "privileged environment" in the Paris suburb of Maisons-Laffitte . At the age of 15 he joined the right-wing extremist Front National (FN), which his parents sympathized with. From 1997 to 1998 he was secretary of the FN youth organization Front national de la jeunesse (FNJ) in the Yvelines department . After the FN split in 1998/99, he joined the Mouvement national républicain (MNR) of Bruno Mégret . From 2001 to 2014 he was a member of the municipal council of the city of Sartrouville near Paris. In July 2007 he was appointed General Secretary of the MNR and resigned the following year. In 2009 he returned to the Front National and stood for them in the European elections in the constituency of north-west France. In the 2010 regional elections in Haute-Normandie , he was the top candidate on the FN list, which received 14.2% of the vote in the second ballot. He was then chairman of the FN parliamentary group in the regional council of Haute-Normandie. At the end of 2012 he was appointed Deputy Secretary General of the FN.

In the European elections in 2014 he was elected to the European Parliament as a representative of the constituency Northwest . There he was initially non-attached, from 2015 a member of the Europe of Nations and Freedom Group. He was a member of the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy from 2014–2017 and the Development Committee in 2015–17 . He is also a delegate in the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly and in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union for the Mediterranean . In November 2014, party leader Marine appointed Le Pen Bay General Secretary of the FN. He is considered a representative of the “right” wing of the party, which he describes as “conservative (economically) liberal”, in contrast to Florian Philippot , who is more statistically oriented . Bay is also close to Les Identitaires and Philippe Vardon .

At the end of 2015, Bay was the top candidate for the FN in united Normandy (merger of Upper and Lower Normandy ). His list got 27.7% of the vote. He is still group leader of the FN in the regional council. In the parliamentary elections in June 2017 , he ran in a constituency of the Seine-Maritime department and received 22.8% of the vote. From September 2017, as the successor to Marine Le Pen, he was co-chair of the ENF group in the EU Parliament, which he led together with the Dutchman Marcel de Graaff ( PVV ) until the end of the 2019 legislative period . In the same month he became vice chairman of the FN, while he was replaced as secretary general by Steeve Briois . In June 2018 the FN changed its name to Rassemblement National (RN). In the 2019 European elections, he was re-elected as a MEP. Since then he has been deputy chairman of the Identity and Democracy Group . He is a member of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Abel Mestre: Nicolas Bay, ou l'ascension d'un apparatchik FN. In: Le Monde , December 5, 2015.
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Entry on Nicolas Bay in the European Parliament 's database of representatives