Students of what might be called the grammar of the media have made the observation – it is known as Betteridge’s Law – that if a newspaper headline is phrased as a question, the answer to that question will almost inevitably be No. The insight is based on the judgement that the propositions that such headlines convey – let us say ‘Could the US go to war with the EU?’ – tend to be rather unlikely, but that an article bearing a headline reflecting a more sober assessment, say ‘US unlikely to go to war with EU’, will not be read.
Marine Le Pen, who took over the leadership of France’s main far-right party from her father, Jean-Marie, in 2011, changing its name from Front national to Rassemblement national in 2018, has so far contested three presidential elections. She has increased her vote in each, from 6.4 million in 2012, to 10.6 million in 2017 and 13.3 million in 2017 and 2022. On the last two occasions she progressed to the second round, which includes just two candidates. The 2017 election was the first time the party had made the run-off since 2002, when her father, who had narrowly squeezed ahead of the socialist candidate in the first round, was defeated by the Gaullist Jacques Chirac by 25.5 million votes to 5.5 million.
In 2017 Front national seemed to be enjoying considerable political momentum, and it was not long before headlines began to appear in the international press asking ‘Could France elect a president from the far right?’ The answer to this semi-rhetorical question for any sober analyst was a plain No. The FN was gathering strength, but most French voters still regarded it as beyond the pale. In the second round of voting, the centrist Emmanuel Macron almost doubled Le Pen’s score with 20.7 million votes, having attracted a further 12 million votes on top of those he had won in the first round.
With the fortunes of the far right continuing to improve, the question was asked again in 2022, this time with greater insistence: ‘Could France elect a president from the far right?’ Again the answer was No, if less resoundingly so. Five years in office had been enough to take much of the gloss off Macron’s centrist project, now perceived as directionless. The same two candidates faced off in the second round as in 2017, but on this occasion President Macron won 2 million fewer votes. The gap between the two remained considerable, however, at almost 5.5 million votes.
RN emerged as the largest party – in terms of percentage vote if not in seats – in the 2024 parliamentary election, hastily called by Macron after his electoral list was heavily defeated in the European elections. There had been uncertainty about whether Le Pen, rather than party president Jordan Bardella, would be the candidate in 2027, given that she had been barred from running for public office after being found guilty of illegally diverting EU funds into the party coffers. But the relaxation of the sentence on appeal in July 2026 cleared the way for her to run. Bardella would have been seen by many as more pragmatic in his approach to the EU, though it would be naive to portray him as ‘the moderate candidate’.
With Le Pen now showing fifteen to twenty points ahead of any other putative presidential candidate in polling for next year’s presidential election, the question as to whether France could have a far-right president is being asked again. This time it is far from certain that the answer will be No.
The question of who Le Pen’s main opponent will be next year is paramount: we can assume that barring some huge misstep she will progress to the second round of voting. Will she face a candidate from the centre or centre right, such as former prime ministers Gabriel Attal or Édouard Philippe, or one from the centre left, such as Raphäel Glucksmann or former president François Hollande? Or will it be Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the longstanding leader of the far-left La France Insoumise? At this early stage, either Philippe or Mélenchon seem favourites to qualify. Recent surveys of voting intention suggest that Le Pen would narrowly beat Philippe and trounce Mélenchon.
Also crucial will be whether Le Pen can satisfy a sufficient proportion of the electorate that her party is not what it was – a process of public persuasion, referred to as dédiabolisation, that she has been engaged in since she took over the leadership of FN from her rumbustious, antisemitic father, the diable who needs to be exorcised.
If the first round, with its wide range of candidates, encourages voters to express themselves politically, the second, with its choice of only two, affords them the opportunity to say who they would like to be in charge of the country, or indeed who they would not like to be in charge. The practice of what is called discipline républicaine, which encourages supporters of the left in particular, but also of the centre, to switch their second-round votes to a republican – which is to say reliably democratic – candidate so as to block the election of the far right, has a long history in France. For decades it has had the effect of denying FN/RN the representation in parliament that a more proportional system would have provided it.
The most spectacular demonstration of discipline républicaine came in 2002, when Chirac was endorsed in the second round by a further 20 million voters, including very many on the left. But in 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front national was an organism that alarmed very many people. In 2026, by contrast, RN is widely considered to be just another party. To explain why FN back then was seen as beyond the pale and why its successor party today does not seem so off-putting, we need to delve briefly into the history of the right and far right in France.
The birth of reaction
The terms left and right, used as political markers, derive from the earliest phase of the French Revolution, when those who continued to defend the powers of the king sat on the right of the national assembly, while those who challenged those powers in favour of greater popular sovereignty occupied the left. This division became an enduring one after the restoration of the monarchy in 1814, when two broad camps came into being, one seeking to undo the democratic changes introduced by the Revolution, the other seeking to retain as many of its ‘gains’ as possible.
The opposition between right and left, though it does not account for every political phenomenon, still retains much of its explanatory power. This is reflected in the seating of many European parliamentary assemblies today, in which deputies of varying political persuasions sit in a semicircle arranged from far left to far right in accordance with their parties’ political outlooks. The idea that left and right are not pure political essences but vary in intensity and admit of gradation, giving us, for example, a far left, a centre left, a centre, a centre right and a far right, has been expressed in over a century of political practice.
It would be an anachronism to equate ‘the left’ in France during most of the nineteenth century with socialism, which remained a marginal force until the 1890s. The left was first understood as that group which defended a republican rather than a monarchical form of government. While it might be in favour, in a general way, of broadening access to participation in the affairs of the nation, it included figures strongly attached to the defence of existing property relations whom we would now no longer regard as being on the left. Take Adolphe Thiers, the first president of the Third Republic and a strong opponent of autocracy, who in 1850 felt justified in withdrawing the franchise from the poorest – and perhaps most volatile – sections of the proletariat, those he characterised as ‘the vile multitude’.
Moderates of both left and right were satisfied that a parliament chosen in free elections could guarantee sufficient public order. However, the far right – chiefly monarchists of one stripe or another who valued hierarchy, obedience to authority and a strong role for traditional elites – saw democracy as a sure path to the rule of those who were culturally, intellectually and morally unequipped for it. But the most bitter rift between left and right during the nineteenth century was not over democracy or wealth or property, but religion. The right wished to restore to the institutional Catholic Church as many of the privileges and possessions it had enjoyed before 1789, while the left, for the most part, sought to hunt it out of public life.
The push and pull between those who accepted and those who rejected the changes brought about by the Revolution continued until late in the century and beyond, with no final victory for either side but against a background of what seemed to be a slow ebb of monarchist sentiment and a sullen withdrawal of many of the supporters of tradition and religion into more or less impotent exile from political life. By the later 1870s the Third Republic, established in 1871, seemed to be safely bedded in: in fact it was to last as an institution, though periodically challenged by those who rejected democracy, until the German invasion of 1940.
In spite of this republican consolidation, a number of circumstances were coming together in the 1870s and 1880s that would re-energise the reactionary right, giving it a new ideological orientation and, even more importantly, new enemies. France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, followed by the uprising known as the Paris Commune and its bloody suppression, had shocked the country. The cession of Alsace and Moselle to Germany brought an influx of migrants, many of them Jewish, to Paris. If the overall number of Jews in France declined after the loss of the eastern provinces, their visibility increased, and was to increase further towards the end of the century after the arrival of thousands of refugees fleeing persecution in eastern Europe. At the same time, paranoia about Germany and German espionage in France increased exponentially, the two powerful forces of antisemitism and xenophobia mingling and fusing, carried to a wider audience by the advent of cheap mass-circulation newspapers.
The most celebrated victim of this wave of hysteria, in which the older elites of Church, Army and landed gentry found a measure of popular support for their reactionary views, was the Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus, wrongly accused of spying for Germany and in 1895 deported to the penal colony of Devil’s Island off French Guiana. A long campaign by the group of intellectuals and artists who became known as ‘the Dreyfusards’ to expose this miscarriage of justice, and a slowly dawning realisation in government circles that elements among the ‘anti-Dreyfusards’ were actively threatening the constitutional order, eventually led – twelve years after the initial trial – to the vindication of Dreyfus and his reinstatement in the army.
Two of the major channels of antisemitism in the 1890s were the newspapers La Croix and La Libre Parole. The former, published by the Assumptionist order, proclaimed itself ‘the most anti-Jewish Catholic journal in France’; the latter, established in 1892 by Édouard Drumont on the huge profits generated by his bestselling ‘exposé’ La France juive (Jewish France), carried on its masthead the slogan ‘La France aux Français’ (France for the French). For Drumont and his followers, it was axiomatic that the Jews were not French – and could not become French. While antisemitism and extreme nationalism often worked in tandem, hostility to France’s Jewish community would significantly diminish during and after the First World War, when there was a premium on national unity and it became evident that Jews were playing as full a part as any other section of the population in defending the country.
If French politics for most of the nineteenth century had primarily revolved around attitudes to the Republic, a new element was soon to enter the mix. In 1885 there had been just seven socialist deputies; twenty years later disparate groups united to form the French Section of the Socialist International (SFIO), which in 1914 became the second-largest party in parliament with 102 seats. As their official name suggested, the socialists were not nationalists but internationalists: French and German workers, they believed, had interests in common, despite efforts by the ruling class and arms manufacturers to set them against each other. They were also mostly pacifists: the SFIO leader, Jean Jaurès, sought to prevent the outbreak of war in 1914 through organising a general strike in France and Germany that would block mobilisation. He was unsuccessful and on July 31st he was assassinated in Paris by a young nationalist fanatic.
If the 1920s was a period when the constitutional parties of the centre right and centre were the dominant forces in French politics, the following decade saw the emergence of a number of mostly small groups modelled on the uniformed, street-fighting militias characteristic of Italian fascism and German Nazism. In February 1934, a number of these came together to lay siege to parliament in Paris. In the ensuing violence at least seventeen people were killed, forcing the centrist government of prime minister Édouard Daladier to resign. The left claimed that the anti-parliamentary ‘leagues’ of the far right had attempted a coup, but there is no evidence of co-ordination or of a single, agreed purpose among the many small groups involved. It was the case, however, that the subsequent replacement of the centrist government by one leaning much more to the right was brought about by violence on the streets rather than through the ballot box.
But if the far right was noisy and troublesome, its support among the electorate was limited, as was to be demonstrated when the general election held in May 1936 resulted in a landslide victory for the parties of the left and centre, clearing the way for the reformist Popular Front coalition of Léon Blum’s socialists and Daladier’s centrist Radicals, supported by the communists. The far right had no path to power except through outside agency, which would eventually arrive in the shape of German invasion in spring 1940.
The government of Marshal Philippe Pétain, in power for four years on the sufferance of the German occupation authorities, could be characterised as authoritarian rather than openly fascist. Pétain believed a country should be run on the same principles as an army, those principles being hierarchy and obedience. His personal popularity was based on his reputation as a successful and humane First World War general, and even if it was boosted by a well-funded propaganda machine, it was by no means an entirely artificial phenomenon. It largely survived his inability to extract significant concessions from the Germans, but not the eventual collapse of the Axis armies.
The country now had another saviour, the Free French leader Charles de Gaulle, and the new soon eclipsed the old in popular esteem. In the three decades after 1945 the far right, deeply tarnished by its wartime collaboration with the Germans, but even more so by gradually unfolding awareness of the sheer scale of Nazism’s crimes, persisted only in a collection of squabbling micro-parties. Lacking any purchase on public opinion, they devoted themselves to fine-tuning their ideology (virulently anti-communist, white supremacist, antisemitic, sometimes pagan in the Nazi manner) or – in the hope that their day might come around again – recruiting and training small groups of ‘professional revolutionaries’ on the Leninist model.
In 1972 one of these micro-parties, Ordre nouveau (New Order), forged an alliance with miscellaneous nationalist elements to create an ‘electoral shop window’, the Front national. The project needed a more or less respectable figurehead. The person selected was Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former deputy for the populist anti-tax party of Pierre Poujade in the 1950s, who had later served as an army interrogator (and torturer) during the Algerian war of independence.
The invention and reinvention of the Front national
The idea of creating a broad electoral front of the nationalist right had been pioneered in Italy by the Movimento Sociale Italiano, the heirs of Mussolini, who had coalesced with the monarchists. But if the neo-fascists of Ordre nouveau thought they would use Le Pen as a front man while continuing to pull the strings in the background, they had misjudged their man. Throughout 1973 the rival factions – broadly speaking neo-fascists and ultra-nationalists – fought each other, then split and went to law over the right to the party name. Le Pen, representing the nationalists, won.
Success did not come instantly for FN. In the first presidential election Le Pen contested, in 1974, he won less than 1 per cent of the vote. In 1981 he was unable to secure sufficient signatures to participate. The breakthrough came in 1983, when President François Mitterrand, seeking to weaken the Gaullist centre right, introduced a one-round voting system for that year’s parliamentary election. This offered greater proportionality. The FN’s 10 per cent support won it thirty-five seats. In the presidential election of 1988, Le Pen scored 14 per cent.
Le Pen led the party he had jointly created for almost forty years and was active during the periods in office of five presidents, from Georges Pompidou to Nicolas Sarkozy. He was probably the most instantly recognisable political figure of his generation. He contested five presidential elections, though he never exceeded his score of 5.5 million votes in 2002. In other words, Le Pen senior was a contestant but never remotely a contender. He knew this to be the case and seemed reasonably content with the role he carved out for himself as a turbulent tribune of the plain people.
In normal electoral politics, a candidate who is associated with one wing of the left-right divide and characterised as ‘extreme’ will attempt to manoeuvre closer to the centre in the course of a campaign, according to the conventional wisdom that this is where the vital extra votes are to be found. Jean-Marie Le Pen never attempted to do this. He was, throughout his career, relentlessly rightwing, and on the right fringe of that right. Among his closest associates were figures whose political pedigree stretched back to the wartime milice (the paramilitary force which hunted the Resistance), the Waffen SS and the terrorist Organisation de l’ armée secrète (OAS). He never forgave Charles de Gaulle for having facilitated Algerian independence. He was fiercely anti-communist and anti-state. He idolised Ronald Reagan and admired Margaret Thatcher’s privatisations of public utilities, while accusing the centre right under Chirac of adopting social democratic policies in its efforts to appeal to centrist voters. He was constantly embroiled in media storms over his offensive remarks about the Holocaust: while he accepted that Jews had been murdered, he disputed the numbers and insisted that the gas chambers were merely ‘a detail’ of the Second World War. A close aide later characterised Le Pen’s politics as being entirely unsystematic but rather based on a grab bag of popular prejudices and vague notions about French history and ‘grandeur’.
Le Pen was a man who was intent on saying whatever came into his head and who was not interested in hearing advice about the damage he might be doing to his party’s electoral prospects. Even after ceding the leadership to his daughter, he continued to make statements she regarded as disastrous for the party’s image, while accusing her of moving FN to the left. Eventually, Marine arranged to have him expelled from the party he had co-founded.
The essential difference between Jean-Marie Le Pen’s FN and Marine Le Pen’s RN is that the latter thinks and acts as a party that believes it has a realistic chance of coming to power. Any other changes, of policy or presentation, derive from that perspective. Marine Le Pen has been quite ready to jettison policies that turn out to be unpopular with voters: the reintroduction of the death penalty, the repeal of the law allowing access to abortion, withdrawal from the euro – all of these once core policies of the party have been quietly dropped. These changes, together with the presence among Le Pen’s inner circle of a number of gay men, provoked the departure from the party of several longstanding figures closely associated with the most conservative wing of Catholicism.
Many of the new seats won by RN in the last few years have been in the north-eastern quadrant of France, including in areas affected by industrial decline where the socialists were once strong. Securing working class support has required the party not just to maintain a dense presence on the ground, but also to adopt positions – like the defence of welfare payments – that would scarcely have appealed to more traditional elements of FN, who combined an unwavering support for free-market policies with hardline stances on law and order and ultra-conservative attitudes on sexual morality. Analysts have noted that the RN of the north is a different one from that of the Mediterranean coast, the party’s other main area of strength, where its supporters are frequently middle class.
An RN victory next year will require it to convincingly detoxify (dédiaboliser) – that is, to bury much of the legacy of Jean-Marie Le Pen and appear to the voters as less extremist. The party was certainly helped in this in the 2022 election by the candidacy of Éric Zemmour of the rival far-right party Reconquête (Reconquest), whose discourse was even more inflammatory than Le Pen’s. Zemmour won 2.5 million votes in the first round, most of which came back to Le Pen in the second. Zemmour is currently showing in polling at about 4 per cent. If he, or his partner Sarah Knafo, well-connected in conservative circles in the US, eventually decide not to contest the 2027 election, this could boost Le Pen’s first-round score to close to 40 per cent.
Le Pen will also need to find an additional 5 million votes that she did not have in 2022. This she hopes to achieve by eating into the support of the traditional or centre right, something she is already on the way to achieving after the defection of high-profile right-wing Gaullists such as the mayor of Nice, Éric Ciotti. Attracting voters from the traditional right, whose preference is for supply-side economics, while retaining the newly-won support of swathes of the working class and less privileged, could be a difficult balancing act, requiring the RN to say one thing to one constituency and a different thing to the other. This is already evident in Marine Le Pen promising social spending, while party president Bardella is despatched to reassure business leaders that the party is serious, responsible and prudent.
The cause of Bardella had been very strongly supported by two powerful conservative media magnates, Vincent Bolloré and Pierre-Édouard Stérin, with the former controlling the company that published and promoted Bardella’s two successful books. Bolloré and Stérin are also both traditionalist Catholics, and would have seen Bardella as more likely to unite all strands of the right than Le Pen, whose appeal is weaker among upper-class Catholics. Exposing the contradictions implicit in RN’s attempts to appeal to differing constituencies may be the most important task of whoever faces Le Pen in the second round of voting next May.
The fraying of the cordon sanitaire
The French far right, in its various strands, has been many things over the 230 years of its existence as a political force: it has been anti-republican and anti-democratic; conspiratorial and putschist; antisemitic; virulently nationalist and xenophobic; monarchist; fascist; conservative and elitist; imperialist and colonialist; national-populist. It has aspired to be both the champion of ‘the natural leaders’ of society’ and of ‘the little people’. At different phases just one of these orientations may have been predominant, while at others more than one were able to coexist. It has been a resilient and protean political phenomenon, which though often down was never entirely out.
Though there has been much change there is also continuity: in the 1890s, the antisemitic newspaper La Libre Parole campaigned on the slogan ‘La France aux Français’. Marine Le Pen is now promising to make that slogan a reality by holding a referendum early next year to abolish the automatic right to citizenship of children born in France and introduce ‘national priority’ in access to housing, employment, public services and social assistance. Though it has jettisoned some of its most extreme stances, the party remains reflexively anti-EU, climate-sceptic and ‘understanding’ of Russia’s geopolitical interests, with Le Pen threatening to withdraw France from NATO’s integrated command and arguing that it should resume contacts with Moscow.
The policy of dédiabolisation has been described in some media as ‘moving RN to the political centre’. There is no evidence that that is the case. Indeed, one prominent party member, Louis Aliot, a former FN vice-president, has felt it necessary to stress the limits of the policy reorientation envisaged: ‘We need to be clear about dédiabolisation. It is solely to do with the suspicion that we are antisemitic. Not Islam, not immigration. In respect of these, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to be demonised.’ Indeed, while RN has attempted to sweep away its traditional antisemitism, or at least sweep it under the carpet, it has found in Islamophobia a more than adequate substitute.
The cordon sanitaire that has effectively kept far-right parties out of power in many European countries so far now seems seriously threatened, as coalitions between conservative and far-right parties become the more viable option. In Spain, for example, Vox’s anti-immigrant mania seems to have effectively colonised the minds of the Partido Popular. In Germany, collaborations with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland at the regional and communal levels no longer seem unlikely. In the European parliament, the far right has provided the European People’s Party with support when majorities have otherwise been unavailable. Politicians on the right-wing fringes of the traditional or centre right have justifiably been criticised for weakening on this vital policy.
But that is not the whole story. In France’s 2022 presidential election, many of those who voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round expressed their unwillingness to support Macron against Le Pen in the second, asking: ‘How does one choose between the cholera and the plague?’ If this reluctance to distinguish – whether through inability or wilful refusal – becomes a significant factor next year, then RN’s ‘normalisation’ will have been successful not through its actual movement to the centre, but through the radical left’s excommunication of every force to their own right. If this political carelessness prevails, it will not only be France that will pay the price but all of Europe.