From the Political Fringe to the Halls of Power

After the surprise victory of the left-wing alliance Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP, New Popular Front) in the run-off for the National Assembly on 7 July 2024, President Emmanuel Macron refused to appoint a left-wing prime minister. Instead, on 5 September he decided to appoint a conservative, former EU Commissioner Michel Barnier. As the 2021 presidential candidate for the conservative Les Républicains (LR, The Republicans), he had himself advocated radical positions on immigration, which — much like in Germany — is one of the most important electoral issues in France.

With Barnier’s appointment, Macron is openly steering a course toward finding a tolerable solution to the problem of how to establish a liberal-conservative minority government. This is intended to deliver a solution to the lack of a parliamentary majority. None of the three largest political camps — the disparate left-wing coalition of the NFP, Macron’s economically liberal party, and the far right and its allies — were able to win the necessary number of seats.

Due to the current complexities involved in finding a working parliamentary majority, a Barnier government is only possible if it does not come up against the marked mistrust of the left-wingers and that of the Rassemblement National (RN, National Rally) at the same time. The aim then is to ensure that the RN tolerates the future cabinet without itself entering government. The liberal Parisian evening newspaper Le Monde even suggested that Michel Barnier’s appointment followed Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen holding direct negotiations over the phone, which both subsequently denied.

Moreover, the RN for its part has announced that in any case it will not bring down a Barnier cabinet. At the same time, it increasingly ratcheted up its demands over the first three weeks of September. The party leadership made a point of ruling out certain liberal politicians — such as erstwhile Macron ally and former Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti and Hauts-de-France regional council president Xavier Bertrand (LR) — from a cabinet it would accept, as both had made disparaging comments about the party. Otherwise the cabinet would risk collapse due to a no-confidence vote by the RN. Jordan Bardella said that the future government would be subject to the “democratic surveillance” of his own party.

The far-right party has never before enjoyed such concrete influence on the formation of a liberal democratic government. Yet the RN did exert decisive influence during the passing of new and harsher immigration legislation (the Loi Darmanin) in December 2023. The amendment only achieved a majority due to the support of the conservative LR and the RN, as Macron’s allies were unable to secure it on their own; the social-liberal wing of Macron’s party refused to vote.

The Beginnings of the Front National as a Far-Right Fringe Party

The history of the Front National (FN), which changed its name to the Rassemblement National in June 2018, can be roughly divided into four phases.

In its first decade, from 1972 to 1982, the Front National, founded by Marine Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen, was a fringe party with a national vote share that hovered at around 0.3 percent. The FN was initially a catch-all party for generations of activists that had formed in earlier periods, for example during the Vichy regime, the Algerian War, or the far-right student movements from the mid-1960s onwards. The aim was to keep these political tendencies together and avoid the loss of experienced political operators and organizational know-how.

The second phase began in 1982 with the party’s first electoral victories, initially at the local level. The Front National’s new general secretary, Jean-Pierre Stirbois (who died in a car accident in 1988), led the first successful election campaigns in the industrial town of Dreux west of Paris. This was followed by successes in rural and urban local elections, and finally at the national level beginning with the European elections in June 1984.

In this period, the FN primarily managed to attract right-wing voters who felt let down by their previous parties, abandoning the bourgeois, liberal, conservative, or post-Gaullist groups such as the Rassemblement pour la République (RPR, Rally for the Republic) and the Union pour la démocratie française (UDF, Union for French Democracy). This voter segment primarily comprised traditionally middle-class people — for example, small business owners and shopkeepers — who felt their position or even their very economic existence was threatened by France’s modernization and by the concentration of capital.

The purported ‘death of Marxism’ offered the FN the chance to henceforth be the only party to bring up social issues in politics, as nationalism became the sole alternative to the ruling economically liberal parties.

The FN of the time positioned itself primarily as an economically liberal party that defended private property — with a particular focus on small business owners — against unions that were “too strong” and “overly rigid labour law”. It defended Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the neoliberal turn they introduced around 1979–80 in the US and the UK.

A new era began in 1990: the often well-educated intellectuals in central positions in the party began to try to win over former left-wing voters. The driving force behind this was Bruno Mégret, the FN’s former “general officer” (délégué général) and head ideologue. Seeing him as a rival, Jean-Marie Le Pen fired him in 1998.

There were two factors behind this strategic shift. On the one hand, Mégret’s faction determined that there was no further room for the party to siphon off votes from the conservatives. The dominant conservative parties adopted symbolic policy messaging such as a hardline discourse around issues like “immigration” and “law and order” — in tones that in some respects strongly resembled those of the far right — in order to win back voters that had flocked to the FN. At the same time, upon returning to government in 1986, the conservatives had abolished the short-lived proportional voting system and reintroduced majority voting. For a party with 10 to 15 percent of the vote, it was left with the choice of either sufficiently “domesticating” itself such that establishment parties would concede a few promising seats to it for the decisive second round, or to vanish from parliament. It was unable to clear the hurdles of the majority voting system by itself, managing to win a few parliamentary seats at most — for example a single seat in the 1988 parliamentary elections.

On the other hand, the leading far-right strategists supposed that new spaces for their political “movement” were opened up by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as well as the implosion of the USSR in 1991. For the purported “death of Marxism” offered them the chance to henceforth be the only party to bring up social issues in politics, as nationalism became the sole alternative to the ruling economically liberal parties.

The Turn to Social Demagoguery

Between 1990 to 1995, the FN increasingly adopted social demagoguery and called for state interventions for the sake of the national economy. This shift away from an economic-liberal to a nationalist-Keynesian programme would not be completed by the party until 2011 onwards, under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, who is often considered to be “more socially sensitive”. Yet this change of course had already been introduced, driven by Bruno Mégret under her father Jean-Marie Le Pen.

This means that there has been a divergence in France since the mid-1990s between the economic discourse of the moderate right and that of the neo-fascist far right. For the dominant factions of the moderate right — from the precursor parties the RPR and the UDR, to the umbrella party the Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP, Union for a Popular Movement) founded in 2002, renamed Les Républicains in 2015 — all pursued a strongly economic-liberal programme. In contrast, the FN (and now the RN) repeatedly criticized the impacts of such programmes.

In parallel, the moderate right also went through a process of increasingly taking up the demands and symbols of the far right on issues such as immigration policy, thus attempting to absorb the energy of the RN. This trend is strongly associated with the name of Nicolas Sarkozy, who served as interior minister (save for a few months’ interruption) between 2002 and 2007, and as president between 2007 and 2012. In May 2007 for example, he established his own Ministry for Immigration and National Identity, and in July 2010 gave his now famous “Discours de Grenoble”, an inflammatory speech on the supposed links between immigration and criminality.

In response to the mass protests in the summer and autumn of 2010, Marine Le Pen abruptly changed course: as presidential candidate for the spring 2012 elections, she demanded the retirement age return to 60. Many conservatives subsequently loudly opposed her position, claiming that she was joining the Left, which was already demanding such a return.

This trend eventually resulted in the political and also organizational split of the conservatives in June 2024. They had come under pressure on two flanks, from the rising RN to their right and from the Macronists in the centre, and had begun to orient themselves to both the left and the right of the LR position.

On 11 June 2024, Eric Ciotti, the LR secretary and deputy for Nice, openly entered into an electoral alliance with the far-right RN for the snap parliamentary elections on 30 June. Elected party secretary in December 2022, Ciotti is from the ideologically radical wing of the party and shares many of the RN’s stances, particularly in terms of immigration policy. For example, Ciotti holds that in the event of a “War on Islam”, fundamental rights would be suspended, and a special criminal court would be established.

The manoeuvre, which took many of his party colleagues by surprise, decisively split LR. Following the June–July 2024 elections, only 16 LR deputies who entered into electoral alliances with the Rassemblement National were elected to the National Assembly. Meanwhile a further 47 deputies who did not enter into an alliance with the RN were elected.

An Elastic Social Programme

After the RN’s strong performance at the preceding European elections on 9 June 2024, the RN was predicted to win its first ever parliamentary elections and possibly even take government. Twenty-seven of twenty-nine polls published between the two rounds of the parliamentary election seemed to herald such a result. As a result of a spontaneous anti-fascist reflex among broad swathes of voters and a mutual agreement by left-wing and liberal parties, where each withdrew badly placed candidates so as to favour the other party’s candidate in a run-off against the RN and prevent the latter from winning the election and securing a majority, such a result did not ultimately transpire. In the end, of the districts where the RN was fielding candidates, it won 37 percent of the vote.

In the run-up to the election, the RN’s economic and social programme came under significant pressure, particularly on the part of employers’ groups. The new coalition partner, LR’s Eric Ciotti, regarded the RN’s former economic and social programme as too “left-wing” and as an aberration. Party secretary Jordan Bardella, elected successor to Marine Le Pen in November 2022, sought to calm the waters by paying a visit to the employers’ association MEDEF on 18 June 2024. Eric Ciotti, who accompanied him, was supposed to lessen the association of the RN’s positions with social demagoguery.

At the MEDEF, Bardella then acted in a somewhat conciliatory fashion. For their part, the employers’ associations remain split on the prospect of a possible RN government. Large businesses oriented to the world market, and those in the IT sector, are rather hostile to the party, while many mid-sized businesses were rather well-disposed toward it.

This holds particularly true for retirement pension policy.

After the French conservatives split definitively into a faction allied with the RN and another close to Macron, a part of the RN party leadership now believes that the time in which the party needed to develop alongside and in opposition to the moderate right, and so to find its own space, has now past.

Under former leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party had originally campaigned against lowering the retirement age. After it was lowered to 60 in 1982, Le Pen had continually called for a return to 65. The retirement age remained 60 until November 2010, when a “reform” under President Sarkozy raised it to 62. Emmanuel Macron succeeded in further raising it to 64 in April 2023 (which is to be brought in gradually, staggered by age bracket). Yet this retirement age guarantees only the right to retire while incurring penalties for the years in which pension contributions have not been made: currently this means 42 years of work, which in future will rise to 43. Before and after the most recent reforms, penalty-free retirement is only guaranteed from age 67.

In response to the mass protests in the summer and autumn of 2010, Marine Le Pen abruptly changed course: as presidential candidate for the spring 2012 elections, she demanded the retirement age return to 60. Many conservatives subsequently loudly opposed her position, claiming that she was joining the Left, which was already demanding such a return.

Yet in the following years Marine Le Pen modified this new course. Prior to the 2022 presidential elections, her policy programme included the right to retire from age 60 only for those wage earners who had begun work between the ages of 14 and 20. Some in the older generation of workers would be eligible, but only very few from the younger generations. In France, where there is no vocational education system and where all future employees pass through the universal education system, 80 percent of people graduate high school. But for those who do not meet the criterion of taking up work before 20, as of 2022 the RN programme will only guarantee the right to retire after 42 years of work.

During a television debate on the evening of 25 June 2024, RN secretary Bardella was confronted with a question regarding a situation in which a wage earner began work at 24 and continued to work without interruption. Jordan Bardella answered that such a person could retire at 66. That amounts to an even tougher position than that of the government, for the latter would “allow” such a person to receive a pension at 64, even though this would incur penalties for falling short of the threshold by two years.

Ideological Flexibility on the Path to Power

This means a significant change in the way the RN presented itself — until then it had taken care not to make it seem like there would be social deterioration if the party entered government. There are various reasons for this.

Doubtless Bardella wanted to avoid the risk of the far right appearing to make social promises shortly before the election that would turn out to be invalid two weeks later. The idea was to avoid a “reality shock” that could result from the massive discrepancies between announcements before and after entering government. This could have discredited the party in the eyes of its supporters, whose expectations were doubtless putting the party under a degree of pressure, as it would have been its first ever stint in government.

More fundamentally, we can observe how, since the preparations for the most recent parliamentary elections, the RN has been reinventing itself in the political and social landscape. After the French conservatives split definitively — that is, both organizationally and politically — into a faction allied with the RN and another close to Macron, a part of the RN party leadership now believes that the time in which the party needed to develop alongside and in opposition to the moderate right, and so to find its own space, has now past. Instead, the goal is now to replace the former conservative right and to become the only significant right-wing party that exists.

But this would also entail re-occupying socially conservative and economically liberal positions that until then had been abandoned in favour of a discourse marked by social demagoguery, which placed them outside of traditional conservatism. To a certain extent, it is no longer a matter of trying to drag the conservatives further to the right, as this process is now more or less complete, but rather to take their place.

Given the RN’s turns and reinventions, its future course is hard to predict.

This has also entailed a shift in the composition of the groups that finance the RN. The main role in the legal and illegal financing of the RN — its extra-legal aspects have led to recent legal action against the party — was until recently played by the so-called GUD Connection, the old boys’ club of the openly violent student union Groupe Union Défense (GUD), which was founded in 1969. It was banned by the French Interior Ministry on 26 July 2024 as a result of recent violence. Among the “old boys” were figures like Axel Loustau and Frédéric Chatillon, who made little effort to conceal the fact that they were outright fascists. But since spring 2024, another group of financiers has become increasingly significant, even dominant: the so-called Versailles Connection around the reactionary Catholic billionaire Pierre-Édouard Stérin, whom RN leader Jordan Bardella first met in 2023. This group has clearly defined reactionary ideological goals, but also a rather liberal economic agenda, and is pressuring the RN to become an identitarian-conservative party.

Yet social demagoguery can be brought back to the fore as required. For example, the RN will use its “parliamentary window” (niche parlementaire) — the annual time-frame that each opposition group is granted to put forward its own draft legislation — to gain media coverage by loudly demanding “the abolition of the 2023 retirement reform”. The details don’t matter; what matters is gaining the attention of the public.

Entering Government Is Risky

Given the RN’s turns and reinventions, its future course is hard to predict. Will a constellation emerge in which liberal and conservative parties rely on votes from the far right to determine domestic policy? Or will the RN prefer to bring down the government when it makes unpopular decisions, with the aim of taking full power after the 2027 presidential elections, and with the explicit goal of preparing for that while in opposition? Will it use a mix of support and threats to attempt to demonstrate its newfound “sense of responsibility regarding state power”, but also to profit from socio-economic discontent?

In this regard, the situation is open. To be relatively intertwined with government decisions​ doubtless also entails risks for the neo-fascist party, as then it might also lose its aura of embodying great change.

Translated by Marty Hiatt and Rowan Coupland for Gegensatz Translation Collective.