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Northeastern populism expert Marianna Griffini says Marine Le Pen has looked to “blunt the edges” of the party to make it an electoral force.
LONDON — The far-right National Rally could be about to form the next government in France.
If it secures a majority in the National Assembly in Paris after the parliamentary run-off votes on Sunday, it will be the first time since World War II and Vichy France, which collaborated with Adolf Hitler and Germany, that the European country has been run by the far right.
Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration party National Rally secured one in three votes during the first round of the parliamentary elections on June 30, creating a scramble for rival parties to form a coalition to prevent National Rally and its center-right Republican Party allies from achieving a majority during the second round on July 7. National Rally secured the most votes in the first round but not enough to claim an overall victory.
The centrist movement, spearheaded by French President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, and a left-wing alliance called New Popular Front, are attempting to work together in hundreds of constituencies to stop National Rally’s Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s young and charismatic protege, from becoming France’s next prime minister.
Marianna Griffini, an assistant professor in international relations and anthropology at Northeastern University, said their success will depend “on the ability of these forces to compromise” and form an electoral “coalition” that can derail National Rally’s popularity, having doubled its support since the last parliamentary election in 2022, which produced a minority government.
France has a complicated political system, combining both presidential and parliamentary rule.
In 2022, Macron — who called the current snap Assembly election in a bid to halt National Rally’s momentum after the party performed well in June’s European Parliament elections — defeated Le Pen in the run-off for president to secure a second term. His time in office still has three years to run and he has vowed not to quit no matter the outcome of this weekend’s poll.
In the National Assembly elections, the process for deciding which party takes each of the 577 seats is a two-round process.
In constituencies where no candidate won outright in the first round, the top two candidates — as well as any candidate with more than 12.5% of the total number of registered voters within that seat — move to a second round, taking place Sunday.
The centrist parties and left-wing movement are currently involved in horse-trading in a bid to work out where, in the case of the 300 or so constituencies where it has become a three-way battle, one of their candidates should stand down to avoid splitting the vote to give them the best chance of defeating National Rally. The results of the negotiations were expected to be finalized by the end of Tuesday.
In the early years of National Rally — or National Front, as it was known between 1972 and 2018, before its rebrand — members included treasurer Pierre Bousquet, who had been part of a Waffen SS military unit under Nazi command during WWII, and others who served in the Vichy regime that ensured the deportation of one-quarter of France’s Jewish population, according to The Guardian.
It came to major prominence in 2002 when founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, made it into the final two in the presidential election. He was heavily defeated but the party would rebuild itself to become an electoral force to be reckoned with.
Griffini says Marine Le Pen, who took over as the party’s president in 2011 and would later eject her father following controversial comments about the Holocaust, has looked to “detoxify” the party and “blunt its corners.”
Choosing Bardella as her successor as president in 2022 has been seen as part of that softening and has been cited as a major reason for the party being able to widen its support, especially among younger voters. Bardella, 28, hails from a less affluent neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris. He was raised in a single-parent family and comes from mixed heritage, with Italian and Algerian background.
“He’s not from a privileged position in terms of family history,” Griffini says, “and he had to fight his way to the top of the political system.” She says his backstory could help National Rally as being seen to “represent the underdog.”
Under Le Pen’s leadership, she says, there has been an ambivalence towards the rights of the LGBT community rather than outright hostility and the party has taken a more open stance on the issue of abortion compared to some hard-right European counterparts.
But Griffini, a populism expert, says it is “debatable” about whether Le Pen has been successful in her efforts to expel elements of racism and Euroscepticism from her party.
The London-based professor points out that Nationally Rally politicians elected to the European Parliament form part of an umbrella group, the Identity and Democracy Party, that includes a host of Eurosceptic, populist and nationalist right-wing outfits, including Chega from Portugal and Lega from Italy.
Islamophobia also “comes through quite evidently” in pronouncements made by National Rally figures, Griffini says, highlighting Le Pen’s criticism of headscarves worn by some Muslim women in France.
Griffini says: “There is a battle against the veil. It has been at the forefront of National Rally and the National Front’s calls for homogeneity. They use it to attack those they considered not to be French.
“Marine Le Pen has used the veil as a tool to attack Islam and project herself and her party as moderate, as the promoter of women’s rights, as the promoter of Le Republique and the secular founding of the French state.”
And on immigration, Griffini feels Le Pen has “stood her ground” with her anti-migrant stance rather than opting to remove the sharper edges to her party policy.
The party has proposed to restrict social welfare to French citizens and abolish the automatic right to French citizenship for people who came to France as children. Griffini says National Rally can view even second- and third-generation migrants, including those who have French citizenship, as “being outsiders.”
On Sunday, French voters will have to decide whether what Griffini describes as the attempted “volte-face” undertaken by National Rally is a palatable option for government — or whether to back anyone but Le Pen and Bardella’s candidate in the decisive second round.