Soon, the French far Right will come to power for the first time since the end of the Second World War. This is the thesis stated bluntly by Victor Mallet, a journalist with the Financial Times and Reuters, at the beginning of his new book. Given current polls and recent election results, we have to take seriously the prospect of a victory for the Rassemblement National (RN), the successor to the Front National (FN) created by Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972. The French could indeed elect Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella as president in the spring of 2027. What was long dismissed as unlikely by pollsters and political scientists has now become a strong possibility.

Mallet’s book offers useful insights into the social and political transformations that have enabled a party long marginalised and ostracised by the mainstream to now occupy a central place in French politics: the yellow-vest revolt during Emmanuel Macron’s first five-year term, the legitimising knock-on effects of the Trump presidency and the process of ‘de-demonisation’ initiated by Marine Le Pen when she succeeded her father as party leader in 2011, followed by the ‘parricide’ in 2015 when she expelled him from the FN. Mallet shows, with the support of valuable field interviews, that the FN–RN’s roots are deep and widespread across a variety of electoral strongholds in the south (the FN’s traditional bastion), but also in the north (the historic heartland of French socialism).

Like Trump and Farage, the leaders of the French far right have understood that politics in the twenty-first century is more about nationalists versus globalists, the people against the elite or us against them, than it is about left versus right. 

The old Left–Right divide still exists in France, of course, but its former significance has greatly declined. The parties that embody this ideological opposition are now in crisis or moribund.

Emmanuel Macron – surprisingly little mentioned by Mallet – has been one of the main architects of the RN’s rise. First, he dynamited traditional distinctions by declaring himself president ‘of both the Right and the Left’, and rallying around him elected officials and voters from both sides of the political spectrum. The synthesis did not live up to expectations: Macron has been a neoliberal president in economic terms and a conservative one in cultural and social matters. Second, it is no accident that the RN has become the main French party on Macron’s watch. When he entered the Elysée Palace in 2017, the FN had eight deputies elected to the National Assembly. In 2024, with 125 deputies, the RN became the largest parliamentary group. Both Macron’s uncompromising policy towards migrants (borrowing from the RN’s doctrine of ‘national priority’, which discriminates against foreigners legally residing in France) and the Islamophobic rhetoric of several Macronist ministers have helped to legitimise the ideas of the RN.

The yellow-vest movement (November 2018–June 2020) encapsulated the main tensions that made the RN’s breakthrough possible. The revolt began in France’s peri-urban areas: it was anti-urban, anti-elite, anti-parliamentary and anti-globalisation. White working-class France rejected Macronism, which it considered arrogant and insensitive to the plight of the ‘little people’. The Left clung to the illusion that it could win back the small towns on the outskirts of regional capitals that used to vote for it. But over the past ten years, it has lost this tranche of the working-class electorate, which now votes for the RN or abstains. A large number of the yellow-­vest protesters voted for the RN in the 2019 European elections.

Mallet’s book clearly illustrates the rift that now exists between, on the one hand, a political orthodoxy made up of Macron’s government and traditional right (Les Républicains) and left groupings and, on the other, a population that feels abandoned and despised. It accurately identifies the sources of popular anger: immigration, the state of public services, an environmental policy deemed ‘punitive’ (the starting point for the yellow-vest movement) and a series of cultural wars (the Macronist government has invested much time and energy in attacking the so-called ‘wokisme’ or ‘islamo-gauchisme’ of left-wing intellectuals). Similar grievances, real and imagined, underpinned Brexit in the United Kingdom and have made Nigel Farage one of the country’s leading political figures.

Over the years, the RN’s appeal has grown nationwide, gaining support among women, young people, the elderly and the upper classes to become multi-class and multi-generational. This trend reached its peak in June 2024, when President Macron dissolved the National Assembly and called for early parliamentary elections. His surprise move backfired and further increased support for the far-right party instead of delivering the urgent ‘clarification’ he claimed to be seeking.

The RN vote is now ‘uninhibited’, as Mallet puts it. Other right-wing parties have legitimised parts of the RN’s discourse and policy, while a disunited Left, cut off from the working classes, believes that chanting anti-fascist slogans will push back the RN. Meanwhile, the strategy of ‘de-demonisation’, undertaken by Marine Le Pen against her father’s advice, seems to have succeeded. She presents her party’s name change in 2018 as a ‘cultural revolution’; its leader­ship keeps its distance from the FN founder’s racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia. Mallet notes that Marine Le Pen, who supports keeping abortion legal and funded in France, has developed a discourse defending women, gays and Jews, but that she has also used these causes to stigmatise Islam as supposedly ‘phallocratic, homophobic and anti-Semitic’. Furthermore, the RN has belatedly rallied behind the Republic and laïcité, two liberal values. Its critics claim that it is distorting these key concepts of French politics in a nativist and xenophobic direction.

According to a recent poll, the RN has a better image than all the other parties: 48 per cent of respondents to Fractures Françaises 2025 believe that the RN can ‘take unpopular measures’ and that it is ‘capable of governing the country’, 38 per cent believe that ‘the society advocated by the RN is broadly in line with my own’ and 42 per cent believe that it is ‘close to my concerns’. The RN is 17 points ahead of Macron’s Renaissance party in terms of competence. The RN remains a party that is ‘dangerous for democracy’ for 49 per cent of those surveyed, but 64 per cent think the same of La France Insoumise (LFI, radical left); 50 per cent believe that the RN ‘incites violence’, but 68 per cent think the same of LFI. The ‘normalisation’ of the RN appears to be almost complete.

During an interview with Jordan Bardella, the thirty-year-old president of RN, Mallet asked him what an RN government would accomplish during its first year in power. According to Bardella, the RN would organise a referendum on immigration, end birthright citizenship for French nationality and introduce ‘national priority’ after rewriting the constitution to reserve access to social security for French citizens. These would be profound political upheavals, in line with all far-right programmes over the past fifty years.

Marine Le Pen, in her capacity as a Member of the European Parliament, has been found guilty of misappropriating public funds. If this ruling (delivered on 31 March 2025) is upheld on appeal, she will not be able to stand as a candidate in the presidential elections in 2027 and will have to let Jordan Bardella run for office. An ‘anti-fascist’ reflex could once again block his path to power at the last minute. The RN’s victory, though plausible, is not assured.

Whatever the outcome, Marine Le Pen and the RN will have achieved a political feat – unique in Europe – by normalising an unreconstructed far-right party that has never officially renounced its post-fascist past. In 1972, Jean-Marie Le Pen was chosen as FN leader because he was ‘moderate’. In that party he sat alongside neo-fascists from the short-lived but influential movement Ordre Nouveau (1969–73), former terrorists from the Algerian OAS, former Vichy regime officials and veterans of the Waffen-SS.