Tian Xiaohui
People attend a rally to celebrate the incumbent French President Macron in Paris, France.
The Rassemblement National (RN) is a veteran far-right party with an important influence in French and even European politics. In the two rounds of French presidential election in April 2022, the RN won a record high with 23.15% and 41.45% of the vote respectively. In June of the same year, the RN gained groundbreaking 89 seats in the French National Assembly election, constituting the “two poles of opposition” together with the coalition of left-wing parties, and again triggering the “political earthquake” in French politics. As a result, Emmanuel Macron became the minority president of the parliament in his second term, and may face a complicated political situation that is “difficult to govern”.
As one of the European populist parties in collective rise against the background of anti-globalization wave, the RN has its own particularities. First, it was founded relatively early. The Front National, predecessor of the RN, founded in 1972, has existed for half a century. Compared with the Lega of Italy, the Alternative für Deutschland and the UK Independence Party, the RN is obviously a more “veteran” party. Second, it has frequently caused “political earthquakes”. The RN came to the fore all of a sudden in both presidential elections in 2002 and 2017. And it also became the French party with most of the seats successively in the 2014 and 2019 European Parliament elections.
Since 2011, Marine Le Pen has embarked on a “normalizing” transformation of the RN with the policy of “dédiabolisation”, aiming at erasing the negative image of fascism and racism of the Front National under Jean-Marie Le Pen. Since the European debt crisis in 2009, Europe’s economic recovery has been sluggish, and the combination of multiple ills in France, such as issues of economic development, social welfare and immigration, have provided a favorable external environment for the RN’s policy transformation. In this context, Marine Le Pen held high the banner of anti-European integration and anti-Muslim xenophobia. With the help of multiple crises at home and abroad, the RN achieved its first policy transformation and stood out in the 2014 European Parliament election and the 2017 French presidential election.
Since its official name change in 2018, the RN has achieved its goal of re-transformation through a series of new policies, including weakening its anti-establishment propositions, focusing on diversity issues, and strengthening party organization.
First, in terms of core propositions, RN has gradually weakened its antiestablishment propositions. Anti-EU and anti-immigration are the two major anti-establishment propositions that the RN had always embraced. But after losing the 2017 presidential election, the RN began to moderate its Eurosceptic stance. In the 2019 European Parliament election, the RN no longer “railed” against the euro. Instead, it proposed “reforming the euro within the EU” and even started talking about Europe’s shared history and cultural values. Marine Le Pen also made it clear that she did not want France to leave the euro zone. After Marine Le Pen was re-elected as party president in 2021, she continued to emphasize that the RN had abandoned the “radical” line. At the same time, the RN’s anti-immigrant stance began to shift from uncompromising opposition to rational intervention. During the 2022 presidential campaign, Marine Le Pen argued for a referendum on immigration in France, but said she would also accept the result of a referendum in which “the French welcome immigrants”.
Second, in terms of party topics, the RN began to move closer to the mainstream and hot issues of left parties, such as environmentalism, ecologism and gender issues. Marine Le Pen is opposed to regarding the EU’s environmental policies as the standard, insisting on that France’s environmental policy should be put first, criticizing the “hypocrisy” of the EU’s environmental policies, and claiming that the RN upholds “true ecologism”. Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen appeals to female voters through gender topics, closely linking feminism with xenophobia. The RN using the pretext of feminism to oppose the wearing of veils by Muslim women, which in fact serves the real purpose of anti-Islam and anti-Muslim immigration. On hot-spot issues like domestic security and COVID-19 pandemic, the RN continued to fiercely criticize the Macron administration’s policies as an opposition party. The RN advocates improving laws and regulations, increasing the number of police and gendarmerie, and strengthening law enforcement jurisdictions of the police force. The RN has published a book titledThe Coronavirus Black Book — From Fiasco to Abyss, criticizing the “incompetence and inefficiency” of the Macron administration’s national governance and stressing the importance of safeguarding “sovereignty” and “national borders” during COVID prevention and control. While bashing the policies of the Macron administration, the RN has mixed its racist and xenophobic stance with its criticism, showing the fundamental nature of a farright populist party.
France’s newly elected far-right MPs and their leader Le Pen arrive at the National Assembly.
Third, in terms of party organization, the RN values strengthening organizational leadership, network construction and party-to-party cooperation. While retaining the basic organizational structure of the Front National under Jean-Marie Le Pen, the RN continues to strengthen the absolute authority and leadership position of the party president. The RN sets store by the construction of organizational discipline, in particular to eliminate the “Jean-Marie Le Pen” style of loose mouth, and prohibit members from publishing discriminatory speech against minorities and inciting hatred. Marine Le Pen also attaches great importance to the network building of party organizations, and social media has become an important organizational channel for the RN to express political views and gain support from young voters. At the same time, just as the word “Rassemblement” (rally) implies collection and alliance, the RN actively promotes party-to-party cooperation and seeks for the interaction and coalition among far-right populist parties in Europe, so as to expand its political influence in Europe. In October 2018, Marine Le Pen met Matteo Salvini, president of Italy’s Lega, the first farright populist party to come to power in Europe. In July 2021, Marine Le Pen and 15 European political parties, including Fidesz of Hungary, issued a “joint statement”. After her defeat in the 2022 presidential election, Marine Le Pen held talks with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to discuss common development and solutions in context of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The strengthening of internal organization and the expansion of external coalition of the RN reflects that the populist forces in Europe have begun to move from going it alone to uniting in solidarity.
The RN’s re-transformation is a clever blending of “attention to multiple topics” and extremist positions. It is adept at grasping the chronic problems of French society, claiming to be “the people” and winning “protest votes” by opposing the ruling party. The re-transformation of the RN has brought about complicated impact on French party politics and political ecology.
First, the re-transformation of the RN has further diluted the party’s extremist tone and blurred the traditional left and right divide of the political spectrum. Racist and xenophobic policies are the National Front’s distinctive far-right label. After Marine Le Pen took office as the party leader, she began to adopt a “two-step” transformation strategy, which enabled the RN to gradually “normalize” from a small party that was widely criticized as extreme and marginalized, and continuously enhanced its political influence through its “highlight moments” in the general elections. In the process of its re-transformation, the RN blurred its position in the French political spectrum by weakening anti-establishment propositions, incorporating a wide range of left-wing topics, strengthening party organization construction and party alliance strategies. To a certain extent, the retransformation of the RN has broken the “stereotype” of a far-right party.
Second, the re-transformation of the RN has further intensified the polarization of French politics and changed the traditional political pattern of France to a certain extent. In the 2022 French presidential election, the RN was “glorious in defeat”. Since then, in the National Assembly elections, the RN has continued to “rise up”, constituting a force contending with the mainstream parties. At the same time, far-left parties represented by La France insoumise (LFI), together with center-left parties such as Parti socialiste (PS), Parti communiste fran?ais (PCF) and Europe-Ecologie-les-Verts (EELV), formed the “coalition of left parties”, which became the largest opposition party in the National Assembly, constituting the “two poles” together with the RN. This reflects the tendency of radicalization and extremism in French politics, and has a great impact on the mainstream parties in France. Some scholars believe that a “Macron-Le Pen” political divide has been gradually formed in France. The future confrontation of European politics is likely to appear between the far-left and the far-right populism.
Third, the re-transformation of the RN has led to the split and reorganization of the far-right forces in France, which intensified the fragmentation and right-leaning trend of French political parties. The Reconquête, another far-right party in the 2022 French presidential election, has become the successor to the extremism and racism of the Front National with its radical anti-immigration and anti-Muslim slogans. The rise of Reconquête filled the “vacuum” caused by the re-transformation of the RN, brought new variables to the French political situation, and objectively strengthened the far-right forces in France. It also reflected the increasingly obvious farright tendency of French society and public opinion, and intensified the fragmentation of small parties in addition to the traditional center-left and center-right parties.
Paris saw local protests as demonstrators took to the streets against the two presidential candidates.
The re-transformation of the RN and its strength in the French domestic and European elections profoundly reflect the desire for change in the French society and the continuing crisis facing mainstream elite politics in France. The breakthrough of the RN in the elections has eroded and threatened the political status of the traditional mainstream parties in France. However, the RN itself is not monolithic and is “adrift” on many issues. In August 2022, the RN unexpectedly showed “cooperation” with the Macron administration by abstaining in adopting the Bill on Emergency Measures to Protect Purchasing Power. When it comes to diplomatic options for the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Marine Le Pen opposes sanctions against Russia and advocates proper handling of relations with Russia under the new European security framework, which again shows a departure from the official position of the Macron administration and even the EU. It can be seen that the populist policy positions of the RN are more a means of political game than a consistent political idea. Once a populist party changes from a protest movement to a part of the existing political system, participates in the task of national governance in the mainstream political system, it will change and adjust in many aspects, such as ideology and governance capacity.
