French election leaves far-right National Rally down but not out

For a party that came top of the first round of voting, third place can only be a disappointment. 

The National Rally (RN) took an early lead in snap parliamentary polls, as it had in EU elections three weeks earlier.

Then its opponents mustered their supporters to vote for anyone but the RN in the second-round runoff, denying the party a chance to dominate parliament in a result widely hailed as a triumph for France's so-called "Republican front".

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But it all depends how you look at it, says Félicien Faury, a sociologist and political scientist who specialises in the French far right. 

"On the one hand, the Republican front, the blocking vote, worked very effectively. On the other, the National Rally got more than 140 seats, which is truly historic for the party – it has never before reached that level," he points out.

The party now claims 143 members of the National Assembly, France's lower house, 126 belonging to the RN itself and 17 of them allies from a breakaway bloc of the conservative Republicans party.

That's compared to the 89 deputies the RN had in the outgoing parliament – which was already a record tally.

Some 37 of them, including party figurehead Marine Le Pen, were elected outright in the first round, more than any other movement achieved.

And while both the left and the centre owe their success to alliances – sometimes strained – between multiple parties, the RN is the single largest party in the French parliament.

Political professionals

That not only gives it more sway in parliamentary debates, it comes with material advantages – such as the public funding France allocates to political parties in proportion to the number of seats and votes they win.

After the RN's latest performance, the party calculates that this funding will rise from around €10 million a year to around €15 million.

That's not to mention the salaries and hiring budgets that each of its 126 members of the French parliament and 30 members of the European Parliament are entitled to.

Faury believes the extra resources will contribute to what he calls the "professionalisation" of the RN. Its deputies stand to gain concrete experience of legislating, while the special advisers, assistants, researchers and other staff they hire will constitute a new generation of trained political operatives. 

That's especially significant given that the RN blamed its failure to win a majority, in part, on a lack of qualified candidates.

Party leader Jordan Bardella referred to "casting mistakes" that led the RN to field candidates subsequently revealed to have made unmistakably racist, antisemitic or otherwise offensive remarks.

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More political experience will make RN members slicker, Faury predicts. While they won't renounce the discriminatory ideas that continue to underpin the movement's project, he says, they will at least learn how to dog whistle.

"Once we no longer have these candidates who allow themselves to be caught out by journalists, once we only have people who know how to couch the ideas of the far right in respectable terms, will we see the same effect?"

No longer off-limits?

The controversies that emerged during this campaign don't seem to have put many RN voters off.

The party got just under 9.4 million votes in the first round and around 8.7 million in the second – not much of a drop-off considering that dozens fewer candidates were standing in the runoff, having either been eliminated or elected outright.

"The RN, as it has managed to do for several years now, has broken through the glass ceiling with certain voters for whom it was previously off-limits," says Hugo Touzet, a sociologist who studies voting patterns.

For instance, early analysis suggests the party scored well among professionals earning more than €3,000 a month, he told RFI. "The RN is picking up a section of the electorate that used to vote for the traditional right."

It's the latest step towards a scenario the RN's opponents have long feared: that one day, the party will successfully convince the electorate that it's no longer a fringe movement but a respectable part of mainstream politics.

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Opposition energised

That day is still some way off, according to Faury.

He points out that the latest election repeated a pattern that's become familiar: the RN manages a strong performance in the first round, followed by a second-round result that "puts them back in their place and demonstrates that so-called normalisation is a process, one that remains far from complete".

That the RN's opponents were able to mobilise so many people against it, including some who might not otherwise have voted at all, is proof that the electorate sees through its claims to respectability, agrees Ulysse Rabaté, a political scientist and co-founder of Quidam, an association that seeks to engage young, working-class people in politics.

"There was a 'detoxification' that came from above and now a 'retoxification' that came from below," he says.

Lacklustre opposition and disillusionment with politics in general have aided the RN's rise, Rabaté argues – but by uniting the left and foregrounding the RN's racist roots, this election has gone some way towards countering both.

He's optimistic that the new current of resistance will continue to check the party as France heads towards a presidential election in 2027.

"What's interesting here is that ultimately the political landscape has shifted and people who didn't think politics really concerned them have decided, with the anti-racism argument, to get involved – and that won't be inconsequential in the future."

Winds of change?

What happens next also depends on other parties setting another agenda.

"The RN's success can't just be attributed to its own victories or failures, it's also a question of the broader climate," says Touzet.

He suggests that the political discourse of recent months – dominated by immigration – left the party "playing with a home advantage" of sorts.

The advantage is also geographic. Mapping the election results shows the RN further consolidated its hold on rural areas and the heartlands of the north and south-east, while its main opponents on the left drew their support from cities.

In the Mediterranean region in particular, the party is becoming the dominant force, according to Faury.

"The wind can change," he says, "but in certain areas it'll have to blow hard."