"Rassemblement National" [National Rally]
Front National - FN
Marine Le Pen, long-time leader of France’s far-right National Rally and presidential hopeful, went on trial in Paris on 30 Sepember 2024, accused of misusing European parliamentary funds. More than 20 other senior figures in the party are also facing the same charges. They are accused of hiring assistants who worked on party affairs rather than for the European parliament which paid them. Investigating judges concluded that Le Pen, as party leader, orchestrated the allocation of parliamentary assistance budgets and instructed MEPs to hire individuals holding party positions. These individuals were presented as EU parliamentary assistants, but in reality, were allegedly working for the National Rally in various capacities.
If found guilty, Le Pen could face fines and imprisonment – and potentially be declared ineligible to run for office for up to 10 years, hitting her presidential ambitions. Some observers expect the trial could prevent National Rally lawmakers, including Le Pen herself, from fully playing their opposition role in Parliament as they would be busy focusing on the party's defense.
Since stepping down as party leader three years ago, Le Pen has sought to position herself as a mainstream candidate capable of appealing to a broader electorate. Her efforts have paid off, with the party making significant gains in recent elections at both the European and national levels. But a guilty verdict could seriously undermine her bid to take the Elysee.
Marine Le Pen was the leading figure of the National Rally (RN) party and de facto frontrunner for the 2027 presidential election. In 2024 a slick political rebrand, overseen by Le Pen and her 28-year-old party president Jordan Bardella, allowed the RN to shed its racist reputation as the former National Front, and storm to victory in in 09 June 2024 European Parliament vote. The RN's strong showing, which forced Macron into calling a snap legislative election that could finally hand the far right real power in France, was partly due to the formidable political tag team that Bardella and Le Pen have formed, experts said. They have fused youthful enthusiasm with battle-hardened experience to devastating electoral effect.
"They're very complementary," said Philippe Marliere, a French politics professor at University College London. The sharp-suited Bardella, son of an Italian immigrant mother who grew up in the rough outskirts of Paris, has polished the RN's reputation, Marliere said. Bardella also broadened its appeal by attracting younger, blue-collar voters hit by inflation and job insecurity to a party once known for an older, middle-class and arch-conservative clientele, he added.
One problem with the National Rally is not just its policies, especially concerning migration, but also the fact that its members had never been in power before. They have few people who can become ministers overnight, and that is probably why many French citizens said ‘we don’t want to try this party’ because they seem to not have enough experience to run the country”.
Far-right, anti-immigrant, anti-globalization leader Marine Le Pen and her main opposition National Rally party have long been durable fixtures on France's political landscape. Scoring strongly in elections, but never strong enough. But by 2021, the French were seeing a kinder, gentler iteration of Le Pen — to the point the country's hardline interior minister Gerald Darmanin scoffingly called her "soft" on radical Islam.
Dogged by accusations of proximity to the Kremlin, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party had hoped to clear its name by setting up a parliamentary inquiry to investigate foreign interference in French politics. But the report on the committee’s findings showed the move backfired spectacularly, finding instead that Le Pen’s policy stances sometimes echoed the “official language of Putin’s regime”.
The vote came just days after Le Pen was grilled by members of the investigation, swearing under oath that she had no ties to the Kremlin while also reiterating her support for Moscow’s takeover of Crimea – which she referred to as a “reattachment”. That support was “visibly appreciated in Moscow”, wrote the report’s rapporteur Constance Le Grip, noting that the Russian press had given ample coverage to the far-right leader’s May 24 interview, “echoing with great satisfaction the assertion, in their view reaffirmed by Marine Le Pen, that Crimea is and always has been Russian”.
Twice a runner-up in France’s most recent presidential elections, Le Pen has in the past spoken admiringly of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his nationalist rhetoric. Prior to last year’s invasion – and despite Russian incursions into Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine’s Donbas – she laughed off suggestions that he posed a threat to Europe.
In her 218-page report, Le Grip, a member of President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling Renaissance party, pointed to a “long-standing” link between Russia and the far-right party co-founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, then known as the National Front. The report further noted that the “strategy of political and ideological rapprochement” with Moscow had “accelerated” since Le Pen's daughter Marine became leader of the party in 2011. The report detailed frequent contacts between party representatives and Russian officials, culminating in the warm welcome Le Pen received at the Kremlin ahead of France’s 2017 presidential election, complete with a photo op with Putin.
Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally, or RN) made historic gains in the 19 June 2022 French parliamentary election second round, on track to win 90 seats according to projections by Ipsos – a score way beyond the record gains polls predicted. Emmanuel Macron’s centrist bloc, meanwhile, underperformed polling expectations and fell well short of a majority – leaving a deal with conservative Les Républicains (LR) as his best hope for governing unencumbered.
Nobody expected Le Pen’s party to win anything like 90 seats. After a presidential campaign all about the distracting focus on the Ukraine war, Macron’s desire to drift to re-election and Le Pen’s submarine-like rise, it looked like the parliamentary election campaign was all about Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Le Pen was a muted presence. She even went on holiday after losing the présidentielles second round to Macron.
Polls and analysts expected RN to make unprecedented National Assembly gains after their better than expected performance in the législatives first round, albeit nothing like the gains they made. The last surveys by Ipsos forecast RN would get 20 to 50 seats – a major advance on the eight seats they got at the previous polls in 2017, easily crossing the 15 seat barrier to acquire their own official parliamentary group, affording them a major funding boost and giving them significant powers of the pulpit.
Enthusiasm for political engagement in any form is subdued by historical standards: The overall turnout looks woeful – projected to be just over 53 percent, a small improvement on the record abstention rate in 2017. Such poor turnout underlines the extent of the anti-system sentiment in France, and as such is linked to RN’s strong performance, said Andrew Smith, a professor of French politics at the University of Chichester: “Abstention from the ballot box is a form of protest, a marker of disillusionment, and in much the same way RN’s performance was driven by a desire to protest as much as it was driven by support for their policies.”
An April 2021 Elabe survey published by BFMTV found nearly half of those polled believe Le Pen will win the next elections. Other polls suggest she could win between 47-48 percent of the vote — well ahead of Le Pen's nearly 34 percent score in the 2017 runoff against centrist President Emmanuel Macron. "The more Marine Le Pen has a soft image, the more she takes on themes of openness and modernity, there's a likelihood voters will be attracted to her in the short term," said Christele Lagier, a far-right expert from the University of Avignon in southern France. "It's also been years since she's been in politics, so she's become a familiar, less threatening face."
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen proposed her National Front party be renamed the "Rassemblement National" [National Rally] on 11 March 2018, in a bid to shed a brand associated by many voters with racism and anti-Semitism and facilitate alliances with other parties. Speaking at a party congress meant to help her reassert her authority following her defeat to President Emmanuel Macron in May 2017, Le Pen said the party’s priority should be to gain power, which could only be achieved through a coalition with allies. “Our goal is clear: power,” Le Pen told party cardholders gathered in the northern city of Lille, who cheered her speech denouncing immigration, globalisation and a federal Europe. “We were originally a protest party,” she said. “There should be no doubt now that we can be a ruling party.”
In a daring, bold, and defiant move Steve Bannon - until very recently the adviser Donald Trump, told the gathering of likeminded French racists: "Let them call you racist. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honour. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker."
The Front National was founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former paratrooper who combined several elements of historical extreme-right politics in France, in particular antisemitism. In many ways, his goal was more to challenge the establishment than to get a seat in the Élysee Palace, home of the French president. His fondness for hate speech made the FN a pariah party in the 70s and the 80s.
The party remains squarely populist and its stock-in-trade is still fear of “the other”, especially Muslims and Islam. Marine Le Pen and the FN are working hard to conflate immigration and terrorism, globalization and unemployment. She portrays herself and the party as fighting for French sovereignty against an occupying EU. She has said that she would ditch the euro, restore border controls, and proposes a sort of “Frexit”. She would restrict immigration and elevate French cultural identity over multiculturalism. (Her ability to follow through with these policies were she elected and their actual consequences are separate questions.)
Marine Le Pen, an excellent TV performer, unquestionably improved the image of the Front National and modernised the party. Le Pen rejects the label extreme right for her party and threatened to sue media organisations who describe her party as such, though she has not yet done so. She is vehemently anti-EU and has gained many working class voters with her insistence that Brussels now runs France. The FN has frequently changed its economic leanings. Under Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, in the 1980s, the party was particularly vocal in its criticism of trade unions and more friendly to big business. Today it claims to fight for the little man against speculators and the EU.
Independent centrist Emmanuel Macron became France’s youngest ever president after earning a decisive win the country’s run-off vote on Sunday 07 May 2017. The win marks a climax for Macron’s meteoric rise from relative obscurity, but the tough task of building a governing majority for his newcomer En Marche! movement was yet to come. The 39-year-old political neophyte, who had never been elected to any office before winning his country’s top job, beat anti-immigration Europhobe Marine Le Pen, with 65.8 percent of the vote to Le Pen’s 34.2 percent, according to estimates released after final polls closed at 8pm Paris time.
Le Pen was never expected to win this race, but polling that saw her inching above 40 percent in voter intentions had spurred anxiety in some quarters. Le Pen’s niece, the ultra-conservative parliamentarian Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, had told the French daily L’Opinion as recently as Thursday 04 May 2017 that a 40 percent score would be “a huge victory” for the National Front.
Populist spitfire Le Pen’s lower than expected score may well be the upshot of a lacklustre end to her nevertheless record run. Her televised debate performance on May 3 was roundly panned by pundits and the last polls before a media blackout on Friday at midnight already appeared to reflect voters’ poor assessment of that TV battle. Confusion over Le Pen’s plans for the euro currency after her post-first-round alliance with Dupont-Aignan may also have cost her support in the dying days of the campaign.
One savvy salvo in Le Pen’s run-off bid -- a stealth incursion onto Macron’s turf, his native Amiens, to visit striking workers at a Whirlpool plant slated for closure -- appeared to backfire when the centrist managed to turn Le Pen’s move to his advantage; Macron waded into a lion’s den to discuss the workers’ plight with them at length on the factory’s parking lot when Le Pen had done little more than pose for selfies with picketing employees.
For French baby boomers, the FN is synonymous with the hate speech of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Generation X, which came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, knew him as well, including his repeated references to the Nazis’ use of gas chambers during the Holocaust as a “detail of history”. For the majority of these two generations, the FN was, is and will remain an extreme-right party.
Older white voters have long made up the core of the party’s support, but its leader, Marine Le Pen, had taken to repeating that the FN is the party of choice for twentysomethings. French twentysomethings don’t have any recollection of the party’s earlier incarnation. They were between 12 and 18-years-old in 2011, when Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie, became its leader. For many young people, the FN is a “normal” part of the French political scene, albeit a polarizing one. Some of the FN’s leaders are also reasonably young, as is Marine Le Pen – born in 1968. She’s also a woman, relatively rare in the French political landscape.
In 2016, approximately 25% of French youth were jobless, a rate that was 15 points higher than the national rate that year, 9.9%. Even when they have a job, it’s typically a short-term contract known as a CDD. They’ve also grown up in a France dogged by limited growth and deindustrialisation.
Some American commentators responded to acts of anti-Semitic violence in France by charging that the country as a whole is anti-Semitic. They saw a continuity among the Dreyfus trials of the 1890s, in which a French Jewish military officer was wrongly convicted of espionage due to anti-Semitic sentiments in the government and the army, the Vichy regime of 1942-44, which collaborated with the Nazis and sent French Jews to their deaths in concentration camps, and the anti-Semitic violence that increased after 2000.
"Angel markers," as abortionists used to be called, are no longer threatened with the death penalty, and few remember the name of Marie-Louise Giraud, who was condemned to death as an abortionist and guillotined in 1943. Catholics and right wing political groups remain opposed to abortion. The most vocal opposition comes from the Front National, the extreme right wing anti-immigration party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, which had won nearly 10% of the French electorate. The party has attempted, without success, to limit the funding of abortion by the Securite Sociale.
In the area of promoting greater social integration between Muslim communities and European societies at large, European governments are being simultaneously driven to act in these areas and constrained in the sorts of steps that the can take by the growing public hostility toward Islam and Muslim immigration across European public opinion. The support in the polls for far-right anti-immigrant parties like Jean-Marie Le Pen’s French Front Nationale, Belgium’s Vlaams Blok, the United Kingdom’s British National Party, as well as the strengthening of anti-immigrant sentiment in European mainstream political parties are all a reflection of growing fear of immigrant communities.
Unlike in America, where attacks on “political correctness” and multiculturalism often seem to fit into a broader conservative populist rhetoric against “liberal elites,” who are accused of fomenting “the welfare state,” cultural decline, and unpopular affirmative action programs, none of these issues has much resonance in mainstream French politics, and the one political party which has made a major issue of protecting a French “way of life” — Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front — has seen the threat to French culture as emanating mainly from immigration, and not from any vision of countercultural elites in academia or the media preying upon traditional values.
Marine Le Pen's father, French fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the neo-fascist, anti-immigrant National Front party, deemed the Holocaust "a footnote of history". Le Pen has been convicted of anti-Semitic crimes by French courts. On February 8, 2008, a Paris court sentenced National Front President Jean-Marie Le Pen to a three-month suspended prison term and a $15,000 (€10,000) fine for misrepresenting Nazi war crimes in a 2005 interview for the extreme right weekly Rivarol. Judges denounced Le Pen's "deliberate falsification of history [that] positively depicted the Gestapo as the French population's protective authority, glossing over the crimes it committed." Le Pen and two Rivarol employees were also required to pay $1,500 (€1,000) in fines to each of the suits' civil parties—the Movement against Racism and for Friendship, the League of Human Rights, and the National Federation for Deportees and Resistance Fighters. Le Pen has been fined more than $270,000 (€180,000) for similar comments dating as far back as 1987.
It is difficult for parties outside the major coalitions to make significant electoral inroads. Despite these difficulties, the far-right National Front (Front National—FN) has periodically had sizable successes in elections since 1983. In the mid-1980s, because the incentives of France’s two-ballot electoral system favor inter-party alliances, the mainstream center-right parties flirted with a strategic alliance with the FN, but finally rejected it. Instead, the moderate right co-opted the FN’s positions by taking a harder line on immigration and law and order.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, a candidate for the French presidency, campaigned on a racist platform aimed at denying French citizenship to people of African descent, including those born in France, and expelling them from France. In 1988 Le Pen received about 14.7 percent of the vote in the primary, winning 20 percent of the vote in the working-class suburbs of Paris and more than 25 percent of the vote in Marseilles, Nice, and other cities with large immigrant populations. Le Pen's success forced other candidates to adopt many of his racist campaign themes.
2002
As expected, in the second round of the presidential election on May 5th, 2002, Jacques Chirac comfortably defeated Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the extremist, right-wing National Front. Chirac won by the largest margin (82% to 19%) ever recorded in the second round of a French presidential election; at the same time, abstention reached a record level of 20%. Jean-Marie Le Pen shocked France with his strong performance, a secondplace finish in the first round of voting. He took 17 percent of the vote, handing a humiliating defeat to Lionel Jospin, the Socialist prime minister, whose party threw its support behind the incumbent Chirac.
For some observers the strong showing of Jean-Marie Le Pen (17.85%) in the 2002 presidential elections was seen as evidence that the French population retains strong anti-Semitic sentiments. Most analysts believed that Le Pen’s strong showing was due to his attacks on immigrants and crime, and not to his anti-Semitic views. The ensuing legislative elections proved to be a victory for the center-right. The extreme-right National Front, despite the infamous second-place finish of its leader Le Pen in the April/May 2002 presidential election, won no seats. Abstention at 39% set a new record.
The support for his views is the most recent manifestation of the growing strength of the Front National, which was founded in 1972 as an amalgamation of neo-Nazi sects and far-right groupings. The large racist vote has also coincided with an increase in racist violence, with incidents directed against Jewish people, Gypsies, and immigrants among others. White supremacists in the United States have closely watched the efforts of the Front National. Nevertheless, anti-racists in Europe have campaigned to expose the Front National and combat the racist violence.
In 2004 the National Assembly passed a sweeping anticrime law that decreased the powers of judges and further augmented those of prosecutors. The new law has been seen as a political move on the part of the center-right to neutralize the far-right National Front party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, which takes a hard line on crime. The rate of common crime in France is about on a par with Europe’s generally low rates. However, the perception is widespread that crime is increasing, perhaps because, in urban areas, the level of reported crime involving guns is rising. A disproportionate share of common crime is committed by minority youths - Muslim and black - who make up half of the prison population.
2007
In the April 22, 2007 first round of presidential elections, Sarkozy, the leader of the center-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party, placed first; Socialist candidate Segolene Royal placed second; centrist Francois Bayrou placed third; and extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen placed fourth out of a field of 12 candidates. Sarkozy, a relative hard-liner on law and order and immigration, garnered votes previously given to Le Pen, whose vote total fell to 10 percent. In the first round of voting for the National Assembly, held on June 10, 2007 the National Front (FN) received 1,116,136 votes, 4.3% of the total, while in the second round on June 17, 2007 it received only 17,107 votes.
2010
The far-right National Front party managed to heat up the 2010 elections with a new campaign poster featuring the Algerian flag, a veiled woman, and half a dozen minarets shooting out of a map of France. The tagline - "No to Islamism" - apparently targets extreme manifestations of the Muslim religion. On 22 March 2010 Front National (FN) has increased its share of the vote in the second round of regional elections to just over 17 percent, or just fewer than two million votes. The FN vote increased in every region it contested, with party leader Jean Marie Le Pen polling 387,481 votes, or 22.87 percent of the vote, in the Provence-Alpes-Cote-D’Azur region. This was up from the 20.29 percent he polled in the first round, and gave the FN 21 seats in that assembly. The results put the FN firmly back on the political map after the setback it suffered at the last general election.
2014
The huge swing to the right in France in the March 2014 municipal elections was an expression of huge dissatisfaction with president François Hollande and his Socialist-led government. Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP party made huge gains, the Front National exceeded its own official expectations, and the Socialists were humiliated.
With 26 percent of the EU Parliament vote on 25 May 2014, her party finished several points ahead of the conservative opposition, making it the first far-right party ever to win a French national election. Le Pen declared that the country had voted for rule "of the French, by the French, for the French."
The founder of France's far right National Front (FN) party said 13 April 2015 he will not run for office in regional polls later this year after a damaging public spat with his daughter, who is now the group's leader. Jean-Marie Le Pen told Le Figaro magazine that he would not seek office even though he still thinks he is the “best candidate." Marine Le Pen was upset with her father when he described the Nazi gas chambers as a mere "detail of history." He later confined himself to his wonted sentiments: providing memories of France's glorious past and delivering anger against immigrants, Muslims, and other traitors of the fatherland.
Le Pen senior said granddaughter Marion Marechal-Le Pen, 25, should stand in his place, if she accepts. Marion, a rising star in the party, is considered to have social views more conservative than Marine Le Pen’s.
2025
On 31 March 2025, the tribunal correctionnel de Paris issued a judgement finding Marine Le Pen guilty of embezzling European Parliament funds over the course of a 12-year-period. The funds in question were intended to be used to pay for EU parliamentary aides but were instead diverted to pay Rassemblement National Pary staff who worked for the party between 2004 and 2016.
The court sentenced Marine Le Pen to a four-year prison sentence, with two of those years to be spent under house arrest and two years suspended. More importantly, and with important implications for the 2027 presidential elections, the court banned her from running for office for a period of five years, with immediate effect, without the possibility of being suspended during the course of any potential judicial appeal.
Eight other current or former RN party members who had also previously served as European Union parliament members, in addition to 12 RN assistants were also found guilty of syphoning off EU funds. Louis Alliot, mayor of Perpignan, was sentenced to a prison term of 18 months of which 3 were to be served under house arrest with electronic monitoring, and also 3 years of political ineligibility, without immmediate effect, thereby ensuring he could retain his mayoral post for the time being. The Rassemblement National Party was fined 2 million euros, of which 1 million were payable, and also of the seizure of of 1 million euros which had been confiscated during the course of the judicial probe. In all, twenty-three people were found guilty and sentenced to terms ranging from a 6 months suspended jail term to a four years with two years suspended. Only one person was found innocent.
Predictably, the Kremlin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, among others, decried the judicial ruling, while US President Trump commented on Marine Le Pen's conviction and prohibition from running in the following 2027 presidential election as a "very big deal".
Moscow Gold
Marine Le Pen is a great critic of European sanctions against Russia. In interviews she has repeatedly stressed that she "admires Putin" and has accused the EU of pushing for a new Cold War. In June 2013, Marine Le Pen visited Moscow and met with Dmitry Rogozin, Deputy Prime Minister, and Sergey Naryshkin, thenChairman of the State Duma and later head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). Rogozin had earlier, in 2008, helped to establish the Paris-based Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, an instrument of Russian soft power, where the British right-wing writer John Laughland is based.
In Moscow, where Le Pen and one of her close advisors had been guests on several occasions, one of the honorary guests at the November 2014 FN conference was the deputy chairman of the Russian Duma, Andrei Isayev. He drank a toast to France and emphasized the good relations between the Front National and Moscow.
In December 2014, the Front National party took 9.4 million Euros (£7.4 m) from the Moscow-based First Czech-Russian Bank. The Front National (FN), has denied claims in a media report which stated that they wanted to borrow 40 million euros ($50 million) from a Russian bank. "This is fictitious, it's crazy," said party leader Marine Le Pen. "We have applied for nine million euros, and we got nine million euros." Among other things, the Front National needed this financial top-up to organize its 29 November 2014) party congress in Lyon. For a long time, the Front National had been accused of receiving Russian financial support. The head of the bank is also close confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In April 2014, Marine Le Pen visited Moscow to criticize E.U. policy during the Ukraine crisis: “I’m surprised a Cold War on Russia has been declared in the European Union,” said Le Pen, according to Interfax. She added that the tensions were the product of Russophobic campaigns by certain E.U. member states and were not in line with France’s economic interests. In an interview with the Russian newspaper Vzyglyad, Le Pen stated that there was “no point” for Ukraine to join the EU, criticized the French foreign minister for a meeting with Euromaidan representatives, asking rhetorically whether international law no longer held meaning. Following the Russian Federation’s annexation of Crimea, a National Front spokesperson stated that “Crimea is historically part of Mother Russia.”
Le Pen admires Putin, often praising him for his "fight against the oligarchs." And she insists that the Russian economy, with its state-run companies, makes a good role model for France. In May 2016, when interviewed by Russian international broadcaster Russia Today (RT), she promised that she would recognize Crimea as Russian territory if she were elected French president.
On 24 March 2017, FN Vice-President Florian Philippot said that the party would not accept financial support from any Russian bank for the presidential campaign, adding that the FN had other creditors abroad. Philippot's statement came during Le Pen's visit to Russia at the invitation of senior Russian lawmaker Leonid Slutsky as part of cooperation between State Duma lawmakers and French political circles. During the visit, the presidential hopeful also met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, the issue of campaign financing was not discussed during Le Pen's meeting with Putin.
The scandal surrounding the loans that French presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen allegedly received from Russian banks took a new turn after fresh media reports regarding a third loan provided to far-right politician in 2016 surfaced. On 30 March 2017, Mediapart news portal reported that, apart from the two loans she received in 2014, Le Pen asked for money from Russian financial institutions in June 2016. The sum of the loan amounted to $3.2 million and was aimed at "financing [the] French electoral campaign."
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