French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to hold an unnecessary snap election has favored the extreme right National Rally party.
In the first round of elections, held June 30, National Rally candidates earned 33 percent of the vote nationally, putting them ahead of the left-wing coalition known as New Popular Front and Macron’s Renaissance party.
It is hard to predict how many seats the National Rally will actually win in the National Assembly, after the second round of voting ends July 7. Remaining distrust of National Rally (formerly National Front), plus the tactics its opponents are adopting, could still limit the number of seats the party ultimately takes.
However, one thing is clear. Many French voters now consider the National Rally a “party like any other.”
National Rally has to some extent sloughed off its reputation as a pariah, becoming a respectable electoral choice for some. Many factors contributed to this shift in perception, but French conservative politicians such as François Fillon played an outsized role in shifting the electorate.
Some of the blame also lies with Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the leftist La France Insoumise party and with President Macron himself. In all cases, National Rally benefited from strategies adopted by these parties, which were meant to favor their own fates but ultimately pushed voters to the extreme right.
Marine Le Pen embarked on a “de-demonization” campaign when she took control of the National Front in 2011. This polishing of the party involved many elements. Anti-immigrant, xenophobic positions were presented as necessary for the defense of “republican” (read: democratic) values — for example, calls to ban the Islamic headscarf were explained as required for the defense of French values such as secularism and gender equality.
Openly anti-Semitic statements by party members became taboo under Le Pen, though more subtle ones were still in evidence — even by Le Pen herself, as late as 2017.
Le Pen’s efforts did move the needle somewhat: her party gained more voters in 2012 and in subsequent elections thanks to these tactics. However, the voters they initially won over were already inclined to support them. Analyses indicated that the people who switched from voting conservative right to the far right after 2012 held strongly authoritarian and xenophobic views.
These voters — many of them women — had resisted voting for the National Front because it was seen as inappropriate to vote for a party with neo-fascist origins. Le Pen’s de-demonization removed that stigma for voters with existing far-right sensibilities.
Opponents of the party deserve credit for expanding its electorate past its core far-right constituency. Fillon’s campaign played a particularly strong role, by exhibiting extremely Islamophobic rhetoric. Fillon, of the Republican party, coined the phrase “Islamic totalitarianism” and claimed that any woman who wore a burqa was a supporter of the Islamic State. His national narrative was one of French exceptionalism and generational continuity, “rooted” in French identity.
In his narrative, France had nothing to apologize for. In fact, Fillon went so far as to claim in a 2016 speech that France should not apologize for, as he put it, “sharing [French] culture with [colonized] peoples in Africa and Asia.” Fillon adopted these talking points, apparently, intending to appeal to conservative voters who had switched their votes to the National Front in 2012.
Fillon’s efforts (and similar ones by Republicans like Nicolas Sarkozy and Valérie Pécresse) had the opposite of the desired effect. Once the Republicans lost voters to the National Front, those voters stayed loyal. Subsequent scholarship backs this up, finding that appeals like Fillon’s only provided republican credibility to xenophobic attitudes and activated exclusive notions of national belonging in a wider share of the electorate, which under normal circumstances would only be salient to voters on the far right.
In short, rather than winning voters back to the center-right, Fillon’s narrative pushed more voters away.
Meanwhile, in 2017, Mélenchon refused to endorse mainstream candidates running against National Rally candidates. In doing so, he sent a signal to his own voters that the National Rally was not an unacceptable second choice for his party.
And in the recent snap elections, Macron insisted the left-wing coalition (which contained mainstream parties like the center-left Parti Socialiste) was equally as extreme as the National Rally (or, depending on your view, equally as good).
Ultimately, it is clear that the “normalized” image of the National Rally is a matter of branding, not substance. According to data collected by a human rights monitoring institution, National Rally’s electorate continues to exhibit autocratic, xenophobic and anti-Semitic attitudes far beyond the core electorates of the opposing parties.
National Rally’s plans for government include sweeping changes to the French electoral system that would favor it in the long term, and constitutional changes that will codify xenophobic, anti-immigrant attitudes into French constitutional law, according to Marine Le Pen’s own 2022 campaign materials.
The National Rally is not a “party like the others,” but the collective efforts of its own leadership and of its opponents have given it the appearance of one.
The defense of France’s “republican values” is best left in the hands of National Rally’s mainstream opponents, but only if they learn from the mistakes they have made in the last eight years.
Renee Buhr is a political science professor at the University of St. Thomas and former visiting researcher at Sciences Po-Bordeaux.