For years, she told me, local officials from other political parties ignored invitations to farmers’ meetings and agricultural fairs. National Rally’s representatives showed up prepared, knowledgeable and ready to talk about farmers’ specific problems.
When one vintner worried that the party’s anti-immigrant program might choke off the local labor supply, a National Rally official offered reassurance. After another party official attended a recent event, he sent a polite thank-you note, my friend reported.
“They know how to behave in society,” she said.
For many French voters, a modicum of civility has not whitewashed the party’s extreme policies, let alone the vicious antisemitism of its Holocaust-denying founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. My friend still isn’t voting for National Rally.
But the party’s makeover — the years-long project of Le Pen’s daughter Marine and her self-possessed 28-year-old protégé, Jordan Bardella — has been staggeringly successful. For years at the fringes of French politics, it won a crushing victory in France’s elections for the European Parliament this month.
Now, ahead of a two-round election for France’s own legislature culminating July 7, National Rally is leading a pack of parties in a deeply fractured political field. Its victory could leave President Emmanuel Macron in office — but, in effect, as the leader of an emasculated opposition.
Beyond National Rally’s soaring fortunes, there are several important things to know about the party, and none of them is comforting.
First, it served until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a supplicant and supporter of Vladimir Putin’s bloody-minded tyranny and a conduit for Kremlin propaganda. Its ascent to a majority or plurality in France’s National Assembly, let alone control of the prime minister’s office — all plausible scenarios — would likely mark a fissure in the West’s united front for Ukraine.
Second, National Rally wants a new order in France, not just different priorities. Instead of promoting the European Union as a counterweight to an aggressive Russia, a voracious China and an increasingly undependable United States, as Macron has done, it seeks nationalist retrenchment. “This would be France’s Brexit moment,” British historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote this month.
Third, in pursuing its bedrock goal of making France less hospitable for immigrants — denying them social benefits, pursuing deportations — it could set a trajectory for long-term decline in a country that, like others in Europe, relies on migrant labor to maintain economic growth as birthrates plummet.
National Rally’s triumph this month prompted Macron to call the snap vote for France’s legislature, triggering political turmoil. His massive gamble is that the electorate won’t repeat, in a domestic ballot, what looked like a protest vote at the continental level. But political momentum — and, for now, polls — suggests the party will win the greatest share of lawmakers in the 577-seat National Assembly.
There is little solace in the fact that its main competition appears to be a leftist bloc dominated by radical socialists whose spendthrift program would explode the French economy. As for Macron’s own centrist faction, it is running a distant third in the polls.
The Financial Times quoted a senior French business executive as saying the prospect of either France’s hard right or hard left entering government was “a choice between the plague and cholera.”
National Rally’s catastrophizing rhetoric, which portrays a France gripped by chaos, crime and decline, flies in the face of the government’s success in driving down unemployment and inflation. But Macron has devised no antidote to the resentment and embittered nostalgia engendered by mass migration, which remains at the heart of the Le Pen-Bardella messaging that “Islamic totalitarianism” will lead to France’s “erasure.”
Imagine, Bardella told a crowd last year, a France “where every Frenchman and Frenchwoman were living under the same flag, the same language, the same culture.” His measured cadence does nothing to negate the radicalism of homogenizing a country whose foreign-born population, roughly 13 percent of residents, includes millions of Muslims. And it’s worth noting that France has added fewer immigrants, as a percentage of population, than many other major Western countries over the past two decades.
There is something bizarre in the prospect of an electorate toying with upheaval in a country buoyed by a vibrant start-up culture, robust social spending and an economy that has outperformed many in the European Union. Yet broad swaths of the country are disaffected, especially have-nots alienated by an urban elite whose remoteness and arrogance they see embodied in Macron.
If French voters succeed in giving National Rally the reins of power, they will have exacted revenge for those grievances. But they might come to regret whatever it is that they’ve wished for.
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