France’s far-right this weekend elected a party leader from outside the Le Pen dynasty for the first time in their 50-year history – the latest sign of the movement’s attempt to convince voters it has swapped extremism for professionalism.
Before a jubilant audience on Saturday night, Marine Le Pen announced that her protégé Jordan Bardella, a 27-year-old MEP, had won the vote to replace her at the head of the Rassemblement National (Rallye National). “I will pass on a newly formed and revitalized party. . . that proves every day that it is a real ruling party, the party that will rule tomorrow,” said the 54-year-old. “We must be ready!”
The succession will not change the power dynamic – Le Pen remains the undisputed boss of the RN. Bardella, in a relationship with her niece, is almost family. Le Pen’s long-held strategy of detoxifying the RN’s image and wooing new voters by focusing on Europe’s cost-of-living crisis is also not expected to change.
But the move comes at a difficult time. Old demons resurfaced last week when Grégoire de Fournas, an RN MP, was sanctioned for shouting “Go back to Africa” as a black MP spoke in Parliament about the dangers migrants face.
The incident marks the party’s first misstep since its unexpected victory in June’s general election, which made it the largest opposition party, just as President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance was losing its majority. It now has 89 MPs, its biggest haul, up from just seven in 2017.
The victory, which came less than two months after Le Pen lost her third presidential bid and hinted she might retire, changed the fortunes of the party and sparked hopes that it could win in the next presidential election in 2027 could win.
Although the RN cannot pass legislation on its own, for the first time it is playing a role in day-to-day legislation, filling prestigious posts in the National Assembly and training a group of experienced national leaders.
Jean-Yves Camus, a political scientist specializing in European nationalist movements, said Bardella’s uprising was another sign of how the RN was trying to break away from the era of founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, because of the racist language and denial of the Holocaust.
“There is a new generation of politicians in the RN who grew up under Marine and not under their father,” he said. “The election of the 89 MEPs is an earthquake, but a victory that brings with it new obligations. They have to show that their MPs are mainstream and respectable, that they get the job done and that they don’t get carried away.”
Things got off to a good start in the National Assembly. Le Pen positioned the RN as the responsible, suit-and-tie-clad opposition fighting for the French people, in contrast to the left-wing Nupes alliance, which they described as boorish and unpatriotic.
RN votes helped the Macron government pass important legislation to protect homes and businesses from rising energy bills. But then she caught everyone on the wrong foot by changing her position to vote for a left-sponsored motion of no confidence in Macron’s government. The motion failed, but Le Pen’s pivot alerted the government that the RN could one day help bring him down.
Most importantly for the chronically indebted RN, the 89 MPs represent an annual cash injection of around €10m – double the amount seen at the last session of Parliament. Under France’s public funding system, parties receive payments for each elected officer and their total votes. Party officials said they would use the funds to gradually repay a controversial loan taken out in 2014 by a Russian bank.
Renaud Labaye, the general secretary of the RN Group, compared the change to a small family business that grows into a company. “When I was Marine Le Pen’s parliamentary assistant in 2017, we had seven MPs, maybe a dozen staff members, and managed to only ask two questions at the government’s weekly Q&A in five years,” he said in an interview. “Now we have 89 MEPs and about 110 staff, provide two of the six vice-presidents of the assembly and can ask four questions a week!”
But the momentum came to an abrupt end on Thursday when de Fourna’s screams led to the parliamentary session being immediately suspended. De Fournas denied any racist intent and said he was speaking of the boats and migrants rather than Carlos Martens Bilongo, his fellow MP, who called on France to step up cooperation with EU countries in helping African migrants rescued from the Mediterranean.
On Friday, a parliamentary disciplinary committee sanctioned de Fournas with the maximum penalty of a 15-day suspension and a temporary pay cut for “provoking a riot” in the assembly.
In public, Le Pen and other RN officials fiercely defended de Fournas and accused their opponents of rigging the episode, but privately some admitted the MP’s words were “disastrous” and “lacking in humanity.”
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It’s still too early to know what impact the outbreak might have on public opinion. Previously, the RN was the most popular political party in France according to a recent Ifop poll with the Greens, up 12 points since 2017. Le Pen himself regularly ranks among the top three most popular politicians in France, and Bardella recently cracked the top 15 .
At Saturday’s party conference, Bardella also defended de Fournas, promising to tightly regulate immigration and reserve social programs like housing benefits for French citizens.
“The vast majority of people in France are with us and approve of such a policy,” he said.
“We are one step away from power,” he concluded. “Ahead of us are the final efforts that will lead to the change in leadership that the country and the French so desperately need.”