How National Rally captured the centre The detoxification of Le Pen's party is complete

Le Pen has spent 15 years “detoxifying” her party, purging it of its more extreme members, changing its name, and even trading blows with her father in the process. Today, a staggering 92% of Jews believe that Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Left-wing La France Insoumise contributes to the rise of antisemitism, compared to only 49% for the RN. But the gains are twofold: in election after election, the party has made steady gains, making it to the runoff of the presidential election twice. With the tantalising carrot of real political power, the party has decided to shed any remaining rough edges. The RN, as a result, is running a campaign that can only be described as muted.

Once upon a time, Marine Le Pen was the Marianne of Frexit, making it RN’s central pledge in 2017. Since then, however, the party has avoided putting forward anything that looks like aggressive Euroscepticism. Today, her role model in Europe is Giorgia Meloni: the Italian advocate for nationalism within the EU, rather than nationalism in one country.

On its criticism of Nato, too, the RN has also softened its stance, citing concerns about the message it would send to France’s allies in Ukraine. Indeed, Vladimir Putin’s war seems to have vaccinated the party from its previous demonstrative signs of Putinophilia; his invasion came just days before Le Pen was about to send out a presidential leaflet with a photo of her shaking hands with Putin. The RN may not be Kyiv’s biggest supporters, but nor have they opposed most of France’s aid packages in recent months.

In fact, on most economic issues, the party is keeping its ambitions low, and watering them down at the first sight of pushback. Most obviously, what should have been the flagship measure — ditching Macron’s pension reform that sets the legal retirement age at 64 — has now been significantly watered-down, to the point where only cosmetic changes are discernible. On energy, meanwhile, Le Pen had pledged to leave the EU market, but Bardella has since suffocated the proposal with fine print. He wants to cut VAT on energy prices, but has made clear this is “pending” on “negotiations in Brussels”.

Even on immigration, the RN’s most radical platform, we can see the spirit of moderation starting to seep in. In fact, the issue only ranks as the “third emergency” for Bardella, behind the cost of living and security. Once driven by its commitment to restricting access to strategic administrative positions for dual citizens and removing birth-right citizenship, the RN has softened its stance. On birth-right citizenship it wants people born in France of foreign parents to have to declare their desire to become French at 18 —a  radical break from French tradition, but not a European anomaly either with many EU countries implementing similarly qualified jus soli regulations. As for the restriction of key strategic positions for dual citizens, it already exists.

And what of the people staffing the party themselves? A lot has been written about Bardella’s photogenic appearance, but much of the RN’s leadership are simply bland and presentable former Right-wingers. After getting 89 MPs elected to parliament in 2022, Le Pen instructed them to put on a tie and to avoid acting like fringe agitators. Naturally, they obeyed, and started to tactfully vote with both the Left and the Macronists on various issues. In their first year in office, RN’s 89 MPs backed around half of the Macronist bills — on everything from squatting to nuclear energy — but also supported the Left on high-profile attempts to censor the government.

This “strategy of the suit and tie” has paid significant dividends, especially as a foil to the rambunctious agitprop style adopted by their counterparts on the Left, which has made the Le Penists look like serious politicians. The radicalism and ambition of the united left’s “Popular Front” platform (an extra 150 billion euros in spending by 2027) has also helped. It did considerably more to spook markets than the risk of a Bardella premiership and by contrast made the RN’s unfocused hodgepodge of promises look reasonable.

And crucially, as a result, the electorate is starting to treat the RN as a normal party. The historic “barrage républicain“, where Right-wing and Left-wing voters would pinch their noses and vote for anyone but a Le Pen in the run-off lies in tatters. Even centrist voters, when presented with a hypothetical run-off between the Popular Front and RN, put them on an equal footing.

More generally, the appeal of the RN, and of Bardella specifically, has become increasingly widespread: Bardella, with his 17 million TikTok followers, now ranks as the second most popular politician in France. (Édouard Philippe, the centrist Mayor of Le Havre is currently first.) As the pollster Mathieu Gallard writes, the RN now has the most representative demographic breakdown of any party in France.

The caveat, of course, is that even a non-radical RN could end up being hugely disruptive for France. After all, while the RN are no longer made up of hard Eurosceptics, they are certainly not Euroenthusiasts either. And it is unlikely that Le Pen and Bardella will fold into the EU doxa without at least giving the impression of putting up a fight. Indeed, even Bardella’s more moderate platform could spark fireworks in Brussels, particularly over the EU budget, and could have significant debt implications given France’s very tight fiscal space.

And for all of Le Pen’s aspirations to emulate Melonism, the RN, unlike its Italian counterpart, has never participated in a ruling coalition, not even at a sizable regional level. While there has been some frantic speed dating over the past year between the RN and France’s business and administrative elites, the RN does not have a strong establishment footprint yet. So a political transition of this scale could be very rocky.

But for all those risks, the RN no longer acts as a radical party, nor is it seen as such by the larger electorate. It has morphed into an opportunistic catch-all creature: amid all the hysteria blowing in from outside of France, Le Pen and Bardella seem ready to make whatever ideological compromises are necessary.

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François Valentin is a political analyst and co-host of the Uncommon Decency podcast.

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