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Recent years have seen the rise of far-right parties in much of Europe – the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, the Freedom Party in Austria, the Swedish Democrats, Vox in Spain, Reform in Britain – but as yet none of these parties has won power. However, attention now fastens on the French Rassemblement National (RN), led by Marine Le Pen.

The RN has emerged as easily the country’s largest party in both the last European and national elections, and in the last presidential election Le Pen for the first time won over 40% of the vote against Emmanuel Macron. With the next presidential election now less than a year away, Le Pen heads every poll as the most likely next president and there now seems a real chance that the far right could win power in a major European state.

In 2025, however, Le Pen was found guilty of having misused European funds to finance her party. She was, as a result, banned from standing for public office for five years. She bitterly proclaims her innocence and has appealed (in fact, she is clearly guilty but this sort of financial abuse is so common in France that really what she is angry about is the unfairness of having been singled out). If she can’t run, she will be replaced by her No 2, the 31-year-old Jordan Bardella, who is just as popular as she is, so conceivably we might get President Bardella selecting Le Pen as his prime minister. Her appeal should be heard any day now.

Like all the other far-right parties in Europe, the RN’s chief issue is immigration and the threat of Islamisation. Currently, immigrants make up 11% of the French population, but 20% of all live births are of Arab-Muslim origin, suggesting that the Muslim presence is rapidly increasing. Le Pen points to the refusal of many Muslims to integrate and sees this as a threat to French identity and culture.

France has also been the scene of much Islamic terrorism, most notably the massacre of 130 people, with more than 400 more wounded, in the attack on the Bataclan theatre in Paris in 2015. The attackers, dressed in suicide vests, were members of the jihadist movement Islamic State, and several of them had taken advantage of the influx of Syrian refugees to infiltrate France.

Events such as this plus the rapid growth of the Muslim population has seen many predict an ultimate civil war.

Populism

The RN is a populist party, and its programme has been criticised as being merely a collection of promises to reward this or that group. It has always enjoyed support in the South from old pied noirs – those who fled back to France once Algeria gained independence – but Le Pen soon broadened that appeal to the old rust-belt towns of Northern France, hitherto the stronghold of Communists and Socialists, and from there she has further broadened its appeal yet further into much of rural and small-town France.

Although her father, thanks to gifts from wealthy admirers, was able to leave her a rich woman, she seems entirely at home in her working-class constituency of Henin-Beaumont in the Pas de Calais in northern France. Everywhere the crowds call her and Bardella just “Marine” and “Jordan” and describe themselves as marinistes.

Her manner is quite humble and admirers are often shaken to learn that as a young lawyer she spent much of her time helping undocumented immigrants – and why not, she asks? “They were in trouble, they’re human beings with rights and the dreadful immigration laws are not their fault.”

An ardent cat lover and a single parent, Le Pen comes across as a woman of the people, happily chatting to her constituents in the street. Asked about her relationship with French people, she says, “I am them. I often think I am feeling the same as the French are feeling. I react like the average French person. I share their outrage when they are outraged… I have the same bursts of enthusiasm, the same worries. And, above all, the same hopes.”

This strong working-class base resonates with Le Pen’s firm dislike of “the elite” who have ruled France for so long and are responsible for the globalisation she detests. Everyone knows what is meant by “the elite” – the enarques (graduates of the École National d’Administration or other Grandes Écoles). For whether the Gaullists, Socialists, or Centrists are in power, in practice the key ministers are invariably enarques. Fewer than 1% of French students get into the fiercely competitive Grandes Écoles and there is no doubting that their graduates have a Gallic flair, high intelligence, and, often, a certain arrogance. Le Pen looks at France, suffering “submersion” from too many immigrants, with high taxes – the highest in Europe – and a national debt of 113% of GDP, and asks, “Since this is what the elite have wrought, why do we want them?”

Horseshoe

The RN’s working-class base also means that much of the party’s economic appeal is very similar to that of the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI), which translates as France Unbowed, of Jean-Luc Mélenchon – a populist mixture of protectionism, strong state control, lower taxes, and high welfare spending. Both the LFI and the RN campaigned bitterly against Macron’s attempt to raise the pensionable age, simply disregarding Macron’s perfectly correct warning that France cannot afford its present generous pension system and that a failure to raise pensionable age towards European norms will result in bankruptcy.

One result is that many voters switch easily from the LFI to the RN, even though they have polar-opposite views on immigration and that the LFI is a perfect example of Islamo-Gauchisme with large Muslim support.

There is no doubt that French opinion has moved towards the RN’s views: polls show a steady 60-70% of voters agreeing that “there are too many immigrants” and that “Islam is not compatible with the Republic”. The RN distinguishes between moderate Muslims who are willing to integrate into French life and Islamists who refuse to do so.

In 2021 Le Pen sponsored a bill that would have banned “Islamist ideologies” and the wearing of the veil and allowed civil servants to refuse housing and social security benefits to suspected Islamists. She angrily points out that of the large number of illegal immigrants who are given the order to leave France, only 7% actually do so: she wants them all gone. She also inveighs against the fact that some 400 000 undocumented immigrants are receiving free state healthcare.

She is above all a nationalist: she acknowledges that the Geneva Convention says that migrants cannot be sent back to their countries of origin if they are likely to suffer persecution there, but bridles at the fact that many countries simply don’t want their migrants back: French national interests must come first.

Le Pen is keenly aware that she has competition on the right from Eric Zemmour, whose Reconquete party claims that many of the Paris suburbs have effectively become part of a foreign, Islamist world and who wants to uproot that whole culture and “return those suburbs to France”. (The name Reconquete is a deliberate echo of the reconquista, the movement which saw the Muslim Moors driven out of Spain in the 15th century.) The sight of Trump’s mass deportations has inevitably excited many who would like France to follow suit.

Polls

In the 2022 presidential election President Macron got 27.9% of the vote on the first round against Le Pen’s 23.2% and then won by 58.6% to 41.5% on the second round. Since then, however, polls regularly show Le Pen or Bardella getting 35-36% on the first round, trailed by Edouard Philippe, the former centrist prime minister and mayor of Le Havre, with 20-22%, and this has caused many to predict a RN victory. This is by no means certain, however: the polls frequently suggest a 50-50 dead heat on the second round as voters of the left and centre unite with orthodox conservatives to block the way to the RN. What is clear, though, is that the result will be closer than ever before and that the RN has a good chance of winning.

A victory for Le Pen or Bardella would be a major shock for Europe but it’s possible that it would be as easily accommodated as Giorgia Meloni’s victory in Italy has been. Le Pen has, after all greatly detoxified her father’s movement. Gone are his provocations, his enthusiasm for Marshall Petain (the head of the collaborationist Vichy French regime in World War II), and his antisemitism. Le Pen and Bardella quote De Gaulle all the time, Le Pen goes on marches against antisemitism and has welcomed many Jewish supporters to the RN. Serge Klarsfeld, the famed Nazi hunter, whose own parents perished in Auschwitz, says he would definitely vote for the RN against the LFI, whose left-wing antisemitism he reviles.

The real problem with a RN victory might well be its economics, not its immigration policies. When Le Pen first ran against Macron in 2017, she came badly unstuck in a debate with him, revealing huge gaps in her knowledge of economics. Macron, a former Rothschilds banker and an ex-minister of finance, made a fool of her (he is, of course, an enarque and she is not) and it took her a year to recover her confidence.

Edouard Philippe, it might be added, is another enarque and much as the French may inveigh against this elite, they are used to their leaders displaying intelligence, sophistication, and polish.

In the last few years, the RN has fought bitterly against Macron’s pension reform – though it has no alternative suggestion as to how to fund the system. During his 2024 campaign Bardella promised to abolish income tax for everyone under 30, reduce VAT on all energy bills, and to raise guaranteed agricultural prices for farmers. All told, his pledges would have added at least €100 billion a year to the deficit, quite possibly triggering a Liz Truss-style meltdown in financial markets. In her 2022 presidential campaign Le Pen offered 22 proposals, 14 of which would require increased spending. When asked where the money will come from, the RN says it will crack down on waste and fraud, but everyone knows that is not a serious answer.

Government Spending

The key point is that with a national debt of 113% of GDP and a budget deficit running at 5.8% of GDP (vs the maximum permitted European Union level of 3%) France urgently needs to cut government spending. It is difficult to say that taxes should be increased since France has by far the highest government spending among the 38 members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, with 58.1% of GDP spent by government. No less than 43.8% of GDP is taken by tax, compared to an OECD average of 33.9%. And as for those who seek refuge in demands to “soak the rich” via a wealth tax, France has already seen how easily wealthier taxpayers migrate to Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, or Monaco to avoid such taxes.

The fact is, of course, that the RN faces the classic problem of populist parties, which is that their voters not only want, but insist upon, unaffordable and contradictory demands. In its long years of opposition, this has not bothered the RN, but now that it faces the serious possibility of becoming a party of government, it has to worry whether its programme is truly realisable.

If indeed the RN wins in 2027 it will be a major shock for France and Europe, but it will be a major shock for the RN too.