As Marine Le Pen’s far-right movement marks 50 years in French politics, RFI looks back at how the National Rally – formerly the National Front – went from a fringe group to France’s single biggest opposition party.
The surname may be the same, but the party of Marine Le Pen today is markedly different from the one founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, half a century ago.
It too has undergone a small but significant name change. Originally the Front National, the National Front (FN), now it goes by the Rassemblement National, the National Rally (RN).
It represents a new generation’s attempt to put its stamp on what is by now one of France’s longest surviving political parties.
‘History is a problem for Marine Le Pen’
That poses an awkward challenge for Le Pen: how to celebrate the movement’s longevity without recalling its original form, which for years put off the large majority of French voters.
“History is a problem for Marine La Pen. The directors of the RN want to let the origins of the National Front be forgotten," political scientist Erwan Lecoeur told RFI.
"And this normalisation involves rewriting history. Marine Le Pen doesn’t want that weighing on her shoulders when she’s clearly pursuing a strategy of normalisation.”
The history in question officially began on 5 October 1972, when Jean-Marie Le Pen and a cohort of French nationalists – comprising anti-communists, veterans of France’s war with Algeria, libertarians, monarchists and fascist sympathisers – founded the Front National Pour l’Unité Française, the National Front for French Unity.
A decade on the political sidelines followed. It wasn’t until the early 1980s, as the right-wing opposition railed against a Socialist Party government and voters on both sides expressed frustration with mainstream parties, that the National Front’s calls to restrict immigration, restore the death penalty and introduce incentives for employers to hire French citizens over foreign nationals began to find a wider audience.
Early inroads
The party started to make inroads in local and European politics, helped by alliances with other parties on the right – as well as by proportional representation, which makes it easier for small parties to gain seats.
Next, it targeted the French parliament. By 1997, opposition to immigration and criticism of Islam had become mainstream talking points, and the FN polled at around 15 percent in parliamentary elections.
But for many French voters, the party remained beyond the pale. When Jean-Marie Le Pen made it to the second round of presidential elections in 2002, the closest any far-right candidate had come to the French presidency, huge protests ensued.
Almost every other party united to block Le Pen, who eventually lost the run-off with around 18 percent of votes to Jacques Chirac’s 82 percent.
De-demonisation
Jean-Marie Le Pen and the rest of the old guard did little to make themselves more palatable to those who saw them as extremists, continuing to express openly xenophobic, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic views.
But his daughter, who took over the party after her father retired as leader in 2011, had broader ambitions.
She and a younger generation of allies initiated a process of “de-demonisation”, dropping some of the party’s most radical proposals such as reintroducing capital punishment, exiting the European Union and going back to the franc.
At the same time, members who excused French World War II collaborators or downplayed the Holocaust in public were kicked out. In 2015, that included Jean-Marie Le Pen himself.
They were replaced with younger, savvier political operators. Today more than a third of its MPs are aged under 40 – younger than the party itself.
In 2018, members voted to rename the party the National Rally, and in 2021, Marine Le Pen handed its leadership to a protégé, 27-year-old Jordan Bardella. The rebranding was complete.
From margins to mainstream
It paid off. Marine Le Pen has twice reached the second round of presidential elections – in 2017 and 2022 – and while she lost both run-offs against Emmanuel Macron, the defeats were considerably smaller than those of her father. In the most recent vote, she finished with around 41 percent.
And in legislative elections earlier this year, the National Rally achieved its best results, going from seven seats in parliament to 89.
The party has skilfully tapped into disenchantment with Macron and anger over the rising cost of living, globalisation and the perceived decline in many rural communities.
Yet opposing immigration remains the assured basis for the National Rally and for a large part of its electorate even today, geopolitics professor Béatrice Giblin told RFI.
Where the movement hasn’t changed, the political landscape has. Some of its favourite talking points are now heard from politicians nominally closer to the centre, while anti-immigration, anti-Islam presidential candidate Eric Zemmour has claimed territory even further to the right.
At 50 years old, the National Rally appears almost venerable in comparison.
As Brice Teinturier of the Ipsos polling institute told France Inter radio: “The RN no longer frightens people.”
