It was third time unlucky for Marine Le Pen, who failed to convince French voters to elect her president on Sunday.
She detoxified her far-right National Rally party and threw out the Holocaust denying, xenophobic thugs – including her own father – softened her image with stories of how much she adores her cats and appeared on television with reassuring smiles and a wardrobe of soothingly neutral coloured clothes.
She even dropped Frexit – though many argued that her intention to create an “alliance” of European nations within the European Union was effectively leaving the EU by stealth – dropped support for the death penalty and apparently abandoned the idea of banning the right to dual nationality while remaining firmly anti-immigration.
But despite repeatedly trumpeting her rival Emmanuel Macron’s alleged “arrogance” and “disdain for the French people”, her programme still did not appeal to enough voters to give her the keys to the Élysée Palace.
On Sunday night, Le Pen conceded defeat while claiming her projected 42% share of the vote represented “a victory in itself” and said she would continue the political fight against Macron.
“Millions of our compatriots have chosen us and change. We are more determined than ever and our determination to defend the French people is greater than ever. This defeat is in itself a form of hope,” she told supporters.
Warning that the next five years would be “as brutal as the last five years” she pledged: “I will continue my commitment to France and the French. It’s not over. In a few weeks we have the legislative elections.”
Her speech, which did not include the traditional congratulations to the winner, ended with a rendition of La Marseillaise.
Le Pen’s promise to continue the fight and “never abandon France” throws in doubt her pledge to relinquish her presidential ambitions. She had said she would not stand again but her speech left the door open to another bid to lead France. At 53 years old, she is still a youngster in French political terms, though Macron, 44, and his team have lowered the age average by some decades. However, she has also indicated she will not give up politics altogether to spend more time with her cats.
“I have become a cat breeder. It’s a passion. One can do politics while having a profession, or turn a passion into a profession,” she told RTL radio last year.
Last month, she told France’s Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche: “A priori I will not stand [for president] again. But I will continue to do what I have done for years, I will defend the French. I don’t know in what role, but it will be in one where I am most effective.”
Le Pen took over her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National party in 2011 and set about cleaning up its image. Le Pen père had caused a political earthquake in France in 2002 when he unexpectedly won a place in the second round of the presidential with only 16.9% of the vote. Marine Le Pen scored 17.9% in the first round of the 2012 presidential election in which the socialist François Hollande faced Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round. Hollande won. In 2017, Le Pen scored 21.3% in the first round and faced Macron in the second. Macron won and Le Pen changed the party name to the Rassemblement National (RN).
This time, Le Pen increased her first round score to 23.25%. However, the far-right vote was split between her and Éric Zemmour, who scored 7.1%, suggesting her score could have been much higher.
Antoine Bristielle, director of the Observatory of Opinion at the left-leaning Jean-Jaurès Foundation, said Le Pen could face an internal party struggle if she stepped back from frontline politics. Le Pen handed over the reins of her party to the up-and-coming far-right star Jordan Bardella, a 26-year-old son of Italian immigrants who grew up in a gritty Paris banlieue. There are several other youngsters waiting in the wings, including her niece Marion Maréchal, who dumped family loyalty to support Zemmour in the first round.
“A danger for the radical right family is that there will be an internal war to take over as leader,” Bristielle said.
“Even if Marine Le Pen is not great at campaigning, she is very good at organising the party. Her strength has been to maintain a united front within it. The risk is that this will fracture without her.”
• This article was amended on 24 and 25 April 2022. Nicolas Sarkozy faced François Hollande, not Ségolène Royal, in the 2012 French elections; and it was Hollande who won that contest, not Sarkozy as an earlier version said. It was in 2007 that Sarkozy faced Royal and won.
