French far-right leader eyes power after hailing immigration ‘victory’

The head of France’s far-right Rassemblement National party has said its brand of nationalist anti-immigration politics was winning the battle of ideas in the country and would also prevail in European parliament elections next year.

Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen’s right-hand man who will lead the RN list in the June vote, described President Emmanuel Macron’s immigration law passed on Tuesday with the support of far-right lawmakers as “a real ideological victory”.

“What was adopted by the National Assembly will certainly not respond to all the problems with immigration in France, but we backed it because it opens the door for our ideas,” said the 28 year old in an interview with the Financial Times. 

Public concern about a surge in the number of asylum-seekers coming to Europe is driving voters into the hands of anti-immigration populists across the EU, forcing governments run by mainstream parties to take ever more drastic measures to reduce numbers.

Among French parties, the RN is forecast to come out on top in European elections as it did in 2014 and 2019, but this time with 30 per cent of the vote, well ahead of Macron’s centrist alliance on 18 per cent, according to a December poll by Ifop.

Bardella also expressed confidence in his party’s national election prospects, with Le Pen expected to run for president for a fourth time in 2027: “It is not a question of if we will come to power, but when.” 

Bardella spoke to the FT after Macron salvaged the long-promised immigration bill by compromising with the right to make it harder on foreigners. It will facilitate removals and create migration quotas, but includes a business-friendly move to give work permits to undocumented people working in sectors with labour shortages. The RN supported it after denouncing earlier versions as too lax.

Bardella said the law set a precedent because it treated French people differently from foreigners — whether in the country legally or illegally — in terms of access to welfare and housing benefits. He also boasted of several other RN policies in the law.

Establishing a system of “national preference” where citizens are favoured over foreigners for access to social housing, public sector jobs and other government services has been the centrepiece of the far-right programme for decades. If elected, the RN would hold a referendum to revise the constitution to make it compatible with “national preference”. 

Since it was approved, Macron’s immigration reform has been roundly criticised by leftwing politicians, NGOs and labour unions as a capitulation to the xenophobic ideas of the far-right. 

Macron denied he had ceded any ideological ground to the far right and called the new law “a defeat for the Rassemblement National” that would fix longstanding problems in the asylum system and make removals easier, in what he called a “necessary shield”.

“If we don’t want the Rassemblement National and its ideas to take over, we have to deal with the problems that feed them,” Macron argued in a TV interview on France 5 on Wednesday.

The debate comes as the RN has moved into the mainstream of French politics and institutions by winning an unprecedented 88 seats in the National Assembly last year, shortly after Le Pen lost her second presidential election head-to-head with Macron.

Le Pen’s efforts to “detoxify” the party her father founded by shedding its reputation for racism and antisemitism has largely paid off, opinion polls indicate.

Le Pen and Bardella now rank third and fourth respectively in rankings of the most popular French political figures. For the first time in a decade of polling by Le Monde, more people now see the RN as a potential party of government than as an opposition group.

Macron and his allies have struggled to dent the appeal of the resurgent RN, while the French left remains mired in infighting. Macron had promised when elected in 2017 and again when re-elected last year that his mission was to ensure that voters “no longer have any reason to vote for the extremes”.

But Bardella, a Le Pen protégé who is seen as a candidate for prime minister if the RN wins power in France in the future, urged Macron to dissolve the National Assembly and call early elections.

Macron’s Renaissance party and its allies no longer have a majority, which has made it harder for them to impose a legislative agenda and led to bruising fights this year over pensions reform and immigration. 

“He is in the minority and I think he has a responsibility . . . it is irresponsible to leave a country ungovernable,” said Bardella. “We are ready to go back in front of the voters.” 

“I think we could win an absolute majority, and we would look for allies if we were just short,” he added. Such a scenario is not what pollsters predict if early elections were called, although the RN is expected to make gains and Macron’s party to lose seats.

Le Pen’s party no longer calls for leaving the EU or the euro, but argues for transforming the union from within to hand power back to nation states on everything from migration to energy policy. However, this stance would put Paris at loggerheads with its partners and contravene wide swaths of EU law. 

On asylum for example, the RN wants to repudiate France’s international and EU obligations to stop taking asylum applications within the country and force people to apply in or near their home countries. 

During the campaign, Bardella plans to run on an anti-Brussels line that blames EU policies for rising food and energy prices, “out of control” immigration, and what he calls “punitive ecology” measures dealing with climate change.

Bardella pointed to last month’s victory of the far-right in the Netherlands and the prospect of a repeat in Austria next year, to hail “the arrival of a people’s Europe . . . of people who share our fundamental views: the desire to strengthen the power of states, to protect ourselves from immigration and to defend our identity”. 

Additional reporting by Ben Hall

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