How France’s far right built a national movement

Every day, Edwige Diaz and her far-right Rassemblement National aides scour local newspapers in the Gironde region near Bordeaux for leads.

Shopkeepers opening a new store or a football club winning a trophy will be among the recipients of 30 to 50 emails they send out a week: congratulations, commiserations or just hellos. 

Often, it pays off. Diaz, a 36-year-old rising star of Marine Le Pen’s party who was re-elected to parliament in the first round of a French snap election last Sunday, says the owners of a rural restaurant came up to her at a recent pit-stop there to thank her for her supportive words after recent flood damage. 

“They said ‘we didn’t think the RN had people like you’,” Diaz says, adding the couple had complained of being ignored by other local politicians.

Diaz’s methodical work in Gironde is emblematic of the old school local politics embraced by the RN in recent years that has put the far-right party within striking distance of taking power in France. 

When French President Emmanuel Macron called for snap legislative elections last month, he appears to have underestimated the strength of the party led by his longtime rival Le Pen. The RN and allies won handily in the first round with 33 per cent of the vote, followed by the leftwing Nouveau Front Populaire and Macron’s centrist alliance, Ensemble.  

Ahead of the second round on July 7, pollsters say a hung parliament is the most likely scenario, in part because of tactical moves by the leftwing NFP alliance and Ensemble to pull most of their third place candidates out of run-offs. But Le Pen’s anti-immigration, Eurosceptic party is still expected to be the biggest force in the National Assembly with the most seats.

Long a fringe opposition party with little local presence, the RN has gradually stitched together a national network — initially helped by a dozen or so mayorships in small cities and towns like Hénin-Beaumont, Perpignan, and Fréjus.

Louis Aliot, a senior member of the RN elected as mayor of Perpignan in 2020, says he spent years building up local support in the southwestern city. “I moved here and opened up a law firm, and met everyone I could to reassure, reassure and reassure,” he says. “I melted myself into the fabric of the city until people finally saw me as not a fascist, but a respectable young man they could trust.” 

The effort was turbocharged in 2022 by an unprecedented election of 89 deputies to the National Assembly. With the MPs came money from the state funding system for political parties, a change for the usually cash-strapped RN, allowing them to hire more staffers. 

Le Pen then told her troops to fan out every weekend in their districts to attend local events to be what she called the “advocates of citizens” who often feel neglected amid the perceived retreat of public services, such as post offices or hospitals.

Such local presence has furthered Le Pen’s decade-long mission to “detoxify” the far-right movement co-founded in 1972 by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and Pierre Bousquet, a journalist and former soldier in the French unit of the Waffen-SS during the second world war. 

Kévin Pfeffer, RN party treasurer, says the crop of new lawmakers elected in 2022 — he was one in the north-east region of Moselle — enjoyed a newfound status in their districts. “Officials like the prefect, deputy prefect, police chief, and head of the unemployment office — they wanted to meet us,” he says, whereas before the RN was largely shunned by local bigwigs.

Slowly RN support evolved to cover a wider swath of the electorate allowing them to rack up more votes: women, white-collar workers and older people. The RN vote has evolved from one previously made out of protest or anger to one of confidence in the party’s agenda and its leaders Le Pen and her 28-year-old lieutenant Jordan Bardella.

“The vote driven by dissatisfaction still exists, but it has become a secondary driver compared with the support for the ideas and the leadership,” pollster Brice Teinturier wrote last week. 

An early turning point in Le Pen’s quest to professionalise the far right came a decade ago, in 2014, when a party stalwart, Steeve Briois, won a mayoral election in Hénin-Beaumont in northern France. 

The RN capitalised on the economic devastation wrought by factory closures around the town of 26,000 in a former mining area in the Pas-de-Calais region.

The election of Briois as mayor then paved the way for Le Pen’s own election as the local constituency MP in 2017, her third attempt to enter the assembly. 

The following year, having lost the presidential election to Macron, she rebranded the Front National party to the Rassemblement National, aiming to make voters forget the racist and antisemitic excesses of her father and his contemporaries.

In Hénin-Beaumont, Briois also made some cosmetic changes. Locals describe his attempts to spruce up an area still scarred by shop closures and unemployment. Among the red brick houses, some of them rundown or boarded up, streets are decorated with flower pots. Residents hailed the refurbishment of a swimming pool and the train station that connects them to Lille. 

Mauricette, a retired one-time cleaner and worker in the declining textile industry, also recalls how Hénin-Beaumont’s city hall called her back “pretty quickly” to help her find social housing when her husband died. 

As mayor in Perpignan, Aliot says he also sought to improve people’s everyday lives. He put more city police on the streets, cleaned up the town centre, and tried to revitalise poor neighbourhoods to “make them easier to live in”.

“Politics for decades has lost contact with the people; many elected officials think they are above everyone. Voters do not want this anymore. They want politicians to deal with the problems in their daily lives,” he says. “You have to take care of people.”

Studies have shown that people back the RN for multiple reasons, some ideological and rational, and others that are more subjective, such as a sense that the French “way of life” is in danger or that they do not “feel at home” in France anymore.  

A recent Ipsos poll showed that purchasing power and the cost of living were the top reasons that voters chose the RN in the European election in June, followed by immigration, and crime. Compared to voters from other parties, they were less motivated by issues like the quality of the health services, social inequality, or climate change.  

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Diaz, the Gironde MP, says she was first drawn to the party by its flagship pledge to establish a “national preference” that would favour French citizens for civil service jobs and social housing, as well as by Le Pen herself. But a decade ago when she began campaigning for the RN around her hometown in Gironde she was met with open hostility. “You needed a thick skin,” she says. 

That is no longer the case. “So what ministerial post will it be for you?” a fishmonger at a market cries out to Diaz. 

“We’ve removed those last brakes, that reticence,” Diaz says of the party’s work to break down what she called “caricatures” about their positions. “There’s a triptych at play — it’s the figures of Marine Le Pen, of Jordan Bardella, and the local efforts.”

But beyond a focus on local issues, the RN’s past governance of towns and cities has also been marked by its ideology.

David Noël, a historian and former city council member in Hénin-Beaumont who squared off against Briois, described in a 2020 paper how the town became a laboratory for the party’s ideas.

Briois grandstanded in 2015 during the Syrian refugee crisis by refusing to take any of them in, and the local council passed a charter called “my commune without any migrants”.

The party also still has work to do to eradicate the lingering issue of corruption, which dates back to the 1990s when several FN mayors ended up facing graft charges.

Allegations emerged last year against David Rachline, a close ally of both Le Pen and Bardella who has been mayor of Fréjus, a town on the Cote d’Azur near Cannes, since 2014. 

Investigative journalist Camille Vigogne Le Coat detailed in a book last year how Rachline allegedly signed sweetheart deals with real estate developers, and mismanaged spending to add to the city’s already heavy debts. 

“In Fréjus, you find a system of clientelism around Rachline,” she says in an interview, citing as an example how new units of social housing were allegedly allocated to people on his staff or close to him. Prosecutors opened up a preliminary investigation. Rachline has in the past denied wrongdoing, but could not be reached for comment.

Vigogne Le Coat also documented how racist banter became common in town hall, such as when one of Rachline’s aides posted a message on Facebook condemning (with poop emojis) a TV advertisement that featured a racially mixed couple.

“There is a contradiction between the smooth polished image that Marine Le Pen and the RN’s national leadership convey and the reality in Fréjus,” says Vigogne Le Coat.

Recently, as the spotlight has been trained on the hundreds of RN candidates in snap elections, there have been some unguarded moments too. A first-time MP candidate in Normandy had to withdraw her candidacy this week when an old photo emerged of her wearing a Nazi Luftwaffe cap. Many candidates are unknowns with little experience — a sign of how the RN still does not have a deep bench of talent.

Roger Chudeau, an MP running for re-election, drew a backlash last week when he was asked about a campaign proposal floated by the RN to restrict certain “sensitive” government positions to French nationals. 

Citing a “problem of double loyalties,” Chudeau criticised former education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, who is Franco-Moroccan, as someone who should never have been appointed. “Ministerial positions should be held by Franco-French people, full stop,” he said.

Le Pen repudiated the comments. But many RN voters approve of the party’s “French people first” stance and promises to slash the number of foreigners arriving in the country. The RN says it will cut back welfare benefits and medical insurance for migrants — a message welcomed by some voters who feel cash-strapped amid inflation. 

“Everyone always calls us far right. But my father is Moroccan, it’s not racist to support them,” says Jimmy, a 32-year-old undertaker at a funeral home in northern France who was at Le Pen’s election party on Sunday in Hénin-Beaumont.

He is concerned about everyday challenges like his grandmother’s €900 a month pension and his struggle to get a pay raise. “We need to help the French before helping other countries,” he says, referring to military aid to Ukraine.

Macron, who won the presidency as an outsider in 2017, initially talked about bringing politics closer to the people. He pledged to govern differently by introducing more citizen participation via referendums and consultative committees on issues like climate change.

But such promises soon faded. Macron’s scepticism of parties and desire to centralise power at the Élysée Palace led him to neglect his new centrist party, then called La République en Marche, according to former party members.

One former MP elected in 2017 with LREM admitted that the lack of party structure meant they did not win many mayorships or elections to choose heads of regions and departments, which carry considerable local power. 

“Macron was never interested in the party,” the person says. “LREM was not a force, neither for debate and policies, nor for the action of the president’s parliamentary group.”

However, Florent Boudié, one of Macron’s MPs still in the running in another district in Gironde, argues that RN boasts about its superior ground game were overdone.

A former Socialist MP before joining LREM in 2017, Boudié says has been able to rely on municipal connections and a power base partly built up in his earlier role. Among his priorities, he says, have been to keep local hospitals open and equip medical centres with high-end scanners. 

Speaking at a campaign stop at a market in Libourne, he says that around the picturesque town on the Dordogne river, the far right’s momentum has been anchored in a sense of abandonment felt by many, in contrast to prosperous Bordeaux nearby. That echoed a national phenomenon, he adds. 

“Beyond a form of defiance, you get the sense people feel they’re somehow not where things are at, be it culturally, economically, or with leisure activities,” says Boudié. “They feel forgotten by the Republic.”

Boudié faces an uphill battle to beat back the RN candidate, and will need almost all of the leftist voters to back him in the second round. But at national level the co-ordinated strategy adopted by Macron and the leftwing NFP to keep the RN out of power by pulling hundreds of their candidates from the second round of the snap election looks set to pay off.

A poll carried out on July 2 by IFOP found that two-thirds of those asked did not want the RN to win an outright majority, an illustration of how the party has a solid base but also a significant bloc of opponents.  

Even if the RN does not manage to win the 289 out of 577 seats required to force Macron to name an RN prime minister at the head of a far-right government, the party’s politicians will keep laying groundwork for future elections. 

In Gironde, the MP Diaz is trying to visit every corner of her constituency. In the small town of Cavignac, many passers-by at a fruit-and-vegetable market greet Diaz with kisses, peppering her with stories of nephews or grandchildren who’ve seen her out and about.

There and in another nearby village where Diaz hosts supporters for a small rally, RN campaigners ask people for their phone numbers. They will be used to build up the party’s database of supporters and invite them to local aperitifs or campaign events. 

They aim to follow up with people who have gripes or requests, helping them navigate France’s thicket of bureaucracy by pushing their dossiers to the top of the pile. Aides cited the example of a funeral parlour which was struggling to get local permits to install a new crematorium until Diaz intervened.

Political opponents concede that Diaz is hard-working and polished. But Véronique Hammerer, the defeated MP for Macron’s centrist alliance in this district, says her opponent’s local triumph is also down to the public’s deep dislike of the sitting president and what she sees as an irrational fervour around the RN promises. 

“It’s so much easier to be a demagogue,” Hammerer says. Diaz has managed to build such a following that Hammerer says her neighbour has installed two candles by a photo of her, like a Madonna. 

Francis Paludeto, a 61-year-old rubbish collector, used to cast blank votes before becoming a supporter of Diaz. He appreciates her efforts to stop cutbacks to rubbish pick-ups on people’s doorsteps, and says Macron has “turned his back on people”.

French voters must give the RN power, he says. “They have ideas that can change politics.”