“If you want to give us a go, we’ll need an absolute majority.” Ahead of France’s snap parliamentary elections, the National Rally’s top candidate Jordan Bardella insisted he’d only become prime minister if he had the numbers to implement his programme. After the first round on 30 June, this still seemed a possibility: his party came first in 297 of 577 local races. Yet in the 7 July runoff races, the National Rally was unable to push home its advantage. Its opponents rallied against it, voting tactically, and Bardella ended up with only a 143-strong contingent, the third-biggest force in parliament. Marine Le Pen insisted this was “a victory postponed” for her party. For Bardella, National Rally was thwarted by “a coalition of dishonour” between Macron and “far-left forces”.
Still, there were more critical responses from within the National Rally: it had not just been unfairly blocked or hit a ceiling of support but rather it had been punished for its failed efforts to “professionalise” its operation. Already before the runoff, its candidate list came under scrutiny: Bardella admitted there were “casting errors” among dozens of prospective MPs found to have made egregious racist comments. One candidate even had a criminal conviction for an armed hostage-taking. The night after the second-round vote, the party’s director-general Gilles Pennelle resigned.
Bardella confessed before the runoffs that National Rally had “black sheep” who needed weeding out of its parliamentary group. Yet his next move didn’t exactly show that this was a firm stance of principle. On 8 July, the day after the French result, Bardella was announced as president of the Patriots for Europe group in the EU parliament, alongside Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom and Matteo Salvini’s League. This is one of three hard-to-far right groups in Brussels. Less Atlanticist than Giorgia Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group and more sharply opposed to Ursula von der Leyen’s tenure, Patriots for Europe also stands apart from the more anti-systemic Europe of Sovereign Nations group centred on the Alternative for Germany.
Bardella’s group is a rebadged version of the alliance previously called Identity and Democracy. Adding on Orbán’s party as well as Spain’s Vox and the Czech ANO, it is now the third-largest force in the European parliament, behind only the European People’s Party and the Socialists. It outmatches even the classic pro-European liberal camp around Emmanuel Macron.
Still, this pact with relative minnows is not the prize that Bardella was hoping for: the French weekly Le Canard Enchaîné reported that Le Pen had delayed the formation of this group a week in case the French result had gone differently – for instance if National Rally needed to enter coalition talks with centre-right allies that would have made ties to Orbán a liability. Bardella, an MEP since age 23, did not attend the group’s launch on 8 July.
Yet the alliance with Orbán and co. is more a product of necessity than choice, after Meloni’s ECR rebuffed National Rally. In recent months, Bardella has in fact extended Le Pen’s efforts to normalise the party’s positions, especially on foreign policy. On 19 June, he insisted that he had “no intention of questioning France’s commitments on the international stage. It’s a matter of credibility among our European partners and Nato allies.” In May, his party broke off ties with the Alternative for Germany, which opposes arms supplies to Ukraine and wants a vote on euro exit. If Le Pen’s party once called for this too, Bardella today (falsely) insists that this was all “before his time”. He still wants a rebate on France’s financial contribution to the EU but frames his policy in the conventional right-wing language of “order in the public accounts as well as in the streets”.
Still, while disappointed by the election results, the National Rally did see a rise with more traditional right-wing voters. While it has never governed, Le Pen’s party today polls highest for economic confidence, including on reducing public debt. Its campaign focus on this point recycled many old refrains from establishment parties, and was clearly designed to reassure homeowners, savers, and people with middle-income jobs. This seems to be working: in this election, National Rally recorded its steepest increases in support among pensioners (from 12 to 31 per cent since 2022) and those earning over €3,000 a year (from 15 per cent to 32). The idea that it has reached a ceiling of support ignores these massive breakthroughs among groups historically reticent about the party.
Coverage of the election has often hailed the “republican front” that other parties formed against the National Rally. But this story is easily overstated. The centre-right — today much-reduced — has both seeped considerable support to Le Pen and softened its stance against her. Confronted with a two-horse race between a centre-right and a Le Pen candidate, 70 per cent of left-wing voters backed the former and only two per cent voted for the National Rally. The centre-right electorate didn’t repay the favour. Unlike in 2022, in this election centre-right voters faced with a runoff between the broad-left alliance and the National Rally were more likely to support Le Pen’s candidate. The Gaullist party did not collapse: with far stronger local roots than the National Rally, it held on well to its existing seats, and only a handful of leaders defected to Le Pen’s camp. But its electorate is more open to voting National Rally than before.
Ahead of this election, many pundits suggested that Bardella’s arrival in government would soften his party’s edges and expose its incoherence. This perhaps underestimated the damage it could do in power. But if there was some truth in the idea, the actual result has given us the reverse scenario. France now has a fragmented parliament with no obvious path to a majority, and in which the most popular party will not lead the government. The left-wing alliance has nowhere near the numbers to enact its programme; we may well see a stop-gap solution where an enfeebled Macronite camp draws on other parties’ ad hoc support and dares them to vote down its budgets. This could look especially brutal as EU authorities push for fiscal restraint, with €25 billion in cuts already floated.
The conversation is no longer about leaving the EU, even in Bardella’s Patriots for Europe group. Yet the National Rally remains well-placed to benefit if more pressure is placed on France’s budget, especially faced with a motley governmental coalition. In Italy in recent years, cross-party and technocratic cabinets were a gift to hard-right forces who demagogically denounced — all in one go — government profligacy, interference from Brussels, and the effects of public-service cuts. The same can happen in France. Such a message can rally not only the “left behind” ex-industrial working class, but also broader numbers of homeowners and pensioners whose economic confidence is already rock-bottom. They may be receptive to a message directed against “welfare scrounger” migrants as well as elites.
The situation is far from hopeless, and the left has a strong, if not expanding, bedrock of support to draw on. The race to succeed Macron as president in 2027 is an open contest, and this result showed that Le Pen’s victory is not already guaranteed. But if her party’s final seat numbers on July 7 were below expectations, the National Rally can now hardly be dismissed as a protest vote or angry outsiders. With France set for political logjam and Europe likely on the brink of resumed austerity, the conditions are converging for the far right to make the final step towards power.
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