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How Marine Le Pen is preparing for power

The party has its eyes not on protest but on the presidency

The Economist, Feb 25th 2024

It is an annual ritual in France for politicians to make a new year’s address. Time
was that Marine Le Pen, the leader of the hard-right National Rally (RN, formerly the
National Front), did so from the back room of a boxy building in Nanterre, on the drab
outskirts of Paris. In those days the party she took over in 2011 from her father, Jean-
Marie, was more about low-budget protest and fringe provocation than taking power.
This January the job fell to Jordan Bardella, her slick 28-year-old protégé and
now RN president, whom she watched from the front row. In a dark suit and tie, he
spoke from a grand salon on the swanky Avenue Hoche in Paris, a step away from the
Champs-Elysées. The symbolism was potent. The shift from the capital’s periphery to
the heart of elite Paris encapsulates a strategy: the RN is preparing for power.
Ms Le Pen is no stranger to national elections. Since taking the helm at what was
then an extreme-right outfit, co-founded in 1972 by a former member of the
Waffen ss and nostalgic for French-run Algeria, she has shaped it into a nationalist-
populist party. Having stood at three presidential elections, she has made it to the final
run-off in two. Each time, she has lost to the current president, Emmanuel Macron. But
her final score has jumped: from 34% in 2017 to 41% in 2022. In 2027 Mr Macron will
be barred from running for a third consecutive term. Some early polls now suggest—
however prematurely—that this time Ms Le Pen could scrape a victory.
The RN is changing gear. In quiet meetings in the back rooms of Paris, party
officials and elected deputies are gathering input on everything from market risk to
energy policy. Advisers, says one, are working on a handful of legislative bills that would
be ready to go to parliament, and a programme for her first 100 days. A 60-page draft
economic policy was handed to Ms Le Pen in February, written by Jean-Philippe Tanguy,
a young RN deputy and business-school graduate. Each month a secret group of
sympathetic high-level civil servants, many retired but some of them young, meets Ms
Le Pen to offer advice.
Such work is partly about scouting for technocratic talent in a party where this
has long been scant. The RN has just recruited a top ex-Euro-official: Fabrice Leggeri,
the hard-line former head of Frontex, the EU border-control body. A graduate of the
elite École Nationale d’Administration, he has joined the campaign for elections to the
European Parliament in June, which Mr Bardella will launch on March 3rd.
The RN’s outreach is also part of a charm offensive on the Paris establishment.
This is not so much an effort to woo support, unlikely to be forthcoming in a city that
voted overwhelmingly for Mr Macron. Rather, it is a bid to neutralise influential opinion.
In the tight circles of the capital’s elite, the RN hopes to persuade some prominent
figures to stop spreading alarm about what the party’s victory might mean.
 Already some doors are opening. Mr Bardella was invited in November to debate
with students at a top business school. Aides are trying, though with difficulty, to set
up meetings for him and his boss with 40 business leaders. For a party that portrays
itself as the champion of the people, such efforts are necessarily tricky. In 2022 Ms Le
Pen railed against the “globalist” Mr Macron, who “enslaves mankind to the logic of
economics and accounting”. Yet the RN is also now courting more educated voters. In
2022 only 26% of those with a university degree voted for Ms Le Pen in the second
round.
Today’s watchword is reassurance. On policy, Ms Le Pen has dropped calls for
“Frexit”, leaving the EU or the euro, which worried voters, while retaining her core
nationalist demands. On style, today’s RN has been purged of its most thuggish
elements and antisemitic rhetoric. Ms Le Pen’s 87 fellow deputies sit, besuited, in
parliament; two periodically preside over sittings. Having renamed the party, evicted
her father and shed its family-values conservatism, Ms Le Pen has installed a new
generation of loyalists. The single biggest age group among RN deputies is now the 30-
to 39-year-olds. For the first time in 40 years a poll in December showed that a plurality
of the French (45%) no longer consider the party a “danger for democracy”.
How far the RN really has shed its past instincts, however, let alone gained the
skills to govern, is another question. Ms Le Pen is certainly not yet a guest at the clubs
and debates frequented by the Paris elite. Toxic hangers-on still move in her orbit. She
is an admirer of Hungary’s strongman, Viktor Orban, and the RN sits in the European
Parliament with Germany’s far-right AFD. The difficulty for centrist politicians, though,
is that the RN’s normalisation has gone far enough to defang some of their usual tactics
against it. Taking the moral high ground, or scaremongering, no longer washes with
many voters.