Explaining the FN/RN’s Electoral Performance in France since 2017

• In Event: Populism, Power, Accountability, and Opposition (Pre-Recorded)

Abstract

Despite attaining an unprecedented share of the vote in the 2017 French presidential race and winning more parliamentary seats than ever before under the country’s majoritarian electoral system in the succeeding legislative election, the Front National’s (FN) performance in the 2017 national elections was widely read within the party and further afield as a disappointing failure. Two and a half years on, however, the party’s electoral position and prospects have dramatically rebounded. The newly rechristened Rassemblement National (RN) won the 2019 European election in France and is currently poised to make substantial gains in the March 2020 municipal elections.
This paper makes sense of this reversal in the FN/RN’s electoral fortunes by analyzing the conditions of political supply—the discursive, strategic and tactical factors conditioning the presentation of the party’s program and image to the electorate—and political demand—the socio-structural, economic and partisan factors mediating the reception of the latter among the electorate—that attended its resurgence. It argues that the RN’s return to the nativist authoritarian and archeo-liberal economic program that characterized the FN under Jean-Marie Le Pen’s leadership, combined with the party’s harnessing of mass-scale social protest against fiscal and structural reforms linked to European integration—has placed the post 2017 FN/RN in a position similar to the ascendant post-1995 FN that would see Le Pen père accede to the second round of the 2002 French presidential election. Namely, as in the case of the latter following the 1998 mégretiste scission, the contemporary FN/RN finds itself, contrary to post-2017 expectations, in a new stage of political ascendancy in the run-up to the 2022 national elections. The paper concludes that although radical right-wing populist parties like the FN have a certain endogenous capacity to shape their electoral performances through their own internally generated programs, discourses and strategies, the impact of the latter is strongly constrained by exogenous political and sociostructural variables that end up determining the resonance of these conditions of political supply among the electorate.

Author

• Gabriel Goodliffe, Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico