France’s Far Right Confronts Life After Le Pen
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WSJ
Apr 02, 2025 12:17 PM IST
For generations, Marine Le Pen’s family have held the reins of France’s nationalist party.
Marine Le Pen described herself as a fighter after she was banned from running for president in France’s 2027 race.
PARIS—Is there life after Le Pen for France’s far right?
France’s Far Right Confronts Life After Le Pen PREMIUM
France’s Far Right Confronts Life After Le Pen
For generations that question was unthinkable as one Le Pen, firebrand Jean-Marie, handed the reins of France’s nationalist party to another, his daughter Marine.
In banning Marine Le Pen from running for the presidency in 2027, however, a French court has forced the Le Pen family party, National Rally, into a reckoning over its future.
The dilemma: whether Le Pen should dig in and fight for her political future or make way for a successor.
The first option means waging an all-out war with French prosecutors in appellate courts as well as the court of public opinion. That approach mirrors President Trump’s campaign against judges and prosecutors, which fired up his supporters and helped turn the tide of the U.S. presidential election in his favor. It also risks bogging down National Rally in litigation with no guarantee Le Pen will secure the right to run, all while alienating swaths of the French electorate who support France’s fiercely independent judiciary.
Picking a successor, meanwhile, is also a path fraught with peril. Le Pen has positioned her protégé, Jordan Bardella, as National Rally’s dauphin, waiting in the wings. A fresh-faced 29-year-old with a gift for viral TikTok posts, Bardella is regarded as a talented politician. Bardella spearheaded National Rally’s campaign during last summer’s snap parliamentary elections, but he has never been under the klieg lights of a contest for France’s highest office.
So far, Le Pen has been mercurial about her intentions. In a TV interview on Monday she described herself as a fighter, saying she wasn’t going to be brought down by a court ruling. But she also praised Bardella as a “tremendous asset for our movement.”
“I hope we won’t have to use that asset any sooner than necessary,” she added.
Le Pen is counting on an unusually swift appeals trial to overturn Monday’s ruling, which convicted her of misusing European Union funds and sentenced her to a five-year ban from running for office again, as well as a four-year prison term. Half of that term was suspended, and the remaining two years could be served with an electronic bracelet, judges said. The Paris appeals court said Tuesday it “will examine this case within a timeframe that should allow a decision to be taken in the summer of 2026.”
Jordan Bardella is waiting in the wings at the National Rally party.
For National Rally, turning the page on Le Pen is challenging because the party has long operated as a cult of personality centered on a Le Pen family member. Jean-Marie Le Pen, who died in January, outraged the public with antisemitic remarks, but he was also a riveting presence on the airwaves with his provocative turns of phrase. His daughter cultivated a folksy image, publicly fawning over her cats, and connecting with rural and working-class voters neglected by mainstream parties.
Some polls, however, suggest that voters are ready for a changing of the guard. A survey by polling firm Odoxa conducted on Monday after the ruling found that 57% of National Rally voters consider Bardella a better candidate than Le Pen for president in 2027. The figure rose to 61% when accounting for voters of all stripes.
Bardella isn’t alone as a pretender to France’s far-right throne. Le Pen’s 35-year-old niece, Marion Maréchal, has had an on-again, off-again relationship with National Rally and her aunt, adopting the Le Pen last name at one point only to jettison it later. Her ambition to one day become the face of France’s far right, however, has always been clear.
After judges ruled on Monday, Maréchal wrote a post on X that included an archival photo of her embracing her aunt. Maréchal recounted how her family had endured “all the attacks, all the injustices” over the decades.
“I am more than ever by Marine’s side at this time,” Maréchal wrote.
Not to be outdone, Bardella posted a photo of Le Pen hugging him with a look of maternal pride on her face. Bardella and Maréchal each appeared on TV on Tuesday morning to defend Le Pen.
“The weakening of Marine Le Pen’s leadership will create more competition and rivalry,” said Olivier Rouquan, a researcher at the Paris-based Study and Research Center for Administrative and Political Sciences.
Jean-Marie Le Pen outraged the French public with his antisemitic remarks.
Support for Bardella within National Rally is strong but he isn’t without critics. Some senior party officials blamed him for the National Rally’s disappointing results during last summer’s snap legislative elections. The campaign won 125 seats in the National Assembly—by far the most in the party’s decadeslong history—but the result underperformed the polls.
There were signs that Bardella and the party failed to thoroughly vet candidates as it scrambled to find people to run in far-flung districts across the country. Days before the vote, local media reports unearthed a photo of a National Rally candidate wearing an officer’s cap with a Nazi swastika. A video interview of another candidate went viral when she tried to defend National Rally against accusations of racism and antisemitism by saying she had a Jewish eye doctor and a Muslim dentist.
Bardella removed some of the controversial candidates from National Rally’s ticket, describing them as “black sheep.”
The episodes stood in contrast to Le Pen’s effort to “de-demonize” the party. After the summer election, Le Pen tasked Bardella with professionalizing its ranks, but senior party officials say he has made little progress on that front.
Le Pen’s strategy of cleaning up her party’s image and building its machinery was designed to persuade French voters that National Rally is ready to govern. It is an approach that aims to mirror the best practices of the political establishment even as she rails against it.
Le Pen’s anti-immigration stance has centered on lax border enforcement and welfare programs that provide migrants with aid without embracing ideology such as the “great replacement” theory, which holds that global elites are bent on replacing Europe’s white population through mass migration from nonwhite regions of the world.
Bardella, on the other hand, has flirted with the idea. “I don’t like the word ‘great replacement’ because I don’t think it’s clear. It’s a very intellectual slogan, but it points to a reality that is true,” Bardella said on national TV in 2021.
On Tuesday, Bardella and Le Pen met with their caucus in the National Assembly, allowing cameras to film part of the proceeding as they sought to harness any public anger toward the court’s decision to mobilize supporters. The party is organizing a petition drive to “save democracy” from what Bardella described as “the tyranny of the judges.”
Le Pen cast the court’s ruling as the political establishment pulling out all the stops to block her from government.
“The system has taken out the nuclear weapon and if they use such a powerful arm against us it’s because we’re on the brink of winning elections,” she said.
Write to Noemie Bisserbe at noemie.bisserbe@wsj.com and Stacy Meichtry at Stacy.Meichtry@wsj.com
France’s Far Right Confronts Life After Le Pen
France’s Far Right Confronts Life After Le Pen
France’s Far Right Confronts Life After Le Pen
France’s Far Right Confronts Life After Le Pen
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