Next year, France could elect its first far-right leader since 1944. Campaigning for the elections, which are scheduled for next April, is already underway, and opinion poll after opinion poll shows that the Rassemblement National, also known as the RN or National Rally, has a commanding lead. The popularity of the RN—which was founded in 1972 as the National Front by Jean-Marie Le Pen, before being rebranded by his daughter Marine in 2018—has grown steadily over the past 30 years, boosted by unease over rising immigration and France’s economic struggles. In 2017 and 2022 presidential elections, this sentiment carried Marine Le Pen to the second round of voting, where she lost soundly to Emmanuel Macron both times.
But a rerun of those elections is not in store for 2027. Macron cannot run again, due to term limits, and as the RN continues gaining ground, his once unified base of establishment voters has dispersed. Le Pen is likely not running either, after being found complicit in the embezzlement of EU funds, although she is appealing the decision. Still, surveys, such as one published by Odoxa in May, suggest that the RN’s president and likely candidate, Jordan Bardella, will win over 30 percent of first-round votes. No other candidate commands more than around 17 percent of current voters’ support.
A far-right victory in the second round is by no means guaranteed, but it is, for the first time, a serious possibility. The year 2027, in other words, could end up being France’s equivalent of a U.S. or British “2016” moment. A decade after Brexit shattered the consensus around the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union and Donald Trump detonated mainstream U.S. politics, there are reasons to anticipate a rupture in French governance. And such a rupture would, in turn, send shock waves through the EU itself.
A far-right victory in France would be far more consequential than Hungary’s and Italy’s experimentations with far-right rule in recent years. With the fifth-largest Western economy, membership in the UN Security Council, and status as a nuclear state, France carries significant influence over the EU. It is a central and founding member of the bloc and still has about a dozen sovereign territories around the world. Compared to former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban or Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a far-right president in the Palais de l’Élysée would have far more leverage to carry out the far-right playbook of subverting the EU’s law-based, supranational architecture. At a moment when the EU is seeking to strengthen its unity and global influence, to assert its sovereign independence from the United States, and to push back against Russia and China, the upcoming French election carries considerable risk.
GRADUALLY, THEN SUDDENLY
Since 1958, when French leader Charles de Gaulle oversaw a new constitution and established the Fifth French Republic in the wake of an attempted coup and political collapse, French politics have alternated predictably between the center-right and center-left. French voters, who tend to be cautious but also suspicious of incumbents, could expel whichever bloc was in power knowing that nothing substantial would change. But by 2017, the French had begun to agitate for something new. They had grown sick of the failures of both left and right to reduce unemployment and deliver improved living standards, state education, and health care. Macron, who founded a new political party and ran under the slogan “Neither left nor right,” offered a painless revolution. His approach was somewhat bolder and less corrupt than the muddle-through managerialism that went before him, but not much more successful. He reduced unemployment, but he failed to boost working- and middle-class incomes. Over his nine-year tenure, his failures have led more voters to believe that Bardella or Le Pen are now, as they say, the only alternative.
Many urban and educated voters retain a certain revulsion against the far right’s simplistic populism and racist origins, but many voters in the suburban, rural, and working classes are tempted by the RN’s agenda to crack down on illegal immigration, crime, and the rise of radical Islam. These issues are real, but they are not as acute as the right-leaning parts of the French media and far-right candidates paint them to be. After celebrations of a French soccer team’s victory in the Champions League turned into riots in May, for instance, Bardella said on television that the scenes were “reminiscent of civil war” and urged the French to “wake up,” because such rioters would soon “be breaking down the doors of apartment buildings and breaking into your homes.” He blamed the violence, in part, on immigration and the failure of France’s assimilation policies. The RN’s strongest electoral footholds tend to be in villages with only or mostly white inhabitants, or suburbs with little crime, but as in the United States and the United Kingdom, social media silos have reinforced conviction around this anger and sense of loss.
Mainstream French parties are also losing the economic argument. In past elections, center-left and center-right parties mocked the economic contradiction of Le Pen’s calls for both lower taxes and higher spending on social policies—a heavily revised version of her father’s anti-state politics. But in the last nine years, Macron’s economic policy has spent freely to soften the blow of the COVID-19 lockdown on individuals and businesses and to alleviate the inflationary pain of the Ukraine war. These initiatives were popular, but they also added roughly $1.1 trillion to France’s national debt. Accumulated national debt is now around 118 percent of its GDP—nearly 20 percent higher than a decade ago and the third-highest proportion in Europe, after Greece and Italy. The country, in other words, is broke, and it is difficult to argue that an RN president would be less fiscally responsible.
LOST THE BATTLE, NOT THE WAR
There is little doubt that the RN candidate, whether Bardella or Le Pen, will win the election’s first round. The more important question, then, is whether he or she will be able to assemble a majority in round two. Much of this will depend on the opponent, and whether that candidate inspires French voters to stick with their innate caution or feeds their appetite for change.
In 2017 and 2022, Macron brought together a “Republican Front” of far-left, center-left, center, and center-right blocs to soundly defeat Le Pen. That coalition has not disappeared, but it has weakened. Elections for every town hall in France in March, which produced victories for many mainstream candidates, suggest that there is still an impulse among many voters of the center-left and center-right to vote tactically to keep the far right out of power. Such voters’ favored candidates include former Socialist President François Hollande, who has yet to declare but seems to believe that he can emerge as champion of the quarrelsome, moderate left, and Macron’s first prime minister, Édouard Philippe, who seeks to glue the splintered center and center-right into a revived version of the Gaullist movement that dominated French right-of-center politics for much of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Philippe is the current front-runner for second, with 17 percent of respondents in a May Odoxa poll saying that they would vote for him if the election were held that Sunday.
The year 2027 could be France’s equivalent of a U.S. or British “2016” moment.
But these politicians are but two in a field of at least 20 contenders, ranging from flavors of the Trotskyist far left to other nationalist-populist movements. Most significant, Philippe will have to contend with the magnetism and cynicism of the perennial far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who tracked 16 percent in the May Odoxa poll and whose voting base has demonstrated much less of a willingness to vote tactically to keep the RN out of power. Mélenchon lost to Le Pen in 2022’s first round by just over one percentage point and remains popular, especially with the young and with those in troubled multiracial inner suburbs of French cities. He is, however, also feared and detested by much of the rest of France, with only 15 of French respondents expressing trust in him in a May Toluna-Harris poll.
The proliferation of candidates may reduce the score needed to reach the runoff, making each candidate’s odds at winning something like a lottery. The decision over second place could be decided by just a few thousand votes, out of roughly 47 million. Those thousand votes could, in turn, determine the final result. One May poll by Toluna-Harris suggests that Philippe would lose to Bardella by eight percentage points, whereas Mélenchon would lose by more than 30.
The other great unknown is the Bardella effect. Le Pen, the RN’s de facto leader, has been positioning to run for years, and polls have her winning about 33 percent of voters in the first round, despite the March 2025 court ruling that she was complicit in the embezzling of roughly $5 million in EU funds. If she loses her appeal of the ruling, set to be announced on July 7, she will be banned from running for five years, and the candidacy will fall to Bardella, who polls suggest would win even more votes—around 35 percent, but possibly up to 38 percent. The RN is already preparing for this scenario, and Bardella is in a good position, having fashioned an effective twenty-first-century political persona, with a polished and approachable manner and a talent for speaking in calm sound bites on TV and on Tik Tok.
Bardella’s main weakness is his age. He will be 31 at the time of next year’s vote, and second-round voters would likely wonder whether he has what it takes to be head of state and how he would measure up to experienced bullies such as Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. In private, some RN strategists have suggested that Bardella would be better off as the RN candidate in 2032. If he does win next year, he could be overwhelmed by domestic and international crises and damage the RN in the long term.
ONLY THE BEGINNING
Whether an RN-led government could truly change France would depend on the legislative election that Bardella or Le Pen would almost certainly call after taking office. Almost every newly elected president has done this since 1958, and typically their party wins. But much of what made Macron’s second term such a struggle and, ultimately, a failure, was his inability to gain that advantage in 2022: with no clear majority in the legislature, he could not garner sufficient support to pass many of his initiatives on the economy, the budget deficit, and the national debt. The RN could fall into a similar trap, especially given its unpopularity in metropolitan France, and if it did the country could be forced to endure several more years of parliamentary deadlock.
Whether it had a majority or not, though, the RN’s first big governing challenge would be its 2027 budget. Bardella has said that he would respect Macron’s commitment to reduce the budget deficit from five percent of GDP to the EU’s three percent limit by 2029. But the RN economic platform contains internal tensions that would make its governing approach hard to forecast. The party is trapped between statist and free market impulses and factions, the former favored by Le Pen and the latter backed by Bardella. The party has promised lower taxes but more social spending, and a reduced pension age for some workers but a higher one for those who enter the workforce late. Its budget plans depend on unrealistically high estimates for savings from slowing immigration, and thereby immigrants’ social benefits, and fighting fraud. Such economic uncertainty would mean that if the RN were elected, bond markets would likely revolt, selling French bonds and increasing the cost of government borrowing and servicing debt.
Privately, RN strategists say that they would moderate many of their economic policies so long as they could claim victories on immigration and crime. The ultimate economic test for them will thus be if they can keep the French budget serviceable. Here, ironically, they are partly sheltered by France’s membership in the EU’s monetary union, which is much bigger, and therefore more stable, than a French currency would be. Still, if the RN mismanaged finances badly enough, the consequences wouldn’t just hurt France; the country’s economy is big enough that a deep French budget crisis would shake confidence in the entire euro currency itself.
A far-right victory could also lead to another acute spasm of the urban and inner-suburban riots that have exploded regularly since 2005. Politicians from Mélenchon’s far-left party, La France Insoumise, or France Unbowed, have all but promised such an outcome, saying that they would refuse to recognize a far-right victory and that there would be “five rounds” of votes next year—two in the presidential election, two in the parliamentary election, and one in the streets.
RN strategists know that they would face intense pressure from bond markets and the French technocracy from day one and that, to avoid the kind of meltdown that could destroy their government, they would have to compromise. Yet they would also be under pressure from their triumphant base to demonstrate that they were following through on their promise to abandon what they see as anti-French, pro-elite, and Eurocentric policies. Any sign that the RN was turning mainstream would provoke ridicule from opponents and anger from supporters.
YOUNG, SCRAPPY, AND HUNGRY
The RN is no longer the anti-Semitic, anti-European, anti-NATO, anti-American party that it was when founded in the 1970s, but it remains inward-looking and skeptical of the EU’s power. A far-right government taking control in France would change the country, but it would likely be even more destabilizing to the European Union. France is a large founding member state with a tradition of leading the way on European integration and EU policy, not one of undermining the club from within, as Orban’s far-right government in Hungary did. Many of its senior figures are sympathetic to Russia and Putin, and an RN government could block further aid to Kyiv, seek to unravel EU sanctions against Russia, and oppose Ukrainian membership to the EU.
Even if the RN failed to garner a parliamentary majority, having the presidency would, according to the French constitution, give it extensive authority over foreign policy, including France’s policy toward Europe. As the bloc’s second-largest economy after Germany, only permanent member of the UN Security Council, and only nuclear power, it could disrupt the EU through a series of extended legal and constitutional battles with Brussels.
Bardella has attempted to reassure nervous Europeans about such a possibility. In May, he suggested in a German media interview that he could form an alliance with center-right Chancellor Friedrich Merz to make Europe more competitive and less bureaucratic. Yet he would still likely pick a series of fights around issues such as France’s contribution to the EU budget, common European immigration policy, and EU rules on electricity pricing. Bardella has already argued that the free movement of people allowed in the EU should apply only to EU citizens, in effect re-creating internal borders. An RN government would also likely test the European single market by imposing a preference for French companies for local and national government contracts in France, which is currently prohibited by EU law.
France could bring some, if not all, EU decision-making to a halt.
The RN’s current budget proposal also depends on France refusing to pay a portion of its contributions to Brussels, which would violate EU law. This would provoke a crisis of faith in the EU. No country has ever refused to pay its contribution to the EU budget—not even the United Kingdom in the 1980s, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher demanded that the EU give the country its “money back” for what she alleged were overpayments. (In the end, British contribution requirements were lowered to compensate for what the EU recognized as overpayments.) If France refused payment altogether, the EU would be plunged into a lengthy political and possibly fiscal crisis.
The RN’s official policy in the 2024 European election, which it has not changed, was to propose to replace the law-based, supranational EU architecture with the “freely agreed cooperation between member states,” ending 50 years of French commitment to the current EU model. France could not impose such a drastic change unilaterally, but it could bring some, if not all, EU decision-making to a halt.
Bardella might not destroy the EU, but he would freeze all hopes of progress toward making Europe more capable of standing up to China, Russia, and the United States. Whereas the EU seeks to promote greater common borrowing, a bigger budget, and common industrial, immigration, and defense policies, the RN wants to reduce the EU’s budget and authority in these domains. The RN favors increasing the French defense budget, but it opposes a common European defense policy and remains committed, in the long term, to France quitting the integrated military structure that underlies NATO. A far-right-led France would also likely abandon Macron’s plan to create an embryonic European nuclear deterrent by positioning French nuclear-capable aircraft in other EU states and Norway. And although the RN has condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it has also systematically opposed EU and French aid to Kyiv, a position it would likely push even further if given the power to do so.
There’s no telling what the relationship between Paris and Washington would be under a far-right French government. Trump and Bardella share some ideology and attitudes, notably on immigration, but Bardella has criticized Trump’s approaches to Greenland, Venezuela, transatlantic trade, and restrictions on U.S. tech giants as attacks on national sovereignty. Bardella’s U.S. counterpart for most of his term wouldn’t even be Trump, but whoever succeeds him in 2029.
What the next election has in store for France, then, is by no means certain. But it is already bringing the country much closer to a far-right future than any time since the end of World War II, and the possible shock waves would extend across Europe. Any RN president would, of course, be torn between compromise and feeding the expectations and prejudices of the party’s base. But at the very least, such a scenario would push France and Europe into five years of confusion and paralysis. Amid the upheaval of the postwar global order wrought by China, the United States, and Russia, that chance is something France and Europe can ill afford.
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