In 1965, then-President Charles De Gaulle declared that France was neither a left-wing nor a right-wing country, but in the aftermath of the May 1968 student and worker riots, that all changed. During President Georges Pompidou's administration (1969-1974), the neo-Gaullist party became more and more conservative.
This rightist orientation was enhanced in the 1980s when the socialist-communist coalition took power in 1981 for the first time since the beginning of the Fifth Republic in 1958. The right-wing parties voiced harsh opposition to a political program, whose aim was to break with the capitalist system.
French right-wing parties had to face a new political challenger as the rising politician star of the 1980s in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen and his populist stance on immigration. Nonetheless, the French right-wing parties did not assume their conservative beliefs, they were de facto conservative parties.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy inherited this conservative framework when he became the UMP former RPR party leader in 2004, which he enhanced his chances to win in 2007, for having a very strong right-wing program and message in particular on the issue of national identity.
President Sarkozy aimed to margianalize the RN party, yet it has continued to gain traction, evident in election results, media and public opinion. In the 2017 presidential election, the overall protest vote reached 21.3% for left-wing candidates (Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Philippe Poutou and Nathalie Arthaud) and 27.1% for right-wing candidates (Marine Le Pen, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, François Asselineau and Jacques Cheminade).
In the 2022 presidential election, the right-wing protest vote accounted for 32.3% of the votes cast by Le Pen, Eric Zemmour and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, compared with 23.3% for the left-wing protest vote. Between 2017 and 2022, the protest vote in the presidential election was dominated by the right, while increasing more strongly on the right (+5.2 points) than on the left (+2 points).
As it grows, the RN’s electorate is diversifying. It is growing in towns with more than 100,000 inhabitants (excluding Paris), where its share (18%) in the first round of the legislative elections is about the same as the national average (19%). The RN vote is growing in the upper social categories. Between the first round of the 2017 parliamentary elections and the 2022 parliamentary elections, the RN party (or previously Front National) vote among white-collar workers has risen from 5% to 13%, and the vote among those with intermediate professions rose from 11% to 16%.
The main conservative party is now known as Les Republicains (the Republicans). The then-party leader Sarkozy engineered a name change in 2015, designed to distance the new party from the old, the UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire), which had been in turmoil since the 2012 election defeat.
This is one of the largest political parties in France, although the conventional French conservative party is now called Les Republicains. Though Les Republicains represent the right wing of French politics, on the international spectrum of political positioning, most party activists and representatives would consider themselves closer, politically, to U.S. President Joe Biden’s Democrats and to Utah's Sen. Mitt Romney's centrist Republicans in the United States.
The far right in French politics is occupied by two parties, the Rassemblement National (RN), formerly Front National, and the National Front founded by Jean Marie Le Pen, and currently led by his daughter Marine Le Pen, and chaired by the Le Pen darling boy: Jordan Bardella. The RN party is a classic extreme right-wing party, campaigning on a narrative of national preference, law-and-order, and anti-immigration, notably the migration of people of Muslim and Arab descent.
The RN party has won the battle of populism: 39% of voters "strongly agree" or "somewhat agree" with the ideas of the RN party, while 28% of voters say they “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” with the ideas of LFI. Moreover, with 48% of voters who “strongly disagree” with the RN’s party ideas, 28% say they “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” with LFI’s party ideas. In addition, with 48% of voters "not at all in agreement” with its ideas, LFI is, after the Reconquete! party (54%) and Debout la France (49%), one of the three political formations whose ideas are most widely rejected.
Trying to weave a decidedly tricky course between the left and the right in French politics, former presidential candidate François Bayrou created the MoDem or Mouvement Democratique in an attempt to distance himself and his followers from the perceived liberal policies of President Nicolas Sarkozy. This party is in the political center but with just two deputies elected in the 2012 general elections, and Bayrou losing his seat, the MoDem's future hangs in the balance.
After supporting François Hollande in the second round of the 2012 presidential elections, Francois Bayrou lost a lot of credit, and the MoDem party has since then fallen into relative insignificance. In 2017, Bayrou was an early backer of President Emmanuel Macron in the presidential race – the Alliance Centrist is a center-right party, part of the UDI, and is led by Jean Arthuis, a former Conservative minister in President Jacques Chirac's administration.
“En Marche” ("In Movement") was not a classic party with a solid grassroots and strong leaders nationally like the Socialist party and the former RPR / UMP in the 1980s and 1990s, but a movement, basically a grassroots movement supported by hundreds of thousands of people across France, who had become disillusioned by traditional politics and politicians.
Thus, Macron was presented by the mainstream media as an anti-system politician, but in other more significant ways the French president turned out to be the conventional product of the French “system.” Ironically, he wrote a book in 2017, called "Revolution," where he wanted to make an end to the old world of politics in France.
While many of the former En Marche (Renaissance) party elected MPs were political novices in 2017 and 2022 were experienced parliamentarians from both left and right, who had already backed Macron in the presidential election in 2017 and 2022, and joined the new party rather than go with the imploding Socialist party or with the fragmented Les Republicains party, where the latter is moving further to the extreme right. A dynamic that makes the RN party today look like the RPR party of Jacques Chirac and his vocal Interior Minister Charles Pasqua in the 1980s.
Creating a high-profile and popular party to occupy the middle ground in French politics, Macron tried to achieve what centrist or moderate politicians in many other European countries did. He has created a non-partisan bloc in the political center that had shown itself able to govern, yet the Ben Alla scandal in 2018, later the Yellow Vests protests, and the protests against the retirement reform plan bill did end his ambition, and paved the road to the right-wing xenophobic, nationalist and populist parties like RN and Reconquete! to thrive.
In summary, Ms. Le Pen is strategically eyeing the 2027 presidential election. Despite the unpredictable nature of politics over the last four years, the current political landscape seems favorable for her, with factors such as high inflation, internal challenges within the right of LR, vulnerabilities in the 2022 presidential coalition NUPES, and a positive political and media atmosphere following the ongoing conflict in Palestine. Additionally, the recent passage of a controversial immigration bill, supported by the far-right RN party and extremist MPs of Les Republicains, in the French parliament further cements the far-right's political agenda, signaling a significant departure from the "equality" principle in France's immigration policy, a change not witnessed in the last four decades but approved by President Macron.
