The quest for respectability of the National Rally (RN) is a long staircase. But some steps are more difficult to climb than others. Like this damn “extreme right” label, which Marine Le Pen’s party has always contested. The member for Pas-de-Calais has just recorded a legal defeat in this cultural battle. The Council of State confirmed on September 21 the validity of a circular from the Ministry of the Interior attributing this nuance to it in the context of the senatorial elections.
Its candidates were therefore counted within the “extreme right” cleavage bloc, alongside “left”, “center” or “right”. The party denounced a “difference in treatment between political movements [susceptible de porter] attack on the sincerity of the vote” and a violation of the principle of impartiality. Argument not accepted. “In the state of the investigation, none of these means is likely to create serious doubt as to the legality of the contested circular”, estimated the summary judge. This failure prolongs a political defeat. The day after the 2022 legislative elections, Marine Le Pen had requested that her group not sit on the far right of the Hemicycle. Clear refusal of other group presidents of the National Assembly.
Semantics, political key
This is how. Marine Le Pen takes care of her semantics. In small steps, the member for Pas-de-Calais smooths the presentation of her political offer to reassure public opinion. In 2018, the National Front became the National Rally. Less warlike. The “national preference”, the keystone of the party’s project, is transformed into a “national priority”. Less xenophobic.
There remains the “extreme right”. Freeing yourself from this qualification is an old Frontist obsession. In 1982, the National Front obtained in court the right of reply on TF1, which had described one of its candidates as a “right-wing extremist”. Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine have threatened legal action against those who use this term to describe the movement. The father took action against The world And Releasewithout success. Justice had rebutted an “abuse of rights [visant] in a deliberately dissuasive manner to censor the journalist’s vocabulary”. The far-right FN? An “ethical misconduct on the part of journalists”, an “act of activism” and an “intellectual blunder”, scathed the party’s president, Marine Le Pen, in 2013.
“A difficulty in our fight”
Marine Le Pen knows how much this term is an obstacle in view of 2027. “It is an additional burden on our fight, but also on the quality of public debate”, complains the deputy for the Somme Jean-Philippe Tanguy, n° 2 of the RN in the Assembly. “Extremism” suggests marginality and distances its herald from the barycenter of popular aspirations. How then can we gain majority support? The term refers to a three-pronged conception of politics, where instinct prevails over reason. Violence, on reflection. The “extreme right” finally carries a heavy symbolic and historical charge in France, with an immediate association with the Vichy regime or Italian fascism.
Make them spit out the word, will they swallow the thing? The extreme right has no legal definition. Political science researchers are struggling to find a scientific definition. Consensus hardly exists, including in the case of the RN. The historian Nicolas Lebourg – holder of a majority position among his peers – ranks him on the far right because of his “organicist” project. The latter would compare society to a living being threatened by foreign bodies. Hence the desire to “regenerate this unitary community, whether based on ethnicity, race or nationality”. Conversely, political scientist Jean-Yves Camus depicts the RN as a “radical right” party in view of its recent evolution.
This vagueness is inherent to scientific controversy. The RN takes advantage of this to impose its definition of the extreme right, from which it is of course excluded. A restrictive definition, which limits the ideological camp to its most radical fraction. “The refusal of democracy and elections, the call to violence, racism and the desire to install the single party”, listed Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1996. Twenty-seven years later, Jean-Philippe Tanguy – from Nicolas Dupont-Aignan’s movement, Debout La France – dons the same player-referee jersey to deliver a similar definition: “Distrust of democracy, lack of respect for elections, use of violence and demand for discrimination based on religion, gender, supposed ethnicity or sexuality. That’s not us!”
The end of ideological isolation
The RN claims advantages in its cultural war. Marine Le Pen has never been involved in anti-Semitism and has always distanced herself from revisionist comments from his father. She renounced the abolition of dual nationality or did not speak of “remigration” during the last presidential election. These fundamental developments do not affect the fundamentals: national preference and migration measures which violate our bloc of constitutionality and various international commitments of France. And in the intellectual patchwork that is the party, some survivals from the past: the identity student union La Cocarde provides it with a significant number of collaborators and the former gudards and youth friends of Marine Le Pen Frédéric Chatillon and Alexandre Loustau still have shares in the company e-Politic, which manages the party’s communications.
No matter: at the RN, we observe with interest a journalistic inflection. Several editorial offices – generally right-wing media outlets – no longer describe Marine Le Pen as a far-right figure. “National right” or “nationalist party” dot this new rhetoric. A victory for a camp struck by the syndrome of the besieged citadel.
The political environment finally benefits the RN. The party is emerging from its ideological isolation. Marine Le Pen now has an opponent on her right: Eric Zemmour refocused his close enemy during the last presidential election by embracing the theory of the great replacement. The MP prefers the expression “migratory submergence”. Way to sanitize the form of the statement without softening the substance. The president of the RN, Jordan Bardella, for his part does not reject the theory, without promoting it as an element of language.
For their part, Les Républicains (LR) are moving closer to the historic positions of the RN on immigration. The Le Pen camp joked about the right’s “copy and paste” after his presentation of two bills in the spring. During the 2021 LR primary, Eric Ciotti spoke out in favor of a “national and European community priority [pour] employment, benefits and housing”. This ideological shift may taint LR’s appeal to a moderate electorate, but it causes the term “extreme right” to lose some vigor. If my proposals are equivalent to that of the heir of the UMP, how could I be presented like this? “Less French people see them as far right or say to themselves that the far right is a problem”, fears a Renaissance deputy.
A misguided expression
Many LR elected officials still qualify the RN as a far-right group. But the sentence seems dropped out of habit, as it is hardly accompanied by an opposition of values. Eric Ciotti thus praises the technical competence of his training to distinguish himself from the RN on sovereign themes. Laurent Wauquiez does not say anything else: “Marine Le Pen is not scary. She is not the devil and can even be popular. But the French know that she would be a problem in power. They know that putting a Le Pen in power will set the country ablaze. There is finally a doubt about his exercise of power.” The name “Le Pen”, this other glass ceiling.
Reinforcements are not always where you think they are. Marine Le Pen found one as surprising as she was unintentional: Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The rebellious leader easily drops the accusation in collusion with this enemy camp, even if it means making it lose its substance and blurring the lines. Emmanuel Macron speaks of “decivilization” after the urban riots? The sign of a “junction from the right to the extreme right”. The president of Crif declares that the rebels are compromising themselves far from the “republican pact”? “The extreme right no longer has limits.” Fabien Roussel talks about “strainer borders” or talks about “France of benefits”? “There is some Doriot in Roussel,” reacts LFI MP Sophia Chikirou. Reaction from his colleague Raquel Garrido in Humanity : “It’s historical confusion. It disarms us in the face of the extreme right.”
The term “extreme right” remains abrasive. Here it can be used as a weapon to excommunicate the adversary. There, its use on the fly can turn against its author. On July 9, Pap Ndiaye, then Minister of Education, described Europe 1 and CNews as “far-right channels”. Immediate outcry from both media, which bombard the intellectual. At the time, a minister from the left – benevolent towards the exit of Pap Ndiaye – summarized his impasse. “This word must be used to denounce the harshest ideologies, but it allows those who are targeted to put themselves in the position of victims. As the definition is not completely endorsed and consensual, it was a gift for these two media.” Here is the extreme right between two parallel realities: a scientific existence made up of subtle debates, a political-media life where the term is so quickly misused. The RN ends up coming to terms with this gap.