From Political Fringe to Political Mainstream: The Front National and the 2014 Municipal and European Elections in France

Abstract

The succession of Jean-Marie Le Pen by his daughter Marine Le Pen as president of the Front National (FN) in January 2011 heralded a significant strategic shift in the party’s development. In terms of its overarching political objective, the FN has moved from playing its historical spoiler role as an anti-system protest party to recasting itself as a mainstream political formation interested in exercising political power. In order to secure this objective, the FN under Marine Le Pen has adopted a two-pronged discursive and organizational approach. At a discursive level, the FN has toned down the racialized anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic rhetoric that characterized it in the past and instead chosen to couch its rejection of immigration in a broader, more conceptually neutral opposition to neoliberal globalization. The central element underpinning this discursive aggiornamento has been the rejection of the European Union, which is presented as an institutional stalking horse for the latter, conjoined with an avowedly Gaullist reaffirmation of France’s economic and political sovereignty. While the ‘UMPS’ (an acronym combining the initials of the principal center-right and -left parties in France) is busy facilitating Europe’s neo-liberal economic integration, so this new line goes, the FN erects itself as the sole authentic partisan opponent of this project and defender of its sectoral victims. At an organizational level, the FN has attempted to balance its top-heavy party structure built around a charismatic leader in favor of establishing a grassroots structure geared to responding to local concerns. Specifically, it is attempting to develop — much like the French Communist Party in the 1950’s and 1960’s — a clientelistic network to anchor its municipal electoral implantation. In turn, this Frontisme municipal is designed to strengthen the FN’s parliamentary representation at the mainstream parties’ expense. Thus, through both its discursive aggiornamento and new emphasis on local organizing, the party hopes to translate its status as the third political force in the country following the 2012 presidential elections into concrete electoral gains. This would allow it to more directly shape national policy and ultimately aspire to exercising power in its own right. The municipal and European parliamentary elections respectively scheduled for March and May 2014 stand to provide a sterling empirical test of the electoral effectiveness of the FN’s strategic reorientation under Marine Le Pen. The former will gauge the FN’s organizational gambit to wrest local political control from the mainstream parties, while the latter will measure the electoral resonance of its anti-European discourse. On a backdrop of generalized socioeconomic crisis, this paper shall analyze the FN’s performance in the 2014 municipal and European parliamentary elections from the standpoint of discourse and organization as essential factors of political supply. First, it will assess what the electoral results bode for the FN’s positioning and status within the French party system, chiefly whether they signal the party’s ‘breakout’ from the political fringe to the political mainstream. In turn, it will consider the broader lessons and implications this case holds for other radical right-wing parties in Europe.