Le Pen’s party ideas are taking root, but so is doubt about its ability to govern

Amid a troubled period for the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), the annual barometer on its image, conducted by the Verian institute for The Worldin partnership with the periodical The Hemicyclepublished on Monday, November 25, comes as a piece of good news for the party. It confirms its ideas’ surge in public opinion, spurred on by its leaders, Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella; as well as its normalization, which has been demonstrated in elections. Yet doubts about the RN’s ability to convince a majority of voters – particularly those on the right – remain, after its parliamentary election campaign (June 30 and July 7) was marred by several of its candidates’ extremism and incompetence.

This study represents “a turning point in the RN’s trend,” said Eddy Vautrin-Dumaine, research director at Verian. “Support for its ideas continues to grow, but it has found itself isolated and lost some appeal among right-wing supporters. In the short and medium term, we may well have doubts about its accession to power if it is unable to restart its momentum, by reaching out to the Les Républicains [LR, right] party.”

This study – conducted on 1,004 people interviewed face-to-face at their homes – has been carried out by the same institute, under the same conditions, for 40 years, and thereby provides a long-term view of French public opinion on the RN. It reveals the far-right party’s strengths and weaknesses. Unquestionably, neither the trial the party is currently undergoing, for the case of the Front National’s (the former name of the RN) fake European parliamentary assistant jobs, nor its disappointment in the parliamentary elections, have dented the party’s momentum. The study was carried out from November 12 to 20, 2024, when the trial’s prosecutors requested a five-year prison sentence (of which three years would be a suspended sentence) and a five-year ban on election to public office, effective immediately, for Le Pen.

The RN’s ‘normalization’ in public opinion accelerates

In 2023, for the first time, more respondents considered that the RN “is not a danger to democracy” than the opposite (45% versus 41%). A year later, the gap has widened: 51% of respondents henceforth considered that the party does not threaten democracy, versus 38% who had the opposite view. This represents a ten-point rise over two years, signaling a getting used to the RN’s presence in institutions – which was precisely the party’s objective after it got 89 MPs elected in June 2022. This figure is all the more spectacular given that the RN has never seemed so close to power: More than two out of three French people surveyed anticipated such a scenario coming to pass.

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