2024-01-20 11:30:14
Marine Le Pen at the National Assembly, during a session of questions to the government, December 5, 2023. MIGUEL MEDINA / AFP
In this Olympic year 2024, the National Rally (RN) has the wind at its back and its entire body turned towards the finish line: the presidential election of 2027. The European elections in June are, in its eyes, less a obstacle than a springboard towards the Elysian objective, which is no longer a chimera after the twelve months that have passed.
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In 2023, the far-right party has in fact accelerated its normalization, with the hope of completing its demonization in the minds of the French. A succession of polls attests to a successful metamorphosis, which also involves the emergence of a two-headedness such as the party has never known: Jordan Bardella exists in public opinion, on the lower level of Marine Le Pen but above the heads of government parties. The RN takes full advantage of the – unexpected – configuration resulting from the 2022 legislative elections, which offers it unparalleled access to the media and the second group in the National Assembly, where Emmanuel Macron does not have an absolute majority. The presence of Marine Le Pen at the Palais-Bourbon, unlike Jean-Luc Mélenchon, allowed her to embody the opposition to the President of the Republic.
However, the RN began the year in an uncomfortable situation. The debate opened on pension reform, a subject on which the party evolved in the middle of the presidential campaign, a year earlier, abandoning the totem of retirement at 60 and proposing avenues which contained their share of inconsistencies. A mobilization was taking shape in which the party would be on the fringes: the employee unions refused the presence of the RN in the processions and, in the provinces, very few deputies risked it for fear of a hostile reception. The RN, not very active in the Assembly, absent from the streets but very present in the media and on social networks, has nevertheless achieved the feat of embodying partisan opposition to reform in public opinion, particularly in voting on the motions of censure presented by the left.
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A more favorable sequence then began, marked by debates on violence and immigration in France. Since the death of Nahel M., killed during a police check on June 27 in Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine), the political debate has been saturated by themes dear to the far right. At the end of summer, the Saint-Denis meetings recorded the integration by the Elysée of the RN into the Republican field and accelerated the change in status of Jordan Bardella; immigration dominated the debates, through the idea – now abandoned – of broadening the questions submitted to referendum, then the adoption of the immigration bill.
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