Will the far-right populist nationalist leader Marine Le Pen or her protege Jordan Bardella be elected president of France in April 2027?
Enda O’Doherty, who previously worked on the foreign desk of this newspaper and is the author of the forthcoming The Dark Side of France: Thirteen Chapters in the History of the French Far Right, cites the journalistic adage known as Betteridge’s Law, which states that “any newspaper headline that ends with a question mark can be answered by the word No”.
Victor Mallet, a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times, writes in Far-Right France: Le Pen, Bardella and the Future of Europe: “The far right is likely to come to power in France in one way or another in the years ahead.” Mallet says progressive liberals are too complacent about that probability, just as they failed to foresee Brexit and Donald Trump’s first election.
Until Le Pen was convicted in March 2025 of embezzling €1.4 million in EU Parliament funds to pay RN party workers in Paris, her election was considered almost a foregone conclusion. A French judge made her ineligible for elected office for five years. Her legal appeal will be decided on July 7th.
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If Le Pen is not allowed to stand, Bardella, the 30-year-old MEP whom Le Pen elevated to head her party in 2022, will be the RN candidate. If Bardella wins, Mallet says, he might circumvent Le Pen’s ineligibility by appointing her as his (unelected) prime minister, similar to Vladimir Putin’s arrangement with Dmitry Medvedev.
A poll in Le Figaro in February showed more than two-thirds of RN supporters think Bardella, who has the charisma and oleaginous good looks of a 1930s film star, would be a better candidate than Le Pen. But two recent polls indicate the former centre-right prime minister Edouard Philippe, who announced his candidacy in September 2024, would defeat either Le Pen or Bardella by several points.
“The RN’s challenge now – and this is something that Bardella in particular is trying to do – is to bring on board the bulk of the right, the traditional right as well as their hard core far-right supporters,” says Mallet.
“The RN can be certain that anyone who is racist or Islamophobic will vote for them. They try to keep a lid on that in public because they have those voters anyway. They need the undecided centre-right voters to bring them up to the magic 50 per cent mark in the second round.”
Le Pen’s discourse has become so smooth, so careful, that old-time hardliners are nostalgic for her truculent late father, Jean-Marie, the former paratrooper who founded the Front National in 1972. Le Pen père boasted of having tortured Arabs in the Algerian war and made sick jokes about the Holocaust.
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The establishment conservative Les Républicains (LR), a distant descendant of Gen Charles de Gaulle’s once proud Rally of the French People, may be following the path of US Republicans who morphed into Maga and British Tories who switched to Nigel Farage. Former LR leader Eric Ciotti has already defected to the far right.
The need to win over traditional conservatives motivated Le Pen’s campaign to “dédiaboliser” or “detoxify” her party. As O’Doherty notes, she never clarified what “diabolical” offences were covered. He quotes Louis Aliot, Le Pen’s partner for a decade and the RN mayor of Perpignan: “We need to be clear about dédiabolisation. It is solely to do with the suspicion that we are anti-Semitic. Not Islam, not immigration. In respect of these, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to be demonised.”
If the RN wins both the Élysée and the National Assembly, Mallet says, “the concept of liberté, égalité and fraternité would be turned upside down. Those rights, previously universal rights, would be restricted to French citizens.”
Ever a pragmatist, Le Pen dropped unpopular promises to leave the EU and withdraw from the euro. But she is allied with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who routinely blocks EU aid for Ukraine, and whom Ukrainians refer to as “Russia’s most precious frozen asset in Europe”. Orbán is also allied with Trump, who dispatched his vice-president and secretary of state to campaign for him in Sunday’s Hungarian election.
Le Pen, like Putin, Trump and Orbán, scorns the European Union. “The anti-EU rhetoric has been pretty constant,” says O’Doherty. He paraphrases the RN’s discourse: “‘These are globalists. These are the enemies of France. We are not going to be run from Brussels. And we will team up with our fellow populist parties in Europe to hobble the original vision of the EU’.”
Mallet says he is astonished that “despite the massive damage that Trump has already done to the world economy, pushing up energy prices and prompting crises in Europe, parties like the RN and the (German far right party) AfD have not really suffered at the polls”.
O’Doherty predicts that the RN’s opponent in the second round will emphasise the danger of an RN president discrediting France internationally, as Trump has destroyed the reputation of the US. “The RN candidate will want to talk almost wholly about domestic issues, about the discontent of the French people, which is a constant in French politics and something the RN is expert at cultivating,” he says.
Populist nationalism looks set to become the political wave of our century. “One particularly worrying aspect of populism across Europe has been the degree to which it is facilitated and even financed by Russia, who wants to see the EU blocked politically,” says O’Doherty. Trump’s national security strategy, unveiled last December, made it official US policy to promote like-minded regimes across Europe.
In her 2017 presidential campaign, Le Pen praised Trump effusively. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she pulped campaign brochures showing her beaming alongside Putin. Both men have given her support. She has recently kept her distance, but an RN victory next year would be a boon to both autocrats.
