Political scientist Nonna Mayer is a research director emeritus at the CNRS, attached to the Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po. She co-directed The False Appearances of the National Front (Presses de Sciences Po, 2015).
You who have studied the National Front (FN) and then the National Rally (RN) for a long time, you emphasize that its electoral success is “historic”. Why?
Jean-Marie Le Pen’s goal, when he created the FN in 1972, was to reintegrate all the far-right families into the parliamentary game: here we are, they have been completely normalized. Since its first successes in the 1980s, the far-right party has progressed with great regularity in the ballot boxes: in each election, Marine Le Pen, who became president of the FN in 2011 [devenu le Rassemblement national en 2018]did better than her father had done before her.
The first round of the legislative elections represents an unprecedented victory for this party, both in percentage and in number of votes. In terms of percentages, the RN alone obtained 29.3% of the votes: this is a spectacular increase compared to the 9.7% in the 1986 legislative elections, the 14.9% in 1997, the 13.6% in 2012, the 13.2% in 2017 and the 18.7% in 2022. In terms of the number of votes, the success is also unprecedented: 9.4 million RN ballots were cast in the ballot boxes, compared to 3 million in the 2017 legislative elections and 4.2 million in the 2022 legislative elections.
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On July 7, the RN could triple its representation in the National Assembly: the group, which currently includes 88 deputies, could increase to more than 250 at the end of the second round. Even if it has to be content with a relative majority, this is the first time since the Second World War that a far-right party has obtained such a large number of deputies.
What are the characteristics of the RN electorate?
This party has never had a “typical voter”, but it has always had traditional strongholds. Since the 1990s, the FN has made inroads into the working classes – and this success has been confirmed this year: it was chosen by 54% of workers and 40% of employees in the European elections, and 57% and 44% in the legislative elections. The lack of a diploma plays a very important role: the far-right vote concerns 49% of non-high school graduates, compared to only 22% of those with a bac + 3 – education opens up to the rest of the world and familiarizes one with other cultures, other languages and other religions.
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