So kicked off the race to succeed President Emmanuel Macron, in what’s set to be the most consequential election Europe has faced since the UK voted to leave the European Union a decade ago. Should she win, the euroskeptic Le Pen will wield concentrated executive authority over the EU’s second-largest economy (and the world’s seventh largest), only nuclear arsenal, and sole permanent UN Security Council seat.
Her National Rally (RN) party, already the most popular political force in France with the largest bloc in the National Assembly, now stands closer to power than the far right has come since 1944. Polls taken before the court ruling consistently showed both Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, the smooth-faced protégé she had lined up as her stand-in in case the ban held, with commanding first-round leads over the sprawling field, making the RN’s place in the runoff a certainty. A decade of Macron – and public anger over immigration, crime, and a faltering economy – has left voters hungry to punish the establishment, with the RN in pole position to capitalize.
Le Pen’s entry into the race further boosts her party’s chances. Recent polls showed the social-media-savvy and business-friendly Bardella running a shade ahead of his boss in the first round on the back of his appeal to younger and wealthier voters. But a presidential campaign is a long, punishing test for a 30-year-old, and in a turbulent world Le Pen’s decades of experience – she has already run for president three times – make her the tougher candidate and the more credible pair of hands.
None of which makes a far-right victory inevitable. Beyond having little predictive value this far out, the RN’s first-round polling dominance is better read as a rejection of the establishment that has run the country for a decade than as an embrace of the far-right’s program. Yet France, for all its anti-incumbent fervor and appetite for change, remains a conservative country. Some 60% of voters spanning the political spectrum are viscerally hostile to the RN, having twice united behind Macron to defeat Le Pen. This “Republican Front” has splintered and shrunk over the years, but it hasn’t collapsed. March’s municipal elections showed the reflex to vote tactically against the RN still holding (albeit less so among harder-left voters).
As for Le Pen, though she’s spent her career trying to make her party respectable, her name still carries the shadow of her father Jean-Marie, the party’s founder, whose open antisemitism and xenophobia still alienate many older conservatives. The criminal conviction that’s poised to energize her base will repel the traditional-right voters she needs to convert in a runoff. And her economic platform is still unacceptably statist to many pro-market voters, an incoherent mix of low taxes with lavish social spending, protectionism, and industrial policy.
For all these reasons, the race will be decided less by the far right’s strength than by whether its opponents – currently scattered across a field of more than a dozen parties and thirty candidates – can unite against it. Despite its size, the anti-RN majority has yet to rally behind a single candidate it trusts more than it fears Le Pen.
Macron is barred by the constitution from serving a third consecutive term, but two of his former prime ministers are currently vying for the centrist spot in the runoff. Édouard Philippe, leader of the pro-European Horizons party and recently-elected mayor of Le Havre, launched his campaign at a Paris rally on Sunday and has since been drawing endorsements from the center-right. He is polling at a steady 19% in first-round voting, higher than any other non-RN candidate. He is trailed by Gabriel Attal, leader of Macron’s Renaissance party, who has been unable to break through 14-15%.
Both Philippe and Attal would give Le Pen a run for her money, though Attal is handicapped by his closer association with an unpopular Macron. A recent study of “potential electorates” by the think-tank Fondapol put Philippe past Le Pen in a runoff, 34% to 32%, with a third of voters still undecided. The two centrist hopefuls have informally agreed to fall in behind the stronger-polling candidate by February. But with no primary to enforce the pact, the risk of a splintered center – one that splits the vote and cedes the runoff to far right and hard left – will remain alive.
Then there is the left, where no figure looms as large as Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The veteran leader of the anti-capitalist, euroskeptic France Unbowed has crowded out every attempt to build a credible soft-left alternative – social-democrat Raphaël Glucksmann has been rising in the polls and former Socialist president François Hollande is expected to run this fall, but neither has broken clear. Mélenchon is polling around 16%, behind Philippe but ahead of Attal.
The scenario that haunts French moderates and business leaders is a Le Pen-Mélenchon runoff with no centrist on the ballot that results in a comfortable far-right win. That fear is unwarranted so long as the center consolidates around a single candidate, not least because moderate voters are increasingly inclined to vote tactically in the first round to keep Mélenchon out of the runoff. But the odds are far from zero.
As it stands, the far right has never had a better shot. A Le Pen victory is by no means a foregone conclusion, but the contest will be close, and the stakes extend well beyond France. Europe is already under siege from multiple fronts, both internal and external. While she has long dropped her vows to leave the euro and the EU, a euroskeptic president in one of its founding states would paralyze the Franco-German motor at Europe’s center and strain the union to its breaking point, gutting its capacity to coordinate collective policy and respond to crises just as it can least afford it. With Washington’s commitment to NATO in doubt and European capitals scrambling to fill the gap, a Le Pen France would become an adversary within rather than merely a free-rider – pulling French support from the coalition arming Ukraine, obstructing EU action, and nudging other non-frontline states away from the common line on Russia. If Brexit took a country from the Union’s edge, a Le Pen presidency would strike at its core.
Over the next ten months, no vote on the continent will matter more.
