National Rally

Based on Wikipedia: National Rally

In March 2025, Marine Le Pen was convicted of embezzlement and banned from running for political office. The woman who had spent two decades transforming her father's pariah party into France's largest opposition force—who had twice reached the final round of presidential elections—suddenly found herself legally barred from the presidency she had so long pursued. It was a stunning fall for the leader of a movement that had, against all odds, become central to French politics.

But to understand how we got here, we need to go back more than fifty years, to a small gathering in Paris in 1972.

Born from the Shadows

The National Rally wasn't always called that. For most of its existence, it was the National Front—and its origins were about as far from mainstream respectability as you could get.

The party was founded by a group called Ordre Nouveau, which translates to "New Order." Among its founders were Pierre Bousquet and Léon Gaultier, both former members of the Waffen-SS (the combat arm of Nazi Germany's paramilitary organization). François Duprat, a neo-Nazi sympathizer, helped shape its early ideology. Roger Holeindre had been part of the Organisation Armée Secrète, a terrorist group that had tried to assassinate Charles de Gaulle over his decision to grant Algeria independence.

These were not respectable political operators. They were men nursing deep grievances—about France's retreat from empire, about the perceived threats of communism and immigration, about a world that seemed to be leaving their vision of France behind.

They chose Jean-Marie Le Pen to lead the party. Le Pen was considered relatively moderate by the standards of this crowd, which tells you something about the crowd. He had the advantage of not being publicly associated with the more militant activities of Ordre Nouveau. He could be, in theory, a presentable face for a movement that desperately needed one.

Decades in the Wilderness

For its first twelve years, the National Front was a political footnote.

In the 1973 legislative elections, the party received half a percent of the vote nationally. Le Pen himself managed just five percent in his Paris district. The 1974 presidential election was even more dismal—Le Pen won eight-tenths of one percent of the vote. To make matters worse, the Revolutionary Communist League had dug up allegations that Le Pen had been involved in torture during his military service in Algeria, a charge that would shadow him for decades.

The party couldn't even agree with itself. In the mid-1970s, a rival far-right party called the Party of New Forces emerged, founded by National Front dissidents. A radical faction split off in 1980 to create the French Nationalist Party, accusing the National Front of becoming "too Zionist" and dismissing Le Pen as "a puppet of the Jews." The far right, it turned out, was better at internal feuding than winning elections.

By 1981, the situation had become almost farcical. Both Le Pen and his rival from the Party of New Forces wanted to run for president, but neither could collect enough signatures from elected officials to qualify for the ballot. Meanwhile, François Mitterrand led the Socialist Party to a historic victory, becoming the first left-wing president of France's Fifth Republic. The Socialists won an absolute majority in parliament. The far right seemed utterly irrelevant.

The Accidental Breakthrough

What happened next was one of the stranger turns in modern French political history.

The mainstream parties—both the center-right and the Socialists—began, almost accidentally, to give Le Pen legitimacy. In the 1983 municipal elections, the center-right parties formed local alliances with the National Front in several towns. Le Pen himself won a seat on the council of Paris's twentieth district with eleven percent of the vote.

Then came Dreux.

In a by-election in this small city northwest of Paris, the National Front won seventeen percent of the vote in the first round. The local center-right parties faced a choice: lose to the left, or ally with Le Pen. They chose the alliance. Together, they won the second round with fifty-five percent. It was a sensation—and a template.

Meanwhile, Le Pen had been writing letters to President Mitterrand, complaining about media bias against his party. Mitterrand, perhaps calculating that a stronger far right would divide his right-wing opponents, instructed television executives to give the National Front more equitable coverage. In February 1984, Le Pen appeared on a prime-time television interview program for the first time. He later called it "the hour that changed everything."

It did. In the June 1984 European Parliament elections, the National Front won eleven percent of the vote and ten seats. The party had arrived.

The Devil of the Republic

Jean-Marie Le Pen proved to be a deeply polarizing figure. Mainstream media nicknamed him "the Devil of the Republic," and he seemed determined to earn the title.

He described the Nazi gas chambers as "a detail of history"—a comment for which he was eventually convicted and fined. He made repeated statements that courts found to constitute Holocaust denial. He directed inflammatory rhetoric at immigrants and Muslims. He urged "national reconciliation" with former Nazi collaborators, arguing that forty years after the war, the only question that mattered was whether they wished to serve France.

Yet his party kept growing. In the 1986 legislative elections, the National Front won nearly ten percent of the vote and thirty-five seats in the National Assembly. Many of these seats went to "respectable" political operatives who had joined the party after its 1984 success, lending it an air of legitimacy it had never possessed.

The party developed a distinctive ideological blend. Its roots drew from Poujadism—a 1950s movement of small business owners protesting taxes—and from bitter resentment over France's abandonment of Algeria. It espoused Catholic traditionalism while attracting neo-fascists and monarchists who supported restoring the Count of Paris to the French throne. It adopted a tricolored flame logo modeled on Italy's neo-fascist Italian Social Movement.

But its central, galvanizing issue became immigration. The National Front argued for strict limits on legal immigration, aggressive action against illegal immigration, and "national preference"—the idea that French citizens should receive priority in employment and social services over foreigners.

The 2002 Earthquake

The 2002 presidential election shocked France to its core.

In the first round, Jean-Marie Le Pen finished second, ahead of the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin. For the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic, a far-right candidate would face off against the mainstream right in the decisive second round.

The response was electric. Massive demonstrations erupted across France. Voters who had supported everyone from Trotskyists to Greens rallied behind the center-right incumbent, Jacques Chirac. "Vote for the crook, not the fascist" became an unofficial slogan—Chirac was then under investigation for corruption, but he was the only alternative to Le Pen.

Chirac won the runoff with eighty-two percent of the vote. Le Pen's eighteen percent was a crushing defeat. But the fact that he had gotten there at all—that France had held its breath wondering whether a man who called the Holocaust "a detail" might become president—had permanently changed French politics.

The Daughter's Makeover

Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie's youngest daughter, had grown up in politics. She was eight years old when a bomb exploded outside her family's apartment building, an attack apparently targeting her father. By her twenties, she was running his legal affairs. In 2011, she was elected to succeed him as party leader.

She immediately set about what she called "de-demonization"—an effort to scrub the party of its most toxic associations.

The strategy was deliberate and systematic. She tried to frame the party as "neither right nor left," a populist movement for ordinary French people rather than an extremist fringe. She downplayed the anti-Semitic rhetoric that had been her father's hallmark. She presented a softer image on social issues while maintaining the party's hard line on immigration and national identity.

Most dramatically, she expelled her own father from the party in 2015, after he repeated his description of the gas chambers as "a detail of history." The founder and longtime leader of the National Front was out, banned from the movement he had created.

The rebranding accelerated. In 2018, Marine Le Pen proposed renaming the party entirely. Members voted to approve the change. The National Front became the National Rally—a fresh start, at least in name.

The party even moderated its position on Europe. After years of campaigning to leave the European Union and abandon the euro, the National Rally shifted in 2019 to calling for reform of the EU from within. By 2021, Le Pen announced she wanted France to remain in the Schengen Area, the European zone of passport-free travel—though she wanted to restrict free movement to nationals of European countries only.

Twice to the Threshold

The makeover worked, at least partially.

In 2017, Marine Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential election. She lost to Emmanuel Macron, but with nearly thirty-four percent of the vote—almost double what her father had received in 2002.

In 2022, she made it to the runoff again. This time she won over forty-one percent, losing to Macron but demonstrating that the National Rally had become a genuine contender for power, not merely a protest vote.

The parliamentary elections that followed were even more striking. The National Rally went from seven seats in the National Assembly to eighty-nine. It became the single largest opposition party in the French legislature.

The European Triumph and Its Aftermath

By 2024, the National Rally had achieved something that would have seemed unthinkable in its pariah years: it was winning.

In the June 2024 European Parliament elections, the party took over thirty-one percent of the vote—a landslide that left Macron's coalition in the dust. The president responded by calling snap legislative elections, gambling that French voters would pull back from the brink when faced with the real prospect of a National Rally government.

The gamble almost failed. In the first round of the snap election, a coalition led by the National Rally won over thirty-three percent of the vote. In the second round, the party won the popular vote outright, with more than thirty-seven percent.

But the French electoral system, with its two-round voting and constituency-based seats, worked against them. Despite winning the most votes, the National Rally came in third in terms of actual seats. A hastily assembled coalition of left-wing parties and Macron's centrists had coordinated to block National Rally candidates wherever possible, with candidates stepping aside to consolidate the anti-RN vote.

The party had won the battle for public opinion. It had lost the battle for power—for now.

The Conviction

Then came the reckoning.

On March 31, 2025, a French court convicted twenty-five members of the National Rally, including Marine Le Pen herself, of embezzlement. The charges stemmed from the party's use of European Parliament funds to pay National Front staff between 2004 and 2016. The European Parliament provides money for Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to hire assistants who work on European affairs; the National Front had allegedly used that money to pay people who were actually working for the party in France.

Several of those convicted, including Le Pen, received sentences that included bans on running for political office. For a woman who had spent more than a decade positioning herself as a presidential candidate, who had twice come closer to the Élysée Palace than any far-right figure since World War II, it was a devastating blow.

The party's current leader is Jordan Bardella, who took over the presidency in 2022 while Le Pen retained her seat in the National Assembly. Whether the movement can survive without its most recognizable figure on the ballot remains to be seen.

What the National Rally Represents

Trying to place the National Rally on the political spectrum has become a cottage industry for analysts.

Some insist it remains far-right, pointing to its origins, its positions on immigration, and the xenophobic rhetoric that still surfaces in its ranks. Others argue that Marine Le Pen's de-demonization campaign has genuinely transformed it into something closer to "right-wing populist" or "nationalist right"—still conservative, still nativist, but no longer the party of Holocaust deniers and Waffen-SS veterans.

The party itself has tried to escape ideological labels entirely, positioning itself as the voice of ordinary French people against an out-of-touch elite. It opposes immigration while claiming to defend workers. It criticizes the European Union while no longer calling for France to leave. It draws support from former left-wing voters in deindustrialized regions as well as from traditional conservatives in rural areas.

What's clear is that the National Rally has become central to French politics in a way that would have seemed impossible when Jean-Marie Le Pen was collecting half a percent of the vote in 1973. It is the largest opposition party. Its candidates dominate European elections. Its leader—until her conviction—was considered a serious contender for the presidency.

Whether that represents a dangerous normalization of extremism or a genuine evolution toward the mainstream depends on whom you ask. But the party that was founded by former SS members and neo-Nazi sympathizers, that was once dismissed as a fringe embarrassment, now shapes the terms of French political debate. That transformation, whatever else one might say about it, is one of the most remarkable political stories of the past half-century.