The National Rally ( , RN), known as the National Front from 1972 to 2018 ( , FN), is a French far-right political party, described as right-wing populist and nationalist. It has been the single largest parliamentary opposition party in the National Assembly since 2022. It opposes immigration, advocating significant cuts to legal immigration, protection of "French identity", and stricter control of illegal immigration.
The party was founded in 1972 by the Ordre Nouveau, and notably by Jean-Marie Le Pen; former Nazi (Waffen-SS) members Pierre Bousquet and Léon Gaultier; neo-Nazi sympathizers such as François Duprat; and supporters nostalgic for French Algeria, such as Roger Holeindre, a member of the "Organisation armée secrète". Ordre Nouveau sought to establish the party as a legitimate political vehicle for the far-right movement. Jean-Marie Le Pen was its leader until his resignation in 2011. While its influence was marginal until 1984, the party's role as a nationalist electoral force has grown considerably. It has put forward a candidate at every presidential election but one since 1974. In the 2002 presidential election, Jean-Marie Le Pen advanced to the second round but finished a distant second in the runoff to Jacques Chirac. His daughter Marine Le Pen was elected to succeed him as party leader in 2012. Jordan Bardella assumed the leadership in 2022.
The party has seen an increase in its popularity and acceptance in French society in recent years. It has been accused of promoting xenophobia and antisemitism. While her father was nicknamed the "Devil of the Republic" by mainstream media and sparked outrage for hate speech, including Holocaust denial and Islamophobia, Marine Le Pen pursued a policy of "de-demonisation", trying to frame the party as being neither right nor left.Softening image:
Devil of the Republic:
Holocaust denial:
Islamophobia: She endeavoured to extract it from its far-right roots, as well as censuring controversial members like her father, who was suspended and then expelled from the party in 2015.Jean-Marie suspension and expulsion: Following her election as the leader of the party in 2011, the popularity of the FN grew. By 2015, the FN had established itself as a major political party in France. Sources traditionally label the party as far-right,Abridged list of reliable sources that refer to the National Rally as far-right: Academic:
News:
though some outlets argue it has substantially moderated from its years under Le Pen to be classified as "right-wing populist" or "nationalist right".
On 31 March 2025, 25 National Rally members (including Marine Le Pen, former MEPs, and their assistants) were convicted of embezzlement for using European Parliament funds to fund National Front staff from 2004 to 2016. The sentences for several MEPs, including Le Pen, included bans on running for political office. Le Pen's appeal with a Paris appeals court was heard in early 2026, which ruled that while she was guilty, her sentence would be shortened, enabling her to run in the 2027 French Presidential Election.
Party name At the FN congress of 2018, Marine Le Pen proposed renaming the party Rassemblement National (National Rally), and this was confirmed by a ballot of party members. Formerly strongly Eurosceptic, the National Rally changed policies in 2019, deciding to campaign for a reform of the EU rather than leaving it and to keep the euro as the main currency of France (together with the CFP franc for some collectivities). In 2021, Le Pen announced that she wanted to remain in the Schengen Area, but to reserve free movement to nationals of a European Economic Area country, excluding residents of and visitors from another Schengen country.
History
Background
The party's ideological roots can be traced to both Poujadism, a populist, small business tax protest movement founded in 1953 by Pierre Poujade and on right-wing dismay over the decision by French President Charles de Gaulle to abandon his promise of holding on to the colony of French Algeria, (many , including Le Pen, were part of an inner circle of returned servicemen known as ). During the 1965 presidential election, Le Pen unsuccessfully attempted to consolidate the right-wing vote around presidential candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, the French far-right consisted mainly of small, extreme movements such as , (GUD), and the (ON).
Espousing France's Catholic and monarchist traditions, one of the primary progenitors of the ideology generally promoted by FN was the , founded at the end of the 19th century, and its descendants in the Restauration Nationale, a pro-monarchy group that supports the claim of the Count of Paris to the French throne.
Early years Foundation (1972–1973) While Ordre Nouveau had competed in some local elections since 1970, at its second congress, in June 1972, it decided to establish a new political party to contest the 1973 legislative elections. The party was launched on 5 October 1972 under the name National Front for French Unity (Front national pour l'unité française), or Front National. In order to create a broad movement, ON sought to model the new party on the more established Italian Social Movement (MSI), which at the time appeared to establish a broad coalition of the Italian hard right. The FN adopted a French version of the MSI tricolour flame as its logo. ON wanted to unite the various French far-right currents, and brought together "nationals" of Le Pen's group and Roger Holeindre's Party of French Unity; "nationalists" from Pierre Bousquet's Militant movement or François Brigneau's and Alain Robert's Ordre Nouveau; the anti-Gaullist Georges Bidault's Justice and Liberty movement; as well as former Poujadists, Algerian War veterans, and some monarchists, among others. Le Pen was chosen to be the first president of the party, as he was untainted with the militant public image of the ON and was a relatively moderate figure in the far-right.
The National Front fared poorly in the 1973 legislative elections, receiving 0.5% of the national vote, although Le Pen won 5% in his Paris constituency. In 1973, the party created a youth movement, the Front national de la jeunesse (National Front of Youth; FNJ). The rhetoric used in the campaign stressed old, far-right themes and was largely uninspiring to the electorate at the time. Otherwise, its official program at this point was relatively moderate, differing little from the mainstream right's. Le Pen sought the "total fusion" of the currents in the party, and warned against "crude activism." The FNJ were banned from the party later that year. The move towards the mainstream cost it many leading members and much of its militant base.
In the 1974 presidential election, Le Pen failed to find a mobilising theme for his campaign, since many of its platform's major issues, such as anti-communism, were shared by most of the mainstream right. Other FN issues included calls for increased French birth rates, immigration reduction (although this was downplayed), establishment of a professional army, abrogation of the Évian Accords, and generally the creation of a "French and European renaissance." Despite being the only nationalist candidate, he failed to gain the support of the whole of the far-right, as the various groups either rallied behind other candidates or called for voter abstention. The campaign further lost ground when the Revolutionary Communist League made public a report of Le Pen's alleged involvement in torture during his time in Algeria. In his first participation in a presidential election, Le Pen won only 0.8% of the national vote.
FN–PFN rivalry (1973–1981) Following the 1974 election, the FN was obscured by the appearance of the Party of New Forces (PFN), founded by FN dissidents (largely from the ON). Their competition weakened both parties throughout the 1970s. Along with the growing influence of François Duprat and his "revolutionary nationalists", the FN gained several new groups of supporters in the late 1970s and early 1980s: Jean-Pierre Stirbois (1977) and his "solidarists", Bruno Gollnisch (1983), Bernard Antony (1984) and his Catholic fundamentalists, as well as Jean-Yves Le Gallou (1985) and the Nouvelle Droite. Following the death of Duprat in a bomb attack in 1978, the revolutionary nationalists left the party, while Stirbois became Le Pen's deputy as his solidarists effectively ousted the neo-fascist tendency in the party leadership. A radical group split off in 1980 and founded the French Nationalist Party, dismissing the FN as becoming "too Zionist" with Le Pen being a "puppet of the Jews." The far right was marginalised altogether in the 1978 legislative elections, although the PFN came out better off. In the first election for the European Parliament in 1979, the PFN became part of an attempt to build a "Euro-Right" alliance of the continent's far-right parties, and was in the end the only one of the two that contested the election. It fielded Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour as its primary candidate, while Le Pen called for voter abstention.
For the 1981 presidential election, both Le Pen and Pascal Gauchon of the PFN declared their intentions to run. However, an increased requirement regarding obtaining signatures of support from elected officials had been introduced for the election, which left both Le Pen and Gauchon unable to participate.
The election was won by François Mitterrand of the Socialist Party (PS), a results that brought the political left to national power for the first time in the Fifth Republic; Mitterrand immediately dissolved the National Assembly and called a snap legislative election. With only three weeks to prepare its campaign, the FN fielded only a limited number of candidates and won only 0.2% of the national vote. The PFN was even worse off, and the election marked the effective end of competition from the party. The Socialists attained their best ever result with an absolute majority in the 1981 legislative election.
The "socialist takeover" led to a radicalisation in centre-right, anti-communist, and anti-socialist voters.
Jean-Marie Le Pen's leadership Electoral breakthrough (1982–1988)
While the French party system had been dominated by polarisation and competition between the clear-cut ideological alternatives of two political blocs in the 1970s, the two blocs had largely moved towards the centre by the mid-1980s. This led many voters to perceive the blocs as more or less indistinguishable, particularly after the Socialists' "austerity turn" (tournant de la rigueur) of 1983, in turn inducing them to seek out to new political alternatives. By October 1982, Le Pen supported the prospect of deals with the mainstream right, provided that the FN did not have to soften its position on "key issues." In the 1983 municipal elections, the centre-right Rally for the Republic (RPR) and the centrist Union for French Democracy (UDF) formed alliances with the FN in a number of towns. The most notable result came in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, where Le Pen was elected to the local council with 11% of the vote. Subsequent by-elections kept media attention on the party, which was for the first time able to pose as a viable component of the broader right. In a by-election in Dreux in October 1983, the FN won 17% of the vote. With the choice of defeat to the political left or dealing with the FN, the local RPR and UDF agreed to form an alliance with the FN, causing a national sensation; together, they won the second round with 55% of the vote. The events in Dreux were a monumental turning point in the rise of the FN.