Presidential: Marine Le Pen with more than 40% of the vote, best score for the far right under the Fifth Republic

With 41.8% of the vote, according to our estimate at 8 p.m., Marine Le Pen achieved her best score since becoming a presidential candidate.

Despite her defeat to Emmanuel Macron, the main representative of the French far right immediately welcomed a result representing "in itself a resounding victory".

"The ideas that we represent are hitting highs on a second-round night," she said shortly after the first numbers fell.

With good reason: never has the far right been so successful since the establishment of the Fifth Republic.

Marine Le Pen was only two years old when the battle of the extreme right for the Élysée began: in 1965, Jean-Louis Tixier-Vigancour, lawyer for Céline and former member of the Vichy regime, collected 5.2% votes in the first round of the presidential election.

This first "brown" candidacy focuses on amnesty for crimes related to the Algerian war.

The “TV” campaign, as it was nicknamed, was then directed by a certain Jean-Marie Le Pen.

She convinces 1,260,208 voters.

Despite this first breakthrough, this current of thought "then structured around anti-Semitism, national identity, anti-decolonialism and anti-republicanism and propelled by the Algerian war" struggles to exist at the ballot box, recalls Luc Rouban, political scientist at Cevipof and research director at CNRS.

Two years after founding the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen ran for the first time in 1974 but won only 0.75% of the vote, or 190,000 votes.

A first turning point in 2002

From 1988, the right "outside the walls" began to take root in the presidential landscape around Jean-Marie Le Pen, who notably defended the end of immigration, the repatriation of 3 million people and accused immigrants of take work from the French.

With these ideas, the father of Marine Le Pen, regularly accused of anti-Semitism, obtained 14.4% of the vote.

That is 4,375,894 votes, one year after declaring that the gas chambers were a "point of detail" in history.

In 1995, Jean-Marie Le Pen won 15% of the votes, or 4,570,838 votes.

A second candidate emerges: the sovereignist Philippe De Villiers.

He obtained 4.74% of the votes.

This is twice as much as in 2007 when the founder of Puy du Fou, now special adviser to Éric Zemmour, won 2.23% of the vote.

Since then, other candidates have also tried to short-circuit the FN: Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, 1.79% in 2012 then 4.7% in 2017, before the meteoric rise of Éric Zemmour, 7% in 2022.

First stage of the popular turn taken by the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the second round in 2002, without really doing better than in 1995, with 16.86% of the vote.

Le Pen mainly benefits from the explosion of left-wing candidates and ends up with 17.79% of the vote in the second round, against Jacques Chirac.

During the between-two-rounds, more than a million people mobilized to block.

Strong growth from 2012

In 2012, Marine Le Pen took up the torch and began a great ripolinage: “While the FN program is based on rather liberal measures on the economic level, Marine Le Pen gives her party a tone oriented purchasing power, redistribution, social protection”, summarizes Gilles Ivaldi, political scientist in charge of CNRS research at Cevipof.

Jean-Marie Le Pen's daughter won 17.9% of the vote.

She will keep improving her score.

The far right has made strong progress since the first candidacy of Marine Le Pen.

This position establishes the FN and then the RN as a mass party, which aims wider than the supporters of the far right: “Anti-Semitism has disappeared from official discourse.

Marine Le Pen still has populist elements from the far right, but she also recovers proposals tinged with the left and tries to establish herself as the leader of right-wing populists and the radical right”, illustrates Luc Rouban.

The strategy paid off: Marine Le Pen won 21.3% of the vote in the first round of the 2017 presidential election and repeated her father's feat.

In the second round against Emmanuel Macron, she obtained 33.9% of the vote.

At the time, the Republican front was still functioning, but in 2022, with a campaign centered on purchasing power, Marine Le Pen completed her demonization: "The frontist devil is Zemmour now", illustrates Luc Rouban.

It collects 23.15% of the polls.

A total of 11.3 million people voted for the far right.

Once ostracized, far-right ideas are now widely disseminated, from the Republican right to a large part of the French.