Rassemblement National: How the right-wing party became so strong

Created: 05/25/2022, 11:40 am

By: Max Schaefer

The Rassemblement National has been the voice of the political right in France for 50 years.

The development and goals of the party at a glance.

Paris – The Rassemblement National (RN) is a party founded in France in 1972 as the Front National (FN).

Co-founder and first chairman Jean-Marie Le Pen and numerous other right-wing extremists from various splinter groups joined together to form a party in order to exploit the right-wing potential of voters.

Almost 50 years after the founding of the party, Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the longtime leader, was on the verge of becoming France's first female president.

Rassemblement National: Founding and first successes as Front National

The party, now known as the Rassemblement National, was founded on October 5, 1972 by representatives of various national-conservative and far-right groups.

The new party, Front National pour l'unité française, was led by Jean-Marie Le Pen as its first leader.

Le Pen's first run for president in 1974 was unsuccessful.

The right-wing extremist, who repeatedly attracted attention with racist and anti-Semitic statements, received only 0.75 percent of the votes.

It therefore took some time for the Front National to establish itself in the French political landscape.

There was a first success in the second direct elections to the European Parliament in 1984, when the FN received 10.95 percent of the votes and entered Parliament.

Four years later, it also worked at national level, when Jean-Marie Le Pen received 14.38 percent in the presidential election.

Due to the first-past-the-post system, which puts small parties at a disadvantage because only the candidate with the most votes in a constituency gets a seat in parliament, the Front National has had little success in parliamentary elections.

Rassemblement National: From Jean-Marie to Marine Le Pen

Jean-Marie Le Pen was the leader of the Front National for 39 years.

The party leader shaped the party and its extreme right-wing identity.

Again and again he attracted attention with racist and anti-Semitic statements - and was sentenced several times for it.

However, there were no significant electoral successes at the time of the patriarch.

The exception remains the entry into the run-off election of the 2002 presidential election.

After her father's resignation as chairman, Marine Le Pen prevailed over Bruno Gollnisch.

Since taking over what later became the Rassemblement National, she has tried to give the party a bourgeois appearance and make it more electable for more people.

By "de-diabolizing" the Front National was supposed to lose its right-wing extremist character.

Old party cadres were also removed.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was also expelled in 2015 for repeatedly calling Nazi gas chambers a "detail of World War II history".

Marine Le Pen has been President of the Rassemblement National since 2011.

(Archive image) © Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt/dpa

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There was also an innovation in terms of content under Marine Le Pen.

The party, which was renamed Rassemblement National in 2018, continues to campaign against migration and has shown itself to be xenophobic through calls for a principle of national priority in the area of ​​economic and social policy.

Rassemblement National: The most important program points

However, the economic policy orientation of the Rassemblement National has changed under Marine Le Pen.

While her father Jean-Marie had neoliberal ideas, Marine Le Pen favored greater state intervention.

In this way, workers should also become the target group of the RN.

In terms of foreign policy, the Rassemblement National long rejected the EU and the euro and advocated leaving.

In the meantime, Marine Le Pen and Co. have chosen a reformist approach and want to transform the international community into a “Europe of Nations” and reform the EU institutions.

The role of national governments should be strengthened.

General elections in France 2022: What the Rassemblement National is up to

Candidates from the Rassemblement National will also be running in the general elections in France in June 2022.

The right-wing party states that its applicants are rooted in their respective regions and presents them as part of the people they want to protect from Emmanuel Macron's "evil politics".

Even before the vote, the party advertises welfare state measures:

• Reduction of VAT on fuel

• Abolition of VAT on essential goods

• Securing the pension at 60

• Investments in public hospitals

These measures supplement known demands such as curbing an alleged mass immigration and restoring order.

The Rassemblement Nation clearly distances itself from the left alliance led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

It is not a people's union, but left-wing extremist and anti-republican.

(Max Schaefer)