Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right Front National party, renamed by his daughter and successor Marine as the less aggressive-sounding Rassemblement National, is by far the most popular political party in France today. Opinion polls suggest that Marine Le Pen, or her young protégé Jordan Bardella, are on track to win the next presidential and legislative elections due in 2027— something unthinkable only a decade ago. The apparently inexorable rise of the French far right is part of a worldwide phenomenon marked by the British vote for Brexit in 2016, two election victories for Donald Trump, and increasing popularity for extremist parties across Europe, even in countries such as Germany and Spain previously thought to be have inoculated against fascism by the experience of dictatorships in the middle of the last century. A victory for the Eurosceptic RN in France would have a profound impact on the liberal internationalist project that is the European Union, and probably on Nato as well, given the pro-Putin sympathies displayed in the past by Le Pen and other senior party members. Despite occasional setbacks for the far right, it would be naive to assume, as many French policymakers have done, that Bardella or Le Pen have little chance of coming to power. If they are stopped in their tracks, the most likely problem for the far right will probably have come not from inside France — where rival parties and politicians have never been so weak — as from outside: a catastrophe for the Trump administration, for example, or an unforeseen expansion of the Russian war in Ukraine. 

Victor Mallet Biography

Victor is a journalist, editor, commentator and author with more than four decades of experience in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. He is currently based in Paris and London as a senior editor on the Financial Times world desk. His new book, just published by Hurst in the UK and Europe and available in the US from March 15, is Far-Right France: Le Pen, Bardella and the Future of Europe, and is the result of recent reporting across France as well as his three separate stints as a correspondent in France. His previous book was River of Life, River of Death: The Ganges and India’s Future (OUP, 2017), while his highly praised analysis of the south-east Asian industrial revolution and the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, The Trouble with Tigers (HarperCollins), was first published in 1999. Victor’s previous jobs include FT Asia editor in Hong Kong, bureau chief in Paris and postings in New Delhi and Madrid as well as coverage of the Middle East, Africa and south-east Asia. He twice won the Society of Publishers in Asia award for opinion writing. In India, he was twice awarded the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism as a foreign correspondent, for features on the rise of Narendra Modi and on the River Ganges.