Marginalized since the end of the Second World War (1945) due to its sympathy with Nazi collaborationist movements, the extreme right gradually conquered its electoral space in Francethanks to the National Front (FN), co-founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father.
Attracting, at first, those nostalgic for the pro-Nazi Vichy regime, ultra-Catholics and French dissatisfied with a French colonial attitude that they called “lax”, especially with Algeria, it gave an electoral growth spurt starting in the 1980s, with the start of deindustrialization.
Working classes affected by the relocation of companies and the emergence of new technologies were attracted by the FN’s anti-system discourse, which insisted on blaming immigration for the country’s ills.
These are the main electoral episodes of the Le Pen party:
– 1974: Jean-Marie Le Pen opens in the first of his five candidacies for the French Presidency with 0.75% of the vote (190,921)
– 1986: It obtains 9.65% of the votes and 35 deputies in the National Assembly thanks to the introduction of the proportional electoral system.
– 1995: The patriarch of the FN consolidates his electorate and obtains 15% of the votes in the presidential elections that year, equivalent to 4.5 million votes.
– 2002: In an election marked by great fragmentation on the left and high abstention, Jean-Marie Le Pen made a splash by going to the second round ahead of the socialist Lionel Jospin, with 16.86%. In the second round, Le Pen Sr. was swept away, winning 17.79% of the vote, against Jacques Chirac’s 82.21%.
– Presidential elections of 2014 and 2019: Both victories of the FN (later RN), with 24.86% of votes (4.7 million votes and 24 parliamentarians), and with 23.34% (5.2 million and 21 seats).
– 2017: Marine Le Pen goes to the second round with 21.30% of the vote and yields to Emmanuel Macron, achieving, however, the support record broken today, 10.6 million (33.90% of the electorate).
– 2022: Le Pen returns to the second round, in which she exceeds the ceiling of votes by achieving thirteen million, around 42% of the total at the national level.