Le Pen Le Pire
It’s March 2028, and President Marine Le Pen is on a mission. Her government has pushed through “national preference,” ensuring priority for French citizens in public hiring or welfare provision. Foreigners, including dual nationals and EU citizens, are the losers, and so, too, is the Constitutional Council—the court tasked with upholding basic freedoms—whose objections have been steamrollered. To determine who’s really “French,” birthright citizenship is also out, replaced by ius sanguinis—the nationality that runs through your veins. A retired general has been enlisted to “reconquer” the unruly suburbs, while penal facilities in France’s overseas territories are hosting unknown numbers of deportees. A Fox-esque TV station, CNews, applauds, as do now-emboldened vigilantes. Yet Madame la Présidente is in trouble. It’s not just that NGOs are denouncing misdeeds, or that the banlieues are ablaze. It’s that Le Pen can’t afford her promises to her own base. Public debt is ballooning, the bond markets are unhappy, and the euro is imperiled. The Economist is worried enough to devote its front cover to “France: Rogue Government, Failed State.”
This dramatic scenario appears in a recent book, Marine Le Pen présidente: Dystopie politique, 2026–2029 (Marine Le Pen as President: A Political Dystopia). The work of Guillaume Hannezo, Hakim El Karoui and Thierry Pech, three essayists and advisors to past French leaders, it imagines an immediate future in which Emmanuel Macron has quit early and been replaced by Le Pen. For many observers, the idea of her becoming president is simply unconscionable, as the subversion of the values and principles of a mature, democratic Republic. Yet millions of voters think rather like Le Pen does, and polls six months ahead of the May 2, 2027, presidential runoff give her a big lead. Pollsters have been wrong before, and apparent favorites felled by scandals. Yet fourth-time presidential candidate Le Pen is already a familiar face for French voters, and countless exposés—including a criminal conviction for embezzlement of EU funds—have at most slowed her rise.
For political critics ranging from the far left to the Gaullist right, a single noun sums up the prospect of Le Pen winning the presidency: le pire, the worst-case scenario. Warning of this dire outcome has long been a rallying cry against her National Rally—as in the last parliamentary elections in 2024, when left-wing parties and most of Macron’s camp worked together to block it. But more rarely does the drastic rhetoric accommodate a specific reckoning with what a Le Pen government might be like—to what degree the administration would succeed in implementing its agenda, and how this government could reshape France’s identity and its social contract in a more lasting way.
To understand this, we need to consider the reality of the state she would take over. The current constitutional order, the Fifth Republic—founded by Charles de Gaulle in 1958—imposed a top-heavy order that centralizes power in the hands of the president rather than parliament. Through this institutional makeover the General took France out of Algeria and developed a state-orchestrated model of capitalist development with a welfarist underpinning. The Fifth Republic had its mass parties, namely the Gaullists and Socialists, plus smaller liberal forces, yet administrative power was concentrated in the hands of civil servants drawn from the elite grandes écoles. However, the social roots of this exchange of power have been withering since the 1980s, and the major parties have weakened at an even faster rate since the 2008 financial crisis. Running for the presidency a decade ago, Macron squared the circle by rallying elites from “both Left and Right,” promising to inject more entrepreneurial dynamism into the system.1 Yet his establishment-centrist camp has continued to lose support, and today the leading contenders to replace him come from the far right (Le Pen) and the radical left (Jean-Luc Mélenchon). While Le Pen’s party was first created by ex-Vichyites and Algeria veterans opposed to the Fifth Republic, and Mélenchon promises to abolish the presidency altogether, both candidates’ promise of change centers on capturing the summit of the state.
The 2027 presidential election is also a fight over identity and France’s place in the world, and it could also have a profound effect on the European Union and the values that it collectively claims to represent. No one in this contest has a monopoly on French patriotism, but there are many rival versions of it. Where liberal-left candidate Raphaël Glucksmann sees France as the leader of an ever-more united Europe, heart of the free world, and Mélenchon claims to speak for a postcolonial “New France” energized by its multicultural melting pot, Le Pen’s idea of Frenchness is unquestionably more inward-looking and exclusivist. For many of her opponents, her victory would be a triumph for a narrow nationalism directed both against internal minorities and against the European project. Still, one may doubt quite how her vision will translate into material policy measures, in the sense of changing the rights and duties of the citizen, or even the French state’s relationship with its international partners.
For over a decade, accounts of Le Pen’s rising support—and the undoubted “detoxification” of her brand among large swathes of the electorate—have wondered if her rule might be less explosive than her party’s roots suggest. Giorgia Meloni’s Italy offers a ready point of comparison. She, too, leads a force with historical ties to fascism, and her rise ahead of the 2022 Italian general election engendered many fears. In the four years since then, Meloni has often instead been an object of praise in centrist media. Flattering coverage time and again stresses that she was less radical, and more pragmatic, than she seemed. In particular, this telling focuses on the reality that Meloni has defended Italy’s traditional Euro-Atlantic alliances. Her stance on international politics has been that of a conventional European conservative leader, supporting NATO and arms deliveries to Ukraine and even becoming an influential force in Brussels politics. Meloni’s harder-right positions—outsourcing of migration control to non-EU third countries, allied to an expanded guestworker scheme, or her stances on gay marriage and adoption—remain controversial, but have barely dented liberal goodwill toward her.
So, for all the talk of France ending up with “the worst-case scenario,” might Le Pen actually prove more conventional in practice, and behave rather like previous French right-wing presidents? Given it has never been in government, her party is more of an unknown quantity than Meloni’s. It has also retained more unorthodox international positions for longer, both more hostile to the EU’s current leadership and less fulsomely supportive of NATO and Ukraine. Still, there are also signs of Le Pen shifting her positions as she approaches power. When her National Rally condemned Russian hybrid warfare in mid-September, many media reports bore a trace of mild positive surprise. It could make us think that for all the symbolism of the Le Pen name, she, like Meloni, will soon become a relatively conventional right-wing leader.
Even so, the comparison with Italy has its limits. A French president has greater freedom than an Italian premier to remake their Republic. But we can also expect a Le Pen government to be more conflict-ridden, also because of the various powerful actors beyond the halls of power: France’s sizeable radical left; the continued strength of combative labor unions in many sectors; recent dramatic protest movements, from the gilets jaunes to the current school-student uprising; politically noisy police unions; and also the strong political protagonism of ethnic minorities. Such factors, though not wholly absent across the Alps, are markedly more visible in France, and it would seem reasonable to expect enormous social opposition to her rule. Some expect Le Pen will struggle to satisfy the varied demands of the working- and middle-class voters who take her for a protest vote against the Macronite status quo. There are even reports that Macron hopes to stand for election again in 2032 after Le Pen runs the country into the ground, as if he were a latter-day de Gaulle returning to save the day. But the deep divides running through French society, and even the difficulties of France’s economic position, are not only a threat to Le Pen’s rule but instruments that she can play on, to turn her electoral victory into a deeper hegemony that can more fundamentally reshape the relationship between the citizen and the state.
In this sense, it’s misleading to see Le Pen’s potential victory as a doomsday scenario or institutional reset. Based neither on opposition to Macron-esque pro-business ideology, nor on a revolt against the Fifth Republic’s institutions, her appeal draws deeply on prevailing common sense and existing institutional tools. It offers no return to an idealized post-World War II social compact; a President Le Pen will not undo the effects of four decades of market reforms in the French state. Her strength is that she rides on powerful trends—combining an authoritarian offer of protection with the call to free the hardworking citizen from statist constraint.
Uniting the right
The scenariodescribed by Hannezo, El Karoui and Pech depicts one way President Le Pen could make a smooth landing in France’s institutions: allying with the traditional center-right. Such a pact may even be a necessity, given that the presidential contest will immediately be followed by parliamentary elections, which could significantly shape her ability to pass budgets and legislation. These elections to the National Assembly are held under a different electoral system to the presidential race, and aren’t guaranteed to produce a clear winner. Neither the 2022 contest (held right after Macron’s re-election as president) nor the 2024 snap parliamentary election gave any one party a majority of legislators. Even if Le Pen becomes president, she can’t assume her National Rally will dominate parliament.
If Le Pen’s party doesn’t win most seats, she is likely to seek a pact with center-right lawmakers. Key here are The Republicans (LR), the successor to the Gaullist party that elected presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy in the 1990s and 2000s. Political Dystopia imagines Laurent Wauquiez, a leading LR figure,as President Le Pen’s prime minister. While Wauquiez has so far rejected such a pact, there are two reasons to imagine why it’s not all that implausible. One is that, while the National Rally is often imagined as a political black sheep, today’s radicalized LR calls for a “republican front” directed against Mélenchon’s radical Left, not the far right. LR leader Bruno Retailleau speaks in dark tones of civilizational decline, and faced with current school-student protests even touted banning Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise as a “seditious” force. Secondly, the imagined future cabinet in Political Dystopia includes LR figures who already defected to Le Pen’s camp, such as former party leader Éric Ciotti, or Thierry Mariani (transport minister under Sarkozy, today a top National Rally MEP). Other allies include Islamophobic pundit Éric Zemmour and his more bourgeois Reconquête outfit.
The National Rally no longer defines itself as “neither Left nor Right.” Historically drawn from right-wing oppositions to Gaullism—neofascists, Poujadist tax rebels, the defenders of French rule in Algeria, and supporters of ex-Vichyite Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour’s 1965 election campaign—the Front National would in the 1980s make its first electoral breakthroughs by damning immigration. While in this period it often espoused Reaganite economics, it sought to erode the Socialist vote by claiming to defend an endangered French identity, understood in terms of birthright and ancestral traditions. As Vincent Martigny explains in his new book Cultural Nationalism in France, in this period it was the center-left governments under François Mitterrand that made culture a central battleground of French politics, in their effort to craft a national narrative that stressed diversity. This polarization over identity aided the Front National’s early rise, though the party’s broadening of its base also required repeated strategic adaptations.
Marine Le Pen, who became party leader in 2011, derided the Gaullists (then called UMP) and Socialists (PS) as a fused globalist party (“UMPS”). Such claims echoed her father’s rhetoric about breaking mainstream political categories, claiming to be “socially on the Left, economically on the Right, and nationally French.” But in the intervening decade and a half the political terrain has changed, and Le Pen has adopted a far more straightforwardly right-wing posture. True, when the PS’s François Hollande implemented austerity measures during the eurozone crisis, she foregrounded her criticism of the single currency and her defense of public services. Still, her current massive blue-collar support is no longer simply based on economic nationalism, or solely at the expense of the Left. For the National Rally has strengthened its pitch to Gaullist voters and even ex-Macron supporters; and having already won millions of blue-collar voters from these latter as well as the Socialists and past abstainers, its vote is today rising fastest among more white-collar and middle-income groups.
In this vein, the National Rally, and especially its president, Jordan Bardella, has stepped up efforts to make nice with business groups like Medef—the traditional political voice of employers, habitually calling for cuts in labor protection and welfare spending. Some business leaders clearly see Bardella as a figure who can steer Le Pen in a more “Melonian,” pro-corporate direction. And while in the 2010s the National Rally opposed Hollande’s reforms to weaken job protections, it no longer speaks of returning to the status quo ante. This is not to say that Le Pen’s party speaks for “capital” as such, or even for small and national businesses against multinationals. As Théo Bourgeron’s research has highlighted, the National Rally currently faces skepticism or even outright opposition from some interests while enjoying the specific backing of certain fractions of capital and ultra-rich individuals. Media (and fossil-fuel) tycoon Vincent Bolloré’s hard-right TV networks, plus the financial aid of a devout Catholic like billionaire Pierre-Édouard Stérin—advocate of privatizing health and education services—have made clear what kind of “populism” they seek. As Bourgeron has explained, a trio of sectors—alternative finance; fossil-fuel industries; and tech, notably in private healthcare—look to Le Pen as their chance to push deregulation while also channeling state support toward them via a future sovereign investment fund.
Many accounts portray a tension between the more anti-establishment, “social” soul of the National Rally, associated with Le Pen, and a more classically conservative “union of right-wing forces,” tied to Bardella. No wonder that the party’s October congress promised “President Le Pen, Bardella Government,” to balance these different ideas. Some center-right figures hoped that if Le Pen had been disqualified over her 2025 embezzlement conviction, and Bardella had run instead, this would have fast-tracked a more establishment-acceptable (and thus “Melonian”) version of the National Rally, harsh on the immigrant poor but also conformist in its economic and European policy. Bardella’s candidacy has been foreclosed, for now; recent allegations of youthful antisemitism make him seem less moderate. Still, Le Pen’s historic appeal to left-behind, ex-industrial northern France, and Bardella’s call for budget-balancing to reassure the middle classes, ought not be too schematically contrasted. We should understand how they complement each other—as part of a single model of popular capitalism.
Organizing the conflict
Visiting Nigel Farage in Britain this September, Bardella described the first step a National Rally government would take: a referendum bundling citizenship, immigration, welfare and deportation measures. This, he said, would give it the powers to control France’s borders. The National Rally argues—controversially—that the Fifth Republic allows for such a referendum to amend the Constitution. Because the idea already appeared in a 2024 parliamentary bill, there is already some media discussion over how the party might use referendums as such a constitutional battering ram, even invoking the precedent of de Gaulle’s 1958 plebiscite to found the Fifth Republic. Resistance from the Constitutional Council or the European courts may not merely frustrate such plans, but also help to give a Le Pen government a running narrative: the champions of the national and popular will, frustrated by unaccountable elites who cling to power.
This framing also matters because we can be sure that Le Pen will face other choices on issues where her voter base may not all share common interests. If in the 2027 runoff she relies on previous abstainers, or defectors from right-wing parties, to defeat leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, or a Gaullist like Édouard Philippe, how can she harden this one-off vote into stable support? One hurdle concerns public debt and the push to reduce deficit spending. Through nearly three decades of the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact, French governments have almost never obeyed its nominal 3 percent deficit limit. This has never made Paris a special target of scrutiny or discipline from EU institutions, especially since such governments have broadly been perceived as pliable to the normal pro-business priorities and assumptions of European Commission technocracy. However, since the COVID-19 pandemic, France’s deficit has often been much higher—above 5 percent. Despite efforts by tail-ender Macronite governments to force cuts in non-military spending, and the indulgence shown by Brussels toward these incumbents, Le Pen is more vulnerable to such pressure.
So, should we imagine a high-spending, statist party, resisting the neoliberal austerity imposed from Brussels? No. Surely the National Rally will not ride to power, in the manner of Meloni’s post-COVID, NextGenerationEU-era coalition, on the back of a massive injection of EU investment. And Le Pen promises to cut France’s contributions to the EU. The bigger question is who in France it would protect, and whom it would target for austerity, when making reductions which Le Pen herself says are necessary.
In October, Le Pen promised €140 billion in cuts by the end of her first term, allied to a referendum to impose a “golden rule” to rein in government spending: a popular mandate to force austerity, on some people at least. Such a plebiscite can also underpin the National Rally’s wider story about prioritizing the social majority over undeserving claimants. This posture has long been in development. Bardella’s statement, before the 2024 parliamentary election, that he would seek “order in the public accounts as well as in the streets,” was clearly aimed at traditional right-wing voters, and in the ensuing term the National Rally often foregrounded its “responsibility” and willingness to compromise on Macronite budget-cutting measures. Some liberals note the lack of detail in her spending-cuts plans; left-wingers accuse her of a hollow “social” message. Yet its own voters apparently see a pretty clear promise from the National Rally: a model of popular capitalism that empowers hard workers and entrepreneurs while ending handouts to the undeserving poor.
The issue of pensions illustrates this approach. Macron’s reform raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 faced large-scale resistance from trade unions and left-wing parties, combined with lengthy strikes in sectors whose workers would lose current entitlements to lower pension ages. While Le Pen criticized Macron’s reform, she remained aloof from the protests; the sociologist Ugo Palheta suggested that privately it suited her for the movement to be defeated, rather than allow the Left to chalk up a victory for collective action. While Le Pen has even in recent weeks called for the (currently suspended) rise in the pension age to be reversed, this comes with major caveats, plus €15–20 billion in unspecified savings and associated reforms. Notably, where Bardella once distinguished himself with a call for a system based on capitalization—in which the pension you receive depends on what you contributed—Le Pen now also says this should be a “voluntary part” of pensions. Her proposal for a system more dependent on years paid in would make those who only start work after university (also less likely to vote National Rally) retire late, but benefit those with an unbroken work record from age 18.
If many on the Left seek to expose the hollowness of Le Pen’s “social” image, we shouldn’t assume that spending cuts will turn her voters against her. From a different perspective, her routinely strong support among the peri-urban and rural working and middle classes gives her a stronger basis than other recent presidents to force through changes making social protections more selective and conditional. Targeted cuts and discriminatory policy will claim to protect deserving French families—those who contributed—while removing unwarranted “handouts.” This is not altogether new. Sociological work on the values of National Rally voters, for instance a 2024 study by Luc Rouban, illustrates the long-term rise among the party’s electorate of pro-market and individualist ideas, valuing aspiration and property ownership and having higher trust in private business than in state institutions (apart from regalian functions like the military and police). Rouban argues that these voters’ version of economic “liberalism” is less about budgetary rigor than enterprise and personal autonomy.
Faced with the rising cost of living and more precarious forms of employment, Le Pen offers not a return to past social solidarity, but rather more autonomy for working- and middle-class French households—the chance to fend for themselves. National Rally priorities, such as exempting up to €300,000 of inherited real estate from inheritance tax, point in this direction, as do promises to strip red tape from business and in particular green regulations. This also fits a pattern suggested by scholars like Félicien Faury or Violaine Girard: a tendency for this party’s voters to see not a class division between bosses and workers, but a three-sided social conflict, in which the respectable and hardworking French people confront both an undisciplined and racialized underclass and the over-educated urban elites accused of letting them run amok.
A Le Pen government’s success will depend on its ability to entrench such battlelines. In this regard, the resistance put up by the radical Left and trade unions may not only threaten a Le Pen government but also provide the ground on which she can cohere support among establishment allies and habitual right-wing voters who lend her their ballot in the 2027 runoff. We can foresee a Le Pen government picking fights with what it calls the “Islamo-leftist” La France Insoumise, cast as alien to the respectable, national working class. Not only does the National Rally enjoy major electoral support among police officers—it can also build on Macron-era moves to harshen the policing of protest and give officers greater impunity, just as noisy police unions demand. Such an alignment is all the easier to predict since it is the message already today broadcast by rolling news stations BFMTV and CNews and hard-right organs such as Valeurs Actuelles, not to mention LR and even some of Macron’s ministers. Targeted repression against NGOs labeled as Islamist, or militant antifascist groups, can offer red meat to Le Pen’s own base, and can expect the support of broad swathes of establishment conservative opinion.
With critics like these
Political predictions are hazardous, but a Le Pen presidency would hardly be a bolt from the blue. Some authors point to a long-term liberalization of social attitudes which runs against the right-wing shift in institutional politics. Yet it is also clear that the world of media barons, top civil servants, and more or less devoutly reactionary business chiefs has been preparing the ground for a Le Pen presidency, whether through private summits, the radicalization of mainstream discourse on immigration, or the inflation of the “Islamo-leftist” threat to justify a right-wing countermove.
Ahead of France’s last national elections in 2024, BBC News’s Paris correspondent, Hugh Schofield, spoke of government preparations for a National Rally election win. Apparently echoing Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, his piece cast the danger in terms of how others responded. We read that the “nightmare scenario would be a [National Rally] victory leading to calls from the far left for demonstrations, which then turn violent and spread to France’s troubled suburbs, or banlieues.” Even worse than the worst-case scenario would be the left-wing response. And while the authors of Political Dystopia forecast certain kinds of future Economist front pages, in practice the magazine may prove more sanguine. A recent piece asking “Can Anyone Stop Europe’s Populist Right?” mused that “the economy” was “the most promising populist project” since parties like National Rally and Alternative für Deutschland really want a “leaner state and lower taxes” and “deregulation”; their talk of taxing the rich or disrupting the euro is dangerous but anyhow platonic. Though not sympathetic to Le Pen, The Economist seems unlikely to denounce a referendum aimed at capping public spending.
Likewise, a Le Pen government will not just have to compromise with the EU elite—as if the EU were a stable, liberal center of gravity to which all else must conform—but can help form a new establishment. Meloni found her place in the EU-Atlantic order under the auspices of the Biden presidency, boasting that her party always sought close alliance with Washington. She built bridges with the bloc’s dominant European People’s Party and pushed an EU-wide approach to immigration, hardening its external borders. Surely a Le Pen presidency would begin in more unfamiliar territory, given both the Trump administration’s disregard for EU allies and the ongoing economic fallout of the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Le Pen has criticized financial aid to Kyiv and is broadly hostile to projects for more integrated EU defense cooperation but favors rising French military spending. But what we do know is that her party has embraced the idea of reforming the EU from within; what Bardella called playing a winning hand rather than walking away from the table. In the context of Trumpian pressure, a Le Pen government may even be driven to support Europe-wide protectionist measures, not fragmenting the EU so much as seeking a selective decoupling and reintegration in different areas.
Talk of the “worst-case scenario” of a Le Pen presidency doesn’t prepare us for what’s coming, because it forecasts an unthinkable doomsday rather than conflicts that are even now becoming visible. Far from a radical outlier, Le Pen has already begun to win over establishment supporters more concerned with disciplining and pressuring her than with stopping her. For sure, she will not rule unchallenged. Yet, rather than seeing judicial and social resistance as a mere hurdle for Le Pen to clear, perhaps these battles are better understood as the means by which she will realign French politics, confronting the Left and, if need be, the Constitutional Council and European judges. If she wins in 2027, it will be on the ruins of the mainstream parties and in a time of profound crisis. The coming conflicts will decide whether she can consolidate her power, and carry through a reordering of the French state further-reaching than anything Macron could ever have imagined.
- For an exposition of this thesis of the formation of a “bourgeois bloc,” see Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini, The Last Neoliberal: Macron and the Origins of France’s Political Crisis, trans. David Broder (London: Verso, 2021). ↩︎
