France loves a battle-scarred survivor. Charles de Gaulle, François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac clawed their way back from political failure to become presidents of the republic. There is a significant chance that Marine Le Pen will be next.
Now that the Paris appeal court has unshackled her from an electoral ban for fraud, the far-right veteran has double appeal in the race for the French presidency next year. She will run, as always, as an outsider and a scourge of the political elites – despite continuously holding electoral office since 1998. She can also now pose as a “miraculous survivor”, a “mother courage” and “a battling granny”, as senior French political figures, including former ministers, described her to me during recent conversations in Paris.
Le Pen will be a much more formidable candidate than her young understudy Jordan Bardella might have been. The other candidates were wary of Bardella, but they did not fear him. They do fear a resurrected Le Pen.
Her party, the National Rally (RN), has a new campaign slogan: “Renaissance”. The rebirth of Le Pen’s political career, the party says, foretells the rebirth of France.
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One might almost think Le Pen had been acquitted of fraud on 7 July. She was not. The judges essentially ruled that voters, not the courts, should decide who is president. They reduced Le Pen’s five-year ban from electoral politics, imposed by the Paris criminal court last year, to time already served.
She is now a twice-convicted embezzler of more than €4m in EU funds. If her final appeal to France’s highest court is heard rapidly and rejected, she might have to campaign next spring wearing an electronic tag on her ankle.
And yet. Two opinion polls since her reprieve suggest that she could defeat all imaginable opponents in the two-candidate second round next year.
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Previous polls were almost as good for Bardella, but there were reasons to believe that he would not stay the course. The two-week-long second-round campaign traditionally stress-tests the capacity of the candidates not just to govern France but to represent it. Voters will wonder: do they have a stature présidentielle? Bardella will be 31 in September. He has been an RN party apparatchik since he dropped out of college at the age of 19. Would voters have been able to imagine this talented but glib young man toe-to-toe with a Vladimir Putin or a Donald Trump?
That question – presidential weight – is especially important for older voters. Of the 50 million registered French voters, 28% are over 65. Unlike younger people, they turn out in huge numbers.
A recent Ifop poll showed Le Pen beating the former prime minister Édouard Philippe, the strongest of the many candidates looking to carry Emmanuel Macron’s centrist torch, by 54% to 46% in the second round. She had almost exactly the same lead among the over-65s. It is the first time any poll in any national election put the RN ahead with the “grey vote”.
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Bardella was also popular with older voters but his appeal to young and old was starting to fade. He comes from a working-class, Italian migrant family but had begun to show a Nicolas Sarkozy-like attraction to the high life, including, reportedly, a romance with an heiress from Italy’s remnant nobility.
Le Pen was born into a wealthy family and political business but cultivates an image as a gruff-voiced people’s champion, a single grandmother living with her best friend, a breeder of cats and, above all, a survivor.
There is, however, another issue that is crucial for older voters: economic stability. Le Pen’s feeble TV debate performances on the economy in 2017 and 2022 helped Macron to defeat her.
The RN’s economic policies remain an incoherent jumble of high social spending and low taxes, free markets and state interference. Bardella tried to shift the party towards a more traditional rightwing, low-tax policy and a more reformist approach to the EU, taking inspiration from Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.
But Le Pen’s return means a return to “Marinomics” and a policy of wrecking the EU from the inside. With France €3.5tn in debt and permanently teetering on the brink of fiscal crisis, the prospect of a far-right government may disturb older and better-off voters.
Le Pen will have an obvious riposte. Macron bamboozled you twice all with his clever people’s talk, she will say. Look where that got you: another €1tn in debt. Time to give a down-to-earth woman a chance. I could hardly do worse.
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But she could. Much, much worse.
A President Le Pen or a President Bardella would take France and the EU into dangerous new territory. Bardella, at least, appeared aware of the difficulty of being so outlandishly anti-EU, and of trying to govern with slogans. Le Pen does not.
A Le Pen presidency from next May is not a certainty. But it is, for the first time in seven decades of the family’s involvement in politics, a strong possibility. The comfort blanket for mainstream parties of right, left and centre – the implausibility of a 31-year-old slightly more pragmatic President Bardella – has been snatched away.
