https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/unfinished-business?pc=1778
Théo Bourgeron
17 July 2026 Politics

In France as in the United States and Britain, establishment hopes that the courts might halt the rise of the far right have once again come to nought. In March last year, the Tribunal correctionnel de Paris made headlines by declaring Marine Le Pen ineligible to stand in next year’s French presidential election, following her conviction for misusing European Parliament funds. Earlier this month, in a much-anticipated ruling, an appeals court upheld the judgement but reduced the penalty to three years’ imprisonment – down from four – with two suspended and one under electronic monitoring, and a fifteen-month ban from public office, considered as time served. In other words, she will be able to run in 2027. Le Pen has promised to file a further appeal with the Cour de cassation, France’s highest court, thereby suspending enforcement of the judgement. Experts believe that this body might not reach a decision until April 2027, just weeks before the first round of voting. If the verdict goes against the RN leader, she may have to wear an ankle tag for the last few days of the campaign; if not, the case could be remitted to another appellate court for rehearing, a process likely to drag on into the following year. Either way, there is more than one twist in store.

Opinion polls suggest that voters are not overly exercised by Le Pen’s conviction, which concerned the diversion of monies intended for EU parliamentary assistants to finance the party’s domestic activities, rather than personal enrichment. At the same time, the fact that similar accusations have been levelled across the French political spectrum – including at Macron’s governing coalition and La France insoumise – undercuts Le Pen’s claims that she has been singled out for persecution. The Cour d’appel, for its part, explained that it weighed the need to punish embezzlement against ‘voters’ freedom of choice, a prerequisite for the expression of democratic suffrage’. Translation: Le Pen is guilty, but it would be better if she were on the ballot.

It is possible that the decision was arrived at on purely legal grounds. But it may also belong to a growing tendency on the part of French institutions to demonstrate pre-emptive goodwill towards the far right so as to avoid trouble down the road. This was already visible in June 2022, when votes from Macron’s parliamentary majority and the centre right helped install two RN deputies as vice-presidents of the National Assembly. France Télévisions – which the RN wants to privatize – recently recruited a handful of commentators from the hard-right CNews ecosystem, while media regulator Arcom – which the RN wants to restructure – has ordered Radio France to increase the airtime allotted to the party’s representatives. The list goes on.

Though the judges declined to disqualify Le Pen, her penal saga nonetheless revealed potential splits within her own camp. In the days following the 2025 ruling, she was compelled to answer the ‘what if’ question. What if she were behind bars or otherwise prohibited from running in 2027? Le Pen replied that Jordan Bardella, her right-hand man and president of the RN, would stand in her place. On its face, this proposal – reminiscent of the Putin-Medvedev substitution – was an obvious bit of theatre, with scant bearing on the underlying political dynamics. Two years ago, Bardella was a 29-year-old MEP who had little claim to fame beyond Le Pen’s patronage. The son of a small business owner and a nursery-school assistant, he first entered the public eye as ‘MrJordan9320’, an adolescent YouTube influencer known for uploading footage of himself playing the video game Call of Duty. Having dropped out of university after twice failing the second year of his geography degree, he met with greater success dating his way into the RN’s inner circle, as the companion first of Kerridwen Chatillon – daughter of financial wizard Frédéric Châtillon and Marie d’Herbais, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s personal assistant – and then of Marine Le Pen’s niece. Given the RN’s clan-like structure, this opened his way to the party’s upper echelons.

Like Julien Odoul, the former men’s underwear model turned RN spokesman, Bardella embodied a specific type of party functionary: loyal, telegenic young men wholly dependent on Le Pen and reasonably capable of repeating their talking points. Political life being what it is, however, it was not long before Bardella began hinting at differences with la patronne. From the summer of 2024, he increasingly identified himself with a pro-business agenda. On pensions, he questioned Le Pen’s opposition to Macron’s law raising the retirement age and said he was open to adding a funded component to the existing state-backed system; he also expressed scepticism about taxing the superprofits of fossil-fuel companies, a measure previously backed by the RN. Beyond these disagreements, it was Bardella who was dispatched to win over employers’ organizations with promises of fiscal restraint and lighter regulation. He has also begun to move in more rarefied circles. This spring, tabloids announced his courtship of Maria Carolina de Bourbon des Deux-Siciles, a multimillionaire heiress and descendant of Louis XIV. As France reeled from a child murder case last month, he attended the Grand Prix de Monaco, where the French ultra-rich flaunt their wealth.

Several lines of fracture have historically divided the French far right: support for the Republic and monarchical or dictatorial sympathies; ‘civilizational’ Europeanism and hostility to the EU; Atlanticist leanings and the assertion of national sovereignty. Economic policy is no exception. The RN has alternated between the Reaganite nostrums of Le Pen père – corporate handouts, deregulation, attacks on the welfare state – and the more statist course pioneered in the 2010s by his daughter’s onetime consigliere, Florian Philippot.

Le Pen’s legal purgatory revived dreams of a long-awaited settlement of these questions – of one fraction of the far right seizing the opportunity to eliminate rivals and decisively clarify the party line. It would not be the first such purge. The history of the RN is full of expulsions and defections, despite the persistence of the Le Pen family at its head. In 1998, Jean-Marie Le Pen expelled Bruno Mégret, the party’s powerful second in command, who favoured a gentler public presentation in pursuit of alliances with the mainstream right; he left with a majority of the party’s cadres and formed a rival outfit. In 2015, it was the elder Le Pen’s turn to be excluded by his daughter in her bid to cleanse the RN of its more outré elements. Two years later, she forced out many of her own former loyalists and tacked away from Philippot’s economic populism, precipitating his departure in turn. Éric Zemmour’s challenge to Le Pen in the 2022 presidential race echoed these squabbles – he accused the RN leader of crypto-socialism and won the support of Le Pen’s business-friendly niece, Marion Maréchal, and former party vice-president Nicolas Bay.

Historians of the French right traditionally distinguish between three currents – Orleanist, Bonapartist, Legitimist – stretching from the emollient centre to intransigent reaction. The collapse of the Vichy regime, followed by the fallout from the Algerian War, reduced this to a binary opposition that effectively limited the far right to a cluster of isolated micro-parties, barred from governing; from de Gaulle to Chirac and Sarkozy, figures of the ‘republican’ right would strategically appeal to them when convenient and insist on the boundary separating them from respectable politics when not. The far right meanwhile has long strategized about forming a union des droites, a coalition with the mainstream which could bring them to power, though at the risk of dissolving within it.

The conditions for bringing about such a union have been some time in the making. In 2012, Le Pen launched the Rassemblement bleu Marine, a nebulous ‘movement’ that brought in new figures to contest that year’s legislative elections as a cartel without formally entering the RN. Nicolas Dupont-Aignan’s small sovereigntist party Debout la France endorsed Le Pen in the last two presidential run-offs, while remaining organizationally separate. The snap legislative elections in 2024 marked a more dramatic turn. Éric Ciotti, then leader of the centre-right Les Républicains and eyeing the mayoralty of Nice in the far right’s southeastern heartland, defied his party’s political bureau by proposing an alliance with the RN. After briefly closing LR’s Paris headquarters and taking possession of the keys, he broke away to found a micro-party characteristically named the Union des Droites pour la République.

There are historical reasons for the difficulty of making good on the strategy of union. Among the founders of the Front national – forerunner to the RN – were former French volunteers in the Waffen SS, some of whom had been sentenced to death or imprisonment after the Liberation, and veterans of the OAS, the pro-French Algeria terrorist group that repeatedly attempted to assassinate de Gaulle. But there are also more practical obstacles to unity, rooted not only in divisions between right-wing factions but in the disparate constituencies assembled within the RN itself. What do impoverished voters from RN-governed Hénin-Beaumont, in the deindustrialized north, have in common with those of RN-governed Menton, a wealthy city not far from Monaco? How are the interests of the party’s rural constituents – including its affiliated farmers’ union, the Coordination Rurale, which defends family smallholders and denounces the financialization of agriculture – to be squared with those of billionaire financial backers such as asset-management tycoon Édouard Carmignac or Pierre-Édouard Stérin, the ultraconservative Catholic venture capitalist?

No legal ruling was ever going to resolve these contradictions. Who will? In the short term, no one. It is not so much that the RN’s line is ambiguous. Ambiguity is the line. Le Pen’s success has always rested on tactical fudges and obfuscations. Her tandem with Bardella is one. Public debt is another. The RN’s programme remains wildly uncosted. Apart from slashing healthcare provision for migrants, it identifies few new sources of revenue while offering tax cuts to almost everyone – inheritors, young earners, motorists, small businesses – alongside subsidies for investment funds and support for domestic technology and defence companies. Given France’s fiscal predicament, this amounts to tough decisions deferred and betrayals to come.

The constituent social forces of the far-right bloc nonetheless continue to press their claims. Any eventual clarification is likely to come less through ideological debate than through the victory of one over the others. It is telling that the RN’s working-class electorate in the north is increasingly outweighed within the bloc by big business. Until recently, the patronat typically kept the far right at arm’s length, providing support only indirectly – funding a news outlet here, a higher-education venture there – while rarely financing the party itself. But as sections of French capital lose confidence in Macronism’s ability to defend their interests, some have become more directly entangled with far-right politics. This can be nakedly transactional, as with Stérin’s involvement in purchasing a Le Pen family property in Rueil-Malmaison for a price reported to be well above market value, but it also takes more sinuous forms, including pressure on the RN from without.

Over the past decade, the media-and-energy magnate Vincent Bolloré has amassed a communications and publishing empire capable of shaping French public debate, from books to television and radio. Every year or so, he promotes another far-right figure who can compete with the RN by blending ethnonationalist Catholic traditionalism with neoliberal orthodoxy. He was the driving force behind the presidential campaign of Zemmour, previously employed by his CNews TV channel, and has since thrown his weight behind Louis Sarkozy, Nicolas Sarkozy’s Trump-admiring son; the Catholic traditionalist theme-park magnate Philippe de Villiers; and Sarah Knafo, Zemmour’s girlfriend-cum-political-strategist and MEP for his Reconquête party, all of whom have benefited from abundant airtime. But Bolloré has not merely fostered competition on the far right. He has also facilitated alliances. In June 2024, as Ciotti negotiated his pact with Le Pen and Bardella, Bolloré received the LR leader at the offices of his family holding company, where the two men planned its announcement. Bolloré’s media outlets then swung behind the arrangement, which culminated in Ciotti’s tragicomic ouster from the party over which he presided.

Many expected that last week’s judgement would clarify the RN’s line. It did not. Instead of awaiting a judicial deus ex machina, we should pay closer attention to tensions within the far-right bloc, between its working-class and petty-bourgeois electorate and its increasingly assertive business patrons. Here is where clarity will emerge – though likely only after the next electoral cycle. Until then, ambiguity remains more of an asset than a liability.