Could the centre-right Republicans join forces with the far-right National Rally in France? Philippe Marlière writes that if a governing alliance were to be formed between the two parties, it would be unique in Europe.
Emmanuel Macron’s election as President of France in 2017 blew apart the old left-right divide. At the time, few commentators fully grasped the significance of this realignment. A political novice in his thirties, with no party affiliation, winning the flagship political election on his first attempt and then going on to secure an absolute majority in the legislative elections, is an exceptional political event.
The consequences of the 2017 deflagration
For a significant number of left-wing elected representatives and voters to follow Macron and for a large proportion of right-wing elected representatives and voters to join a former left-wing finance minister, the left-right cleavage had to have clearly lost its appeal. This explosion does not mean that the divide has completely disappeared: it is now erratic and competes with other divides that escape this binary classification.
The French left has still not recovered from the 2017 explosion. It has been stagnating for more than eight years at a historically low level (30% of the vote), while Macronism has been in crisis for three years and moribund for a year. The destruction of the left-right cleavage has claimed another major victim: the right, in its Orleanist and Bonapartist variants.
Initially, it was partly won over by the young president’s project. Macron’s “at the same time” approach intended to bring together the centre left and centre right, but it quickly shifted to neoliberal and law and order policies. This combination suited a conservative France until 2022. Then, the president’s authoritarianism and mixed economic results caused a double shift: the centre-left electorate partly returned to the Parti Socialiste, and Macron’s right-wing policies on immigration and law and order completed the normalisation of the National Rally.
As Macronism fades, the old Bonapartist right, notably the Republicans (LR), is wondering how to get out of the rut into which Macron’s reshuffle has placed it. Macron has occupied the LR’s territory with a neoliberal economic policy tinged with state interventionism and a socially conservative discourse advocating order. The left, disunited and lacking in strategy, has failed to offer a convincing counter-narrative to Macronism.
For its part, the National Rally has benefited from the continuing shift to the right of the ruling power. The government has taken up the National Rally’s old security and nativist themes (immigration, national preference, national identity) and legitimised the far-right party. Almost no one today thinks that the National Rally is a neo-fascist party. If that were the case, it would not be clearly ahead in the polls and it would have been banned. According to the Ifop survey “Fractures françaises”, the radical left La France Insoumise is considered “more dangerous for democracy” than the National Rally.
Convergences between the Bonapartist right and the far right
The National Rally is crushing the Bonapartist right and dominating the political scene because its rhetoric triggers a double populist reflex among voters, a phenomenon that sociologist Olivier Schwartz has called “triangular social consciousness”.
The left has traditionally fostered a binary opposition between “us” (the working classes) and “them” (the capitalist elite). The National Rally plays partly on this theme by stigmatising the “elites at the top”, whether economic or intellectual.
But the far right is more focused on another “parasitic danger”: the “welfare recipients at the bottom who are stuffed with social assistance”, a category in which immigrants are over-represented, according to populists. Only the National Rally can play both sides against the middle and provoke a double rejection, albeit more pronounced against the “welfare recipients”. This partly explains why it currently dominates all other political forces.
The Bonapartist right has long based its political action on that of Charles de Gaulle and Jacques Chirac, both fierce opponents of the far right. Today, it has realised that it cannot defeat a chameleon-like far right that borrows from social paternalism in the north and the xenophobic dirty tricks of Charles Pasqua in the south. What was bound to happen has happened. First, Éric Ciotti, president of the Republicans, seceded in the middle of the legislative campaign to join the sworn enemy, another major political explosion that was underestimated in 2024.
Today, it is a former president of the Republic who is preparing his party to rally the National Rally. In his book Journal d’un prisonnier (Diary of a Prisoner), Nicolas Sarkozy is effusive in his praise of Marine Le Pen. He reveals that he will not call for the formation of a republican front in the event of early legislative elections because the National Rally does not represent “a danger to the Republic”.
There are increasing signs of openness: Bruno Retailleau, president of the Republicans, called for “not giving a single vote to the left” in a by-election in Tarn-et-Garonne last October. This election pitted a socialist against a candidate from Éric Ciotti, who won.
Laurent Wauquiez, the leader of the Republicans’ parliamentary group, announced that in the March 2026 municipal elections, the priority would be to defeat La France Insoumise candidates, even if it meant voting for the National Rally. Ironically, Wauquiez does not criticise the National Rally for its xenophobia, but for its “socialist” economic programme.
Wauquiez has proposed a right-wing primary involving candidates ranging from Gérard Darmanin to Sarah Knafo, MEP for Reconquête, a far-right party that promotes the conspiracy theory of the “great replacement”. Only a few voices are speaking out against the ongoing rapprochement with the far right, notably Xavier Bertrand, president of the Hauts-de-France region, and Jean-François Copé, a minister under President Chirac.
A shift to the right that is unique in Europe
Why would the Bonapartist right not align itself with the National Rally? Their policies have long been convergent, even similar on key issues: immigration, national preference, tightening restrictions on birthright citizenship (in Mayotte for the Republicans), security, “pragmatic” Euroscepticism, neoliberalism (recent for the National Rally) and protectionism (recent for the Republicans) or rejection of “woke culture”.
Many observers downplay two things: on the one hand, the Bonapartist right has always been staunchly right-wing on issues of immigration, security and national identity. On the other hand, the mainstreaming of the National Rally is relative but nevertheless real.
The fact that the floodgates are opening today should therefore come as no great surprise. The general hostility towards Macron, the weakness of the Republicans and the cordon sanitaire around La France Insoumise make an electoral alliance possible, even probable. This is also desired by a growing number of LR voters.
If this convergence were to lead to an electoral alliance, and then a government alliance, the situation in France would be unique in Europe. It would not be an alliance of the right, but rather the submission of a minority right to a dominant far right.
For although the National Rally has deradicalised its discourse since the early days of the Front National, it has never officially renounced its history or its links with Vichyism, French Algeria or the neo-fascism that emerged from May 1968 (Ordre Nouveau). If it came to power tomorrow, it would be the first “unreconstructed” far-right party to govern a European country.
The case of the National Rally is different from that of Fratelli d’Italia. Giorgia Meloni, its leader and president of the Italian Council, joined the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement in 1992, a group that inherited Mussolini’s fascism. But she then moved on to various right-wing parties unrelated to neo-fascism: the National Alliance (which succeeded the MSI and officially broke with Mussolini’s legacy), then the People of Freedom, led by Silvio Berlusconi.
She was vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies at the age of 29, then a minister in a Berlusconi government at the age of 31. Fratelli d’Italia, founded in 2012, can be classified as far right (Meloni claims to be centre right), but it has no direct links to Italian fascism. Furthermore, Meloni has been at the heart of national political institutions for almost 20 years.
Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella come from the Front National, a party that has long been institutionally ostracised and rejected by a large majority of voters. Their victory would create an unprecedented situation. This would be all the more so because the historic victory of the far right in France would be accompanied by the rallying of its former archenemy, the Bonapartist right, formerly known as the “Republican” right. The Republicans would be the junior partner in a coalition whose nerve centre would be on the far right.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE European Politics or the London School of Economics.
Image credit: ToninT provided by Shutterstock.
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