.
rēs pūblica - pro libertate >> .
National Rally set to come in 3rd despite topping 1st round CBC
"France is on course for a
hung parliament in Sunday's election, early projections suggest, with a
leftist alliance unexpectedly taking the top spot ahead of the far right in a potential major upset that would bar
Marine Le Pen's
National Rally from running the government."
...
"But it will also be a major disappointment for Marine Le Pen's nationalist, Euroskeptic National Rally (RN) party. The RN, which had for weeks been projected to win the election, was seen getting 115 to 155 seats.
The party is currently
led [nominally led] by
Jordan Bardella, who succeeded Le Pen as
leader [official leader] in November 2022.
Le Pen, daughter of the party's [Holocaust-denying] founder, remains a party member and re
tained her seat in the National Assembly during the first-round of voting last weekend."
The National Rally (
Rassemblement National, RN), known as the
National Front from 1972 to 2018 (
Front National, FN), is a
French far-right party, described as
populist and nationalist. It was the single largest
parliamentary opposition party in the
National Assembly from 2022 to 2024. Its candidate was defeated in the second round in the
2002,
2017 and
2022 presidential elections. It
opposes immigration, advocating significant cuts to
legal immigration, protection of French identity, and stricter control of
illegal immigration. The party advocates a "more balanced" and "independent" French foreign policy, opposing French military intervention in Africa while
supporting France leaving NATO's integrated command. It also
supports reform of the European Union (EU) and its related organisations as well as
economic interventionism, protectionism, and zero tolerance for breaches of law and order.
The party was founded in
1972 to unify the French nationalist movement.
Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the party and was its leader until his resignation in 2011. While the party was a
marginal political force for its first ten years, it became a
major force of French nationalism since 1984. It has put forward a candidate at every presidential election but one since 1974. In the
2002 presidential election, Jean-Marie Le Pen advanced to the second round but finished a
distant second in the runoff to
Jacques Chirac. [Jean-Marie's] daughter
Marine Le Pen was elected to succeed him as party leader in
2012. She temporarily stepped down in 2017 in order to concentrate on her presidential candidacy; she resumed her leadership after the election. She headed the party until
2021, when she
temporarily resigned again. A
year later, Jordan Bardella was elected as her successor.
The party has seen an increase in its popularity and acceptance in French society in recent years. It has frequently been
accused of promoting xenophobia and antisemitism. While her father was nicknamed the
"Devil of the Republic" by mainstream media and sparked outrage for
hate speech, including
Holocaust denial and
Islamophobia, Marine Le Pen pursued a policy of
"de-demonisation" of the party by
softening its image and
trying to frame the party as being neither right nor left [despite classic right-wing policies and receiving funding from Vladimir Putin]. She endeavoured to extract it from its far-right roots, as well as
censuring controversial members like her father, who was
suspended and
then expelled from the party in 2015.
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