PARIS — In 2017, after far-right leader Marine Le Pen and her allies won just a handful of seats in the parliamentary elections, she blamed the French two-round voting system for excluding her party from parliament, despite the fact that there are over a million ballots were cast. it is please.
“There are eight of us,” she said bitterly, referring to the seats her party won in the National Assembly, the lower and more powerful house of parliament. “In my opinion we are worth 80.”
Fast forward to last week’s parliamentary elections. The voting system hasn’t changed, but with 89 newly elected lawmakers – a record for her party, currently known as the National Rally – Ms Le Pen is now beaming.
On Wednesday she has hugged her new colleagueskissed cheeks left and right, before leading them to the National Assembly and posing for a group photo.
Fueled by anger at Mr Macron and enabled by the collapse of the “Republican Front” that mainstream parties and voters traditionally set up against the far right, the results came as a shock even within the National Rally’s own ranks.
“I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t surprised,” said Philippe Olivier, Mrs. Le Pen, who described the 89 seats won by the party in the National Assembly with 577 seats. like ‘a tidal wave’.
The National Rally is now the second largest party in parliament after Mr Macron, who lost his absolute majority and is now struggling to rally enough lawmakers to pass his bills, potentially forcing him to work with a revived opposition.
In an interview with Agence France-Presse news agency on Saturday, Macron said he had asked Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne to consult with parliamentary groups to form “a new government of action” to be appointed early next month.
He added that the new government could include representatives from across the political landscape, with the exception of the far-left France Unbowed party and Ms Le Pen’s party, which he says he does not consider “government parties”.
The National Rally does not have enough lawmakers to pass its own laws and will struggle to find allies in parliament. But thanks to increased public funding based on the election results, winning seats is a financial boon for the heavily indebted party.
Crucially, for the first time since the 1980s, it has enough seats to form a parliamentary faction – the only way to gain influence in the lower house.
National Rally lawmakers can now pass a vote of no confidence, call for a law to be reviewed by the Constitutional Council, set up special committees of inquiry, fill top parliamentary positions and use a new wealth of speaking time and amending power to push the government and provoke and slow down or block the legislative process.
“During the last parliamentary term, there was a two-day debate on immigration,” recalled Mr Olivier. “We had five minutes to speak!”
Ms. Le Pen has said her party will ask for positions traditionally assigned to opposition groups, including the vice-chairmanship of the National Assembly and the leadership of the powerful finance commission, which oversees the state budget.
Analysts say this established presence in parliament could further entrench the far right in France’s political landscape, providing an invaluable launching pad for future elections.
“I think Marine Le Pen understands that this really is the final test,” said Jean-Yves Camus, co-director of the Observatory of Radical Politics at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, a forward-thinking research institute.
Many voters, even those who might agree with her proposals, still doubt her party’s capabilities, Camus noted. Now, he said, she will try to show that her party, like other far-right populist parties in Europe, can harness the institutional machinery from within, rather than oppose it from the outside.
Mr Olivier said his party would try to legislate on its favorite themes, including lowering the value-added tax on energy and essential goods, drastically reducing immigration and increasing police power. But he said his party would also be “a constructive opposition”, not a “problem maker”.
“If Macron proposes a nuclear energy bill, we will vote for it,” he said. “If a bill goes in the right direction, we’ll study it.”
Ms. Le Pen has pursued a long and deliberate strategy to ‘demonize’ her party and increase her electorate. Since her defeat by Mr Macron in 2017, she has tried to boost her credibility and move her party away from its extremist roots.
Many of the new far-right legislators entered politics during this makeover era, learning the ropes as councilors or parliamentary aides trying to exude rigor and break with the excesses of some of the party’s longtime lieutenants, who were often associated with anti-Semitism and xenophobia.
“A little new blood and some new faces won’t hurt,” Bryan Masson, who won a seat in the Alpes-Maritimes area of southern France, told BFM TV last Monday. At 25, he is one of the youngest Members of Parliament, after a decade of activism for the National Rally, first as leader of the local youth wing and then regional councillor.
Ms. Le Pen has also dropped ideas that alienated mainstream voters, such as a proposal to leave the eurozone, which helped her get 41.5 percent of the vote in April’s presidential election, an eight-point increase from from 2017.
That wasn’t enough to beat Mr Macron, who called for a “Republican Front,” an old strategy in which mainstream voters brush aside political differences to support everyone but the far right in the second round.
That front has weakened in recent years, however, and appeared to collapse last week, amid growing polarization in French politics around three strongly opposing blocs: Macron’s broad, pro-globalization center, Jean’s far right and far left — Luc Mélenchon’s party, France Unbowed.
Last weekend, the National Rally won half the runoff against candidates from an alliance of parties supporting Macron, compared with fewer than one in ten in the previous parliamentary election.
Many in Mr Macron’s party put the far right on nearly par with Mr Mélenchon’s left-wing coalition, saying both were extreme, leading half of the president’s supporters to abstain from votes turning the National Rally against the left. set up, according to a recent poll.
“These parliamentary elections were a lot like midterm elections,” he said, despite being held just two months after Macron’s re-election victory.
But the National Rally’s new presence in parliament is a double-edged sword, analysts say.
Ms Le Pen must manage a delicate balancing act that involves being “almost fully normalized while remaining cross-border,” Mr Camus said, as the party fully joins a political system it had long denounced as inefficient and corrupt.
“What brought voters to the National Rally was that they were an anti-establishment party,” he added.
Now they are the heart of the establishment.