The return of Marine Le Pen

PARIS — Marine Le Pen has never been closer to seizing power in France than she is now.

Despite having kept a somewhat low profile in recent months, the leader of the far-right National Rally has reason to be confident. Early polls show her not only reaching a run-off round against President Emmanuel Macron in 2022, but winning a larger share of the vote than ever before.

The implication — worrying to Macron’s allies — is that the tactical voting which has always worked to keep the Le Pens out of the highest office may no longer be enough.

But as she edges closer to the goal, the question remains whether she will be able to maintain her momentum and break through the barriers that have so far held her back.

On Thursday, Le Pen will cross swords on prime time TV with Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin. Her performance will be closely watched, four years after then-candidate Macron crushed her in a televised duel that badly damaged her in the final stretch of the 2017 campaign.

“Getting back to long-format debates with heavyweights is a way to clear the air on the [2017] debate,” which Le Pen herself acknowledged at the time was a failure, said a high-ranking National Rally elected official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “She isn’t taking this lightly.”

The episode left her reeling and questions remain over whether the charismatic far-right leader has fully recovered.

Crisis of inertia

In recent months, Le Pen has struggled to find a voice. With the French government occupying most of the political space during the coronavirus crisis, some have questioned her level of energy in a party that has always relied heavily on its leader’s charisma.

“Marine is a trooper — when she is in, she is fully in,” the National Rally official said. “Deep down, is she all fired up? That’s another question.”

After almost a decade at the head of her party, Le Pen remains its undisputed leader, but only because no other personality has proved skillful or ambitious enough to break her hereditary claim to the top job.

She has retreated from frontline political competition since 2017, leaving it to one of her young lieutenants to lead the 2019 campaign for the European Parliament, to better preserve her capital for the big race.

She has at times invited accusations that she is distracted, such as when she recently announced she had got a license to become a cat breeder.

Party officials recognize the coronavirus crisis hasn’t played to her strengths, with public health restrictions limiting her visibility. One of Le Pen’s advantages is her ability to make connections during campaigns stops, spending hours mingling with crowds in the depressed northern towns that have become her political home.

“Her strength is that she is a star,” said Franck Allisio, a close adviser to Le Pen and a regional councilor in the Marseille region. “You can tour [Conservative politician] Xavier Bertrand around France and nobody cares. With her, that’s making noise.”

For much of the coming year, up-close-and-personal campaigning will be difficult, if not impossible. So Le Pen can ill-afford to fumble her TV appearances.

Fresh momentum

Despite her difficulties, however, Le Pen’s fortunes seem to be turning around.

An Ipsos poll last week put support for the far-right leader at 26 percent during the first round of the 2022 presidential election — with small variations depending on the line-up — and ahead of Macron in most scenarios. A Harris Interactive poll from the week before yielded similar results.

That’s five percentage points ahead of her first-round result during the 2017 election.

The Ipsos poll also put her at 44 percent against 56 percent for Macron in the second round, compared with 34 to 66 in 2017. Second-round data leaked from the Harris Interactive poll predicting an even smaller gap, of 52 to 48, became the talk of the town in Paris. (Harris Interactive declined to comment on the unpublished data.)

Even if polls so far ahead of the election are to be taken with a pinch of salt, pollsters say the fundamentals for Le Pen are strong.

The National Rally has “extremely consolidated electorates, strong and quite stable over time,” said Jean-Daniel Lévy, department director for politics and opinion at Harris Interactive.

A wave of terror attacks last year and the ensuing debate about France’s integration model has also played to Le Pen’s strengths, despite her mostly being outflanked and overshadowed by Macron’s ambitious interior minister.

Darmanin, poached from the Conservative Les Républicains party, led an unprecedented crackdown on Islamist groups in the wake of a teacher’s beheading in October. He also made waves with hardline comments on France’s controversial strand of secularism, known as laïcité.

Macron too has gone big on the issue, with a plan to fight Islamist radicalism, including a bill being debated in Parliament.

The result has contributed to a sense of staleness around Le Pen’s third presidential bid. Having abandoned Frexit and some of the incendiary tone that characterized her party’s earlier stances, her group no longer offers voters a simple “unique selling point” setting it apart from mainstream rivals.

She has achieved her goal of normalizing the National Rally — if perhaps too successfully.

“Now we’re labeled ‘populists,’ not far right, which is better,” said conservative turned National Rally MEP Thierry Mariani. “She isn’t scaring people off any more.”

Signaling a desire to reclaim the issue of migration, Le Pen last week said she intended to focus on it as top priority if she were to be elected.

“My first decision will be to keep immigration under control … by taking back control of our borders, of our visa policy,” she told BFMTV. “I will change citizenship rules [currently based on place of birth] so that French citizenship is either inherited or deserved.”

Republican front

Still, Le Pen has a formidable hill to climb if she’s to reach the Élysée presidential palace.

Despite coming first in the European election, the National Rally had disappointing results in France’s 2020 local elections, failing to capture major cities except one. Six years before, their breakthrough at 2014 municipal elections had marked a major victory for the party and its leader.

To build momentum, Le Pen will need a strong showing at regional elections, currently planned for June. The National Rally has never managed to snatch a regional presidency, despite coming close in 2015 when the Socialist party was forced to withdraw from some races to prevent far-right victories.

The move, known as le front républicain (the Republican front) in France, has stood between the National Rally and most higher offices in a country where many elections require a second round of voting that allows the party’s opponents to join forces to keep out extremists.

And yet, as the 2014 municipal election showed, the maneuver is not foolproof.

The goal is to “win one region, ideally,” the National Rally official said, with Marseille’s Southern region as the top contender, and “get close or equal results to 2015.”

Le Pen will also have to keep a close watch on some of her former allies, including her niece Marion Maréchal, who is only semi-retired from frontline politics.

“Marion is suspected of preparing the post-[Marine Le Pen], of preparing for a failure of Marine Le Pen,” the official said. “It creates a permanent state of tension. Her every move is watched either by Marine or by her closest aides.”

Marion Solletty contributed reporting.