National Rally
[7] However, some media outlets have started to refer to the party as "right-wing populist" or "nationalist right" instead, arguing that it has substantially moderated from its years under Jean-Marie Le Pen.[33] The party's ideological roots can be traced to both Poujadism, a populist, small business tax protest movement founded in 1953 by Pierre Poujade and on right-wing dismay over the decision by French President Charles de Gaulle to abandon his promise of holding on to the colony of French Algeria, (many frontistes, including Le Pen, were part of an inner circle of returned servicemen known as Le cercle national des combattants).[37] Espousing France's Catholic and monarchist traditions, one of the primary progenitors of the ideology generally promoted by FN was the Action Française, founded at the end of the 19th century, and its descendants in the Restauration Nationale, a pro-monarchy group that supports the claim of the Count of Paris to the French throne.[58] The campaign further lost ground when the Revolutionary Communist League made public a report of Le Pen's alleged involvement in torture during his time in Algeria.[59] Along with the growing influence of François Duprat and his "revolutionary nationalists", the FN gained several new groups of supporters in the late 1970s and early 1980s: Jean-Pierre Stirbois (1977) and his "solidarists", Bruno Gollnisch (1983), Bernard Antony (1984) and his Catholic fundamentalists, as well as Jean-Yves Le Gallou (1985) and the Nouvelle Droite."[74] In the 1983 municipal elections, the centre-right Rally for the Republic (RPR) and the centrist Union for French Democracy (UDF) formed alliances with the FN in a number of towns.[76] In January 1984, the party made its first appearance in a monthly poll of political popularity, in which 9% of respondents held a "positive opinion" of the FN and some support for Le Pen personally.[76][79] In the June 1984 European elections, the FN won 11% of the vote and ten seats,[80][nb 4] in a contest that was considered to have a low level of importance by the public, which played to the party's advantage.[93] Le Pen's presidential campaign was highly successful; no candidates came close to rival his ability to excite audiences at rallies and boost ratings at television appearances.[92] Using a populist tone, he presented himself as the representative of the people against the "gang of four" (RPR, UDF, PS, Communist Party), while the central theme of his campaign was "national preference".[nb 7][110] Le Pen then declared that his party would implement its "national preference" policy, with the risk of provoking the central government and being at odds with the laws of the Republic.[109] The FN's elected representatives pursued interventionist policies with regards to the new cultural complexion of their towns by directly influencing artistic events, cinema schedules, and library holdings, as well as cutting or halting subsidies for multicultural associations.[112] Vitrolles' new mayor Catherine Mégret [fr], who ran in place of her husband Bruno,[113] went further in one significant measure, introducing a special 5,000-franc allowance for babies born to at least one parent of French (or EU) nationality.[131] Nevertheless, Chirac did not even have to campaign in the second round, as widespread anti-Le Pen protests from the media and public opinion culminated on May Day in a demonstration of 1.5 million participants across France.The party's 4.3% support was the lowest score since the 1981 election and only one candidate, Marine Le Pen in Pas de Calais, reached the runoff -where she was defeated by the Socialist incumbent.[172] Marine Le Pen called for a "national-unity government" that would include persons such as Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, former LR officials, and souverainistes on the left, such as former economy minister Arnaud Montebourg.On 8 July, Bardella became president of the Patriots for Europe, originally founded by Viktor Orbán with the Czech ANO and the Austrian FPÖ parties on a platform of refusing military aid to Ukraine, anti-immigration, and pro-"traditional family" values.[189] Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, following Pierre-André Taguieff's analysis, include the party in an old French tradition of "national populism" that can be traced back to Boulangism.Aiming at a unity of the political (the demos), ethnic (the ethnos) and social (the working class) interpretations of the "people", they claim to defend the "average Frenchman" and "common sense", against the "betrayal of inevitably corrupt elites".[204] In the 2002 legislative elections, the first under the new gender parity provision in the French Constitution, Le Pen's National Front was among the few parties to come close to meeting the law, with 49% female candidates; Jospin's Socialists had 36%, and Chirac's UMP had 19.6%.[206] In 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen campaigned on a law-and-order platform of zero tolerance, harsher sentencing, increased prison capacity, and a referendum on re-introducing the death penalty.Since 2017, that yearly net immigration rate was around 182,000[214] if one takes into account only people born abroad from non-French parents, but was around 44,000 if one includes also the departures and returns of French expatriates."[262] In 2014, the Nouvel Observateur said that the Russian government considered the National Front "capable of seizing power in France and changing the course of European history in Moscow's favour."[263] According to the French media, party leaders had frequent contact with Russian ambassador Alexander Orlov and Marine Le Pen made multiple trips to Moscow.[266] During the 2022 French presidential election, Le Pen supported sending non-lethal defensive aid to Ukraine in the Russo-Ukrainian War, but not heavy weapons that would make France a "co-belligerent" in the conflict.In 2005, Jean-Marie Le Pen wrote in the far-right weekly magazine Rivarol that the German occupation of France "was not particularly inhumane, even if there were a few blunders, inevitable in a country of 640,000 square kilometres (250,000 sq.[287] In November 2014, Marine Le Pen confirmed that the party had received a €9 million loan from the First Czech Russian Bank (FCRB) in Moscow to the National Front.[294] In December 2023, 28 people, including Marine Le Pen and her father Jean Marie, were ordered to stand trial after they were charged with a scheme which involved paying National Rally party officials through EU funds which were earmarked for European Parliament assistants.The first group it helped co-establish was the European Right after the 1984 election, which also consisted of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), its early inspiration, and the Greek National Political Union.The significant Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) refused to join the efforts, as Jörg Haider sought to distance himself from Le Pen, and later attempted to build a separate group.
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