Next year, France could elect its first far-right leader since 1944. Campaigning for the elections, which are scheduled for next April, is already underway, and opinion poll after opinion poll shows that the Rassemblement National, also known as the RN or National Rally, has a commanding lead. The popularity of the RN—which was founded in 1972 as the National Front by Jean-Marie Le Pen, before being rebranded by his daughter Marine in 2018—has grown steadily over the past 30 years, boosted by unease over rising immigration and France’s economic struggles. In 2017 and 2022 presidential elections, this sentiment carried Marine Le Pen to the second round of voting, where she lost soundly to Emmanuel Macron both times.

But a rerun of those elections is not in store for 2027. Macron cannot run again, due to term limits, and as the RN continues gaining ground, his once unified base of establishment voters has dispersed. Le Pen is likely not running either, after being found complicit in the embezzlement of EU funds, although she is appealing the decision. Still, surveys, such as one published by Odoxa in May, suggest that the RN’s president and likely candidate, Jordan Bardella, will win over 30 percent of first-round votes. No other candidate commands more than around 17 percent of current voters’ support.

A far-right victory in the second round is by no means guaranteed, but it is, for the first time, a serious possibility. The year 2027, in other words, could end up being France’s equivalent of a U.S. or British “2016” moment. A decade after Brexit shattered the consensus around the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union and Donald Trump detonated mainstream U.S. politics, there are reasons to anticipate a rupture in French governance. And such a rupture would, in turn, send shock waves through the EU itself.

A far-right victory in France would be far more consequential than Hungary’s and Italy’s experimentations with far-right rule in recent years. With the fifth-largest Western economy, membership in the UN Security Council, and status as a nuclear state, France carries significant influence over the EU. It is a central and founding member of the bloc and still has about a dozen sovereign territories around the world. Compared to former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban or Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a far-right president in the Palais de l’Élysée would have far more leverage to carry out the far-right playbook of subverting the EU’s law-based, supranational architecture. At a moment when the EU is seeking to strengthen its unity and global influence, to assert its sovereign independence from the United States, and to push back against Russia and China, the upcoming French election carries considerable risk.

GRADUALLY, THEN SUDDENLY

Since 1958, when French leader Charles de Gaulle oversaw a new constitution and established the Fifth French Republic in the wake of an attempted coup and political collapse, French politics have alternated predictably between the center-right and center-left. French voters, who tend to be cautious but also suspicious of incumbents, could expel whichever bloc was in power knowing that nothing substantial would change. But by 2017, the French had begun to agitate for something new. They had grown sick of the failures of both left and right to reduce unemployment and deliver improved living standards, state education, and health care. Macron, who founded a new political party and ran under the slogan “Neither left nor right,” offered a painless revolution. His approach was somewhat bolder and less corrupt than the muddle-through managerialism that went before him, but not much more successful. He reduced unemployment, but he failed to boost working- and middle-class incomes. Over his nine-year tenure, his failures have led more voters to believe that Bardella or Le Pen are now, as they say, the only alternative.

Many urban and educated voters retain a certain revulsion against the far right’s simplistic populism and racist origins, but many voters in the suburban, rural, and working classes are tempted by the RN’s agenda to crack down on illegal immigration, crime, and the rise of radical Islam. These issues are real, but they are not as acute as the right-leaning parts of the French media and far-right candidates paint them to be. After celebrations of a French soccer team’s victory in the Champions League turned into riots in May, for instance, Bardella said on television that the scenes were “reminiscent of civil war” and urged the French to “wake up,” because such rioters would soon “be breaking down the doors of apartment buildings and breaking into your homes.” He blamed the violence, in part, on immigration and the failure of France’s assimilation........

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