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Notes -
The French elections ended in a vast underperformance for Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National. They won more seats than previously, but nowhere close to their hoped majority, with the big winner being the leftist NFP coalition and Macron's supporter parties also performing reasonably well compared to expectations.
This seems to show that the right-wing populist parties still have a major hurdle to pass on their path to power; they have a lot of fervent supporters, sure, but even more fervent opponents of the sort that would vote for a fence post or a dead dog to keep them out of power. In France this was made easier by leftist and centrist candidates dropping out from three-person races to concentrate votes against RN, but vote concentration might have happened to a lesser degree even before the dropouts.
The right-wing populists are predictably blaming elite machinations, migrant voters etc. but the true reason is genuinely that a lot of their agenda is unpopular, such as their opposition to EU (usually moderated in recent years but still in the background), past or present favorability towards Russia, or simply the fact that their rows of candidates are often full of perceived extremists (fundamentalists, supporters of historical movements of the goosestep variety, antivaxxers and conspiracy theorists, monarchists in countries with a strong republican tradition etc.) or people who just come off as plainly too incompletent for people to vote for them.
These things could of course be solved, and the leaderships of the parties usually want to solve them, but such parties are also affected with a heavy bunker mentality where any accusation of extremism or stupidity aimed at a genuinely extreme or stupid candidate is just taken as more leftist lies that everybody in the party will face, and if the party leadership goes too heavily againt such candidates or touches some pet causes, there might be a revolt amongst party membership who are always looking for signs of their leadership betraying them and going over the side of the establishment.
The French government will probably be formed by some combination of centrist parties, ie. everyone expect RN and LFI, the most left-wing party in the leftist coalition, but if such a coalition is unstable or gets other parties tarred with Macron's current unpopularity, it might create opportunities for RN to do better in 2027.
The problem is that the AfD, Sweden Democrats, RN etc have a lot of respectable voters, because of the secret ballot, but a dearth of respectable candidates, because that invites public humiliation, career blacklisting, insult and pariah status - particularly in higher-status circles.
If you’re a competent and successful lawyer or business owner you can vote for the RN without any opprobrium, because of course nobody knows. If you stand for them, everybody knows.
One problem specific to the RN is that it is a family business, and not a normal political party. If you are an ambitious young politician, and your name is not Le Pen and you are not dating a Le Pen, the RN is not a good place for you, if you don't agree totally and all the time with the current head of the Le Pen clan.
Mégret and Phillipot tried, but nothing came of that.
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