All of the major political parties in France have youth wings, but the National Rally remains particularly concentrated on attracting young people, training them, promoting them to leadership positions, and encouraging them to run for office. It does this with an eye towards expanding its base and recruiting youth like Ferreira and her ambitious, well-educated peers in and around Paris—a population usually thought more likely to sympathize with the students of 1968 or the people who took to the streets to protest systemic racism this summer than with a party best known for anti-Semitism, nationalism, and xenophobia. But the next generation of the French radical right lives outside of the stereotype of National Rally voters as rural, less educated, older, and male. Instead, many of its dedicated organizers and future leaders reside in universities at the center of a city widely associated with protests, strikes, and revolution, antagonizing that centuries-long history from the inside. [...]
Founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s father, the National Rally has historically attracted men, both very young and very old, and been most notorious for the elder Le Pen’s Holocaust denial, hate crime accusations, and flirtations with Nazism. When Marine Le Pen took control of the party in 2011, she sought to change that image and professionalize the party. With her “de-demonization” strategy, she saw results fairly quickly: In 2014, the party began experiencing gains in municipal, regional, and European Parliament elections. Last year, the National Rally beat Macron’s party in elections for the European Parliament, riding a wave of anti-elite sentiment embodied by the Yellow Vest protest movement that rocked the country for months. The party’s 2018 name change was part of Le Pen’s larger strategy to distance herself from her father, whose reputation is seen as beyond salvageable. The presence of well-groomed students from elite universities, too, fits nicely into that strategy.
Everyone I interviewed differentiated Marine Le Pen’s party from the party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, accepting the National Rally’s former iteration as racist and anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, they also expressed blatantly nationalistic and Islamophobic views, remnants of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party that remain hallmarks of the National Rally today. Just two years ago, the youth wing marked International Women’s Day by tweeting a meme that read, “Defending women’s rights is fighting against Islamism: The French woman is neither veiled nor submissive!” And last month, the National Rally launched a new campaign titled, “French, wake up!,” calling for security and justice in the face of “savagery” and promising to, among other things, increase prison capacity, apply zero tolerance, end “mass immigration,” reinstate mandatory minimums, and end social services for families of repeat juvenile offenders. [...]
But Rooduijn sees radical right parties gaining broader acceptance, gradually chipping away at the stigma surrounding them. “I think that the National Rally is a good example because you can really see when Marine Le Pen took over the leadership, she really changed the image of the party, trying to present the party as a party that you could vote for, a party that's there for everyone,” he explained. “At the same time, when it comes to policy positions, to the actual ideas and the ideological base of the National Rally, nothing really changed. The party is still very radical when it comes to immigration. It's still very radical on the European Union. It's still very strict on law and order. It's still very populist, meaning that it's still very negative about all kinds of elites, most importantly the political elites.... So these parties have become more generally accepted. However, they have not really become less radical.”
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