For once again, the second round of the presidential election will pit Emmanuel Macron against Marine Le Pen. With 23% of the votes cast, the candidate of the National Rally (RN) achieved her best score in the first round this year.
In 2012, she won 17.9% of the vote, and 21.3% in 2017.
Except in 2007, when the Front National (FN) won only 10.44% of the votes in the first round, its score has steadily improved over the ballots. Marine Le Pen (FN, now RN) won 23.15% of the votes cast on April 10. According to an OpinionWay poll for CNEWS, she should get 46% of the vote in the second round. This is 12 points more than in 2017.
Note that this graph only represents the scores obtained by the National Rally, an “emblematic” party of the far right. But the Le Pens have not always been the only candidates on this political side. In 2002, Bruno Mégret (National Republican Movement) thus obtained 2.34% of the votes in the first round. There is also doubt about how to classify Philippe de Villiers (Movement for France) and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (Stand up for France).
But the most glaring example is that of Eric Zemmour: the Reconquest candidate won 7.07% of the votes cast on April 10. By combining his votes with those of Marine Le Pen, we can therefore consider that the far right in the broad sense gathered more than 30% of the voters during the first round of the presidential election of 2022.
7 deputies and 12 mayors
If the breakthrough of the extreme right is very clear on a national scale, it is not found at all levels of political life. The National Rally (RN) occupies only 7 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly, with Marine Le Pen, Bruno Bilde, Sébastien Chenu, Nicolas Meizonnet, Emmanuel Blairy, Myriane Houplain and Catherine Pujol. This share is on the rise, since only one Rassemblement national deputy was elected in the 2012 legislative elections, and none in 2007 and 2002.
At the municipal level, the far right is also struggling. The RN only won a city of more than 100,000 inhabitants, Perpignan, in the 2020 elections. The party indeed lacks local roots, unlike more traditional movements, such as Les Républicains or the Socialist Party, which are struggling to be convinced at the national level but retain a strong territorial attachment.