Going Local, Going Strong? Ethnography of Two Cities Governed by the French Rassemblement National

Populists Radical Right (PRR) parties’ growth in contemporary democracies has met with increasing interest among political science scholars in recent years, also due to the process of partial access to mainstream and institutional power they are experiencing in several countries. However, this process has been studied mainly at the national level, approaching PRR parties almost exclusively as (supra) national, aggregated and homogeneous actors: a major gap in the academic debate, also considering the relevant role played by territorial anchorage and local attachments for these formations. We know little about PRR experience of government at the local level, and in this respect France is a particularly interesting case to study. While the Rassemblement National (RN) of Marine Le Pen has never succeeded in reaching power at the national level, it has won many local elections over the last decade: in 2014 the RN has taken over councils of 11 small or middle-sized cities, and in 2020 most RN mayors has been re-elected. How did the RN’s local leaders get to the top of city's government? How did they manage to stay in power? Which are the main socio-political processes produced at the local level by this new access to power? In our contribution, we will explore these three research questions, basing on an in-depth and comparative study of two middle-sized towns ruled since 2014 by the RN and both located in the South of France, in a region characterized by an historical cultural rootedness for the party, but where local government still remains a relatively new experience. More specifically, our paper draws on a) ethnographic observations of the local political and party life; b) 70 in-depth interviews with the members of the RN municipal team; grassroots party militants; and their main opponents (both elected in the municipality and/or active in civil society). First, the presentation will focus on the social and political conditions of the access to local power in each city. We will show that, in both cases, the failure of local democracy pushed the RN from the marginality to the mainstream. Second, we will study the main socio-political choices and strategies adopted by the RN once in power. We will argue that the party local government can be described as an attempt to implement an illiberal local democracy, combining forms of plebiscitary democracy (projecting an image of proximity to ’the people’) with assaults on local counterpowers (political opposition, local press, civic associations).Third, we will shed light on the process of social, cultural and political polarization produced in the two cities by the access to power of the party, focusing on the main patterns of opposition we discovered during our fieldwork (cultural repertories, political strategies, typologies of networks activated). To sum up, our paper will give empirical substance to the process of PRR parties’ territorial anchorage and innovate the methodological approach to PRR’s study, summing the advantages of the qualitative/ethnographic single case-study with the strength offered by a comparative gaze.