Radical Right Parties (RRPs) remain heavily stigmatized, and this stigma is central to understanding both support for and opposition to these parties. While existing research has examined how external events such as terrorist attacks shape this stigma, little is known about how RRPs themselves strategically influence it through their discourse. A prominent rhetorical strategy used by RRPs is femonationalism -the portrayal of women’s rights as threatened by immigrants- and its counterpart homonationalism, which frames LGBTQ+ rights in similar terms. Although previous studies find limited or no effects of femonationalist appeals on support for RRPs, these null results may reflect the absence of an examination of stigma as the mechanism linking such rhetoric to political behavior. This article fills this gap by investigating how femonationalist discourse affects stigma toward RRPs.
Drawing on an original online survey experiment implemented in France with 7,000 respondents in winter 2024/25, the study shows that femonationalism does indeed reduce stigma toward Rassemblement National (RN). However, this destigmatization does not occur through the until now expected pathway of normalizing anti-immigration attitudes. Instead, the results indicate that femonationalist framing works primarily by providing a gender-equality “shield,” reducing the credibility of accusations of sexism, an important source of stigma surrounding RRPs. Crucially, the effect is only observable among men, who experience and perceive less gender-related discrimination and are more easily manipulable on these topics, as the results of the experiment shows. Women, by contrast, either detect the rhetorical manipulation or remain resistant to it, showing no reduction in stigma across conditions.
These findings demonstrate that RRPs can strategically reshape the social costs of supporting them by adopting liberal-sounding justifications for exclusionary policies. In the long term, such discursive strategies may contribute to the normalization of RRPs among male voters and, ultimately, to broader public support. Moreover, it raises crucial questions about how gender policies and women’s interest can be used and lose substance, as these parties defend women’s rights in this specific context, without necessarily changing their core conservative stances on gender equality.
