The Centre and the Far Right in France: Macron and His Party’s Strategy Towards the National Rally and the Mainstreaming the Far Right

How mainstream parties address the challenge of the far right is now a well-researched theme. Whereas most of these studies focus on mainstream parties of the left and/or right, this paper will focus the centre, a case enabled by the rise of Macron and his party in France since 2016. Macron won the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections against Marine Le Pen, the National Rally (RN) candidate. In 2017, Macron was widely seen as a champion of the fight against the far right. However, since 2017, the National Rally has increased in popularity, came first in the 2022 European Parliamentary elections, and increased its parliamentary representation from 8 to 125. This paper will examine the evolution, logic, and consequences of Macron and Renaissance’s strategies towards the RN and how they affected the performance of the RN. It will particularly focus on three themes: immigration, secularism, and institutions. Carvalho (2017) showed that accommodative strategies have had mixed results for the right in 2007 and 2012, but more recent research (Spoon and Klüver 2021; Krause, Cohen and Abou-Chadi 2022) has found that accommodative strategies tend to benefit the far right as opposed to the mainstream. The centre’s strategy has evolved over the period since 2016, alternating between adversarial and accommodative strategies (Meguid 2008). Their strategies started mostly adversarial, with a focus on delegitimising the RN, arguing that the party was outwith republican norms and values. Over time, as the centre’s strategy turned towards attracting voters on the right, party positions on these issues moved closer to those of the right, which had themselves become closer to those of the far right. This is particularly evident in the themes of immigration and secularism. On the theme of institutions, Macron and the centre mostly lost interest, turning away Macron’s 2017 talk of ‘democratic revolution’. At the same time, the focus on turning party competition into a duel between the centre and the far right, undermining the more mainstream parties of the left and right, has further contributed to legitimising the RN as a credible opposition and possible future government. All this has further contributed to the mainstreaming of the far right (Mondon 2025)