Jean-Marie Le Pen's leadership
While the French party system had been dominated by polarisation and competition between the clear-cut ideological alternatives of two political blocs in the 1970s, the two blocs had largely moved towards the centre by the mid-1980s. This led many voters to perceive the blocs as more or less indistinguishable, particularly after the Socialists' "austerity turn" (tournant de la rigueur) of 1983, in turn inducing them to seek out to new political alternatives. By October 1982, Le Pen supported the prospect of deals with the mainstream right, provided that the FN did not have to soften its position on "key issues." In the 1983 municipal elections, the centre-right Rally for the Republic (RPR) and the centrist Union for French Democracy (UDF) formed alliances with the FN in a number of towns. The most notable result came in the 20th arrondissement of Paris, where Le Pen was elected to the local council with 11% of the vote. Subsequent by-elections kept media attention on the party, which was for the first time able to pose as a viable component of the broader right. In a by-election in Dreux in October 1983, the FN won 17% of the vote. With the choice of defeat to the political left or dealing with the FN, the local RPR and UDF agreed to form an alliance with the FN, causing a national sensation; together, they won the second round with 55% of the vote. The events in Dreux were a monumental turning point in the rise of the FN.
Le Pen protested the "media boycott" against his party by sending letters to President Mitterrand in mid-1982. Following an exchange of letters with Le Pen, Mitterrand instructed the heads of the main television channels to give equitable coverage to the FN. In January 1984, the party made its first appearance in a monthly poll of political popularity, in which 9% of respondents held a "positive opinion" of the FN and some support for Le Pen personally. The next month, Le Pen was, for the first time, invited on a prime-time television interview programme, which he himself later deemed "the hour that changed everything".
In the June 1984 European elections, the FN won 11% of the vote and ten seats, in a contest that was considered to have a low level of importance by the public, which played to the party's advantage. The FN, notably, made inroads in both right-wing and left-wing constituencies, and finished 2nd in a number of towns. While many Socialists had arguably exploited the party in order to divide the right, Mitterrand later conceded that he had underestimated Le Pen. By July, 17% of opinion poll respondents held a positive opinion of the FN.
By the early 1980s, the FN featured a mosaic of ideological tendencies and attracted figures who were previously resistant to the party. The party managed to draw supporters from the mainstream right, including some high-profile defectors from the RPR, the UDF, and the National Centre of Independents and Peasants (CNIP). In the 1984 European elections, eleven of the 81 FN candidates came from these parties, while the party's list also included an Arab and a Jew - although in unwinnable positions. Former collaborators were also accepted in the party, as Le Pen urged the need for "reconciliation", arguing that forty years after the war the only important question was whether or not "they wish to serve their country". The FN won 8.7% overall support in the 1985 cantonal elections, netting over 30% in some areas.
For the 1986 legislative elections, the FN took advantage of the new, proportional representation system and won 9.8% of the vote and 35 seats in the National Assembly. Many of these seats were filled by a new wave of "respectable" political operatives, notables, who had joined the party after its 1984 success. The RPR won a majority with smaller, centre-right parties, and thus avoided the need to deal with the FN. Although FN was unable to exercise any real political influence, the party could project an image of political legitimacy. Several of its legislative proposals were controversial and had a socially reactionary and xenophobic character, among them attempts to restore the death penalty, expel foreigners who "proportionally committed more crimes than the French", restrict naturalisation, introduce a "national preference" for employment, impose taxes on the hiring of foreigners by French companies, and privatise Agence France-Presse.
The party's time in the National Assembly effectively came to an end when Jacques Chirac reinstated the two-round system of majority voting for the next election. In the regional elections held on the same day, FN won 137 seats, and gained representation in 21 of the 22 French regional councils. The RPR depended on FN support to win presidencies in some regional councils, and the FN won vice-presidential posts in four regions.
Le Pen's campaign for the presidential election unofficially began in the months following the 1986 election. To promote his statesmanship credentials, he made trips to South East Asia, the United States, and Africa. The management of the formal campaign, launched in April 1987, was entrusted to Bruno Mégret, one of the new notables. With his entourage, Le Pen traversed France for the entire period and, helped by Mégret, employed an American-style campaign. Le Pen's presidential campaign was highly successful; no candidates came close to rival his ability to excite audiences at rallies and boost ratings at television appearances. Using a populist tone, he presented himself as the representative of the people against the "gang of four" (RPR, UDF, PS, Communist Party), while the central theme of his campaign was "national preference". In the 1988 presidential election, Le Pen won an unprecedented 14.4% of the vote, and double the votes of 1984.
In the snap 1988 legislative elections, the FN was hurt by the return of two-ballot majority voting, by the limited campaign period, and by the departure of many notables. In the election, the party retained its 9.8% support from the previous legislative election, but was reduced to a single seat in the National Assembly. Following some anti-Semitic comments made by Le Pen and the FN newspaper National Hebdo in the late 1980s, some valuable FN politicians left the party. Soon, other quarrels left the party without its remaining member of the National Assembly. In November 1988, general secretary Jean-Pierre Stirbois, who, together with his wife Marie-France, had been instrumental in the FN's early electoral successes, died in a car accident, leaving Bruno Mégret as the unrivalled, de facto FN deputy leader. The party only got 5% in the 1988 cantonal elections, while the RPR announced it would reject any alliance with the FN, a rejections that now included the local level.
In the 1989 European elections, the FN held on to its ten seats, winning 11.7% of the vote.
In the wake of FN's electoral success, the immigration debate, growing concerns over Islamic fundamentalism, and the fatwa against Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini, the 1989 affaire du foulard was the first major test of the relations between the values of the French Republic and Islam. Following that success, surveys found that French public opinion was largely negative towards Islam. In a 1989 legislative by-election in Dreux, FN candidate Marie-France Stirbois, campaigning mostly on an anti-Islamism platform, returned a symbolic FN presence to the National Assembly. By the early 1990s, some mainstream politicians began also employing anti-immigration rhetoric. In the first round of the 1993 legislative elections, the FN soared to 12.7% of the overall vote, but did not win a single seat due to the nature of the electoral system. In the 1995 presidential election, votes for Le Pen rose to 15% of the total.
The FN won an absolute majority (and thus the mayorship) in three cities in the 1995 municipal elections: Toulon, Marignane, and Orange. Le Pen then declared that his party would implement its "national preference" policy, with the risk of provoking the central government and being at odds with the laws of the Republic. The FN's elected representatives pursued interventionist policies with regards to the new cultural complexion of their towns by directly influencing artistic events, cinema schedules, and library holdings, as well as cutting or halting subsidies for multicultural associations. The party won Vitrolles, its fourth town, in a 1997 by-election, where similar policies were subsequently pursued. Vitrolles' new mayor Catherine Mégret, who ran in place of her husband Bruno, went further in one significant measure, introducing a special 5,000-franc allowance for babies born to at least one parent of French (or EU) nationality. The measure was ruled illegal by a court, which sentenced her to a suspended prison sentence, a fine, and a two-year ban from office.
In the 1997 legislative elections, the FN polled its best-ever result with 15.3% support in metropolitan France. The result showed that the party had become established enough to compete without its leader, who had decided not to run, in order to focus on the 2002 presidential election. Although it won only one seat in the National Assembly, in Toulon, it advanced to the second round in 132 constituencies. The FN was arguably more influential at that time than it had been in 1986 with its 35 seats. While Bruno Mégret and Bruno Gollnisch, favoured tactical cooperation with a weakened centre-right following the left's victory, Le Pen rejected any such "compromise." In the tenth FN national congress in 1997, Mégret stepped up his position in the party as its rising star and a potential leader following Le Pen. Le Pen however refused to designate Mégret as his successor-elect, and instead made his wife Jany the leader of the FN list for the upcoming European election.
Mégret and his faction left the FN in January 1999 and founded the National Republican Movement (MNR), effectively splitting the FN in half at most levels. Many of those who joined the new MNR had joined the FN in the mid-1980s, in part from the Nouvelle Droite, with a vision of building bridges to the parliamentary right. Many had also been particularly influential in intellectualising the FN's policies on immigration, identity, and "national preference". Following the split, Le Pen denounced them as "extremist" and "racist". Support for the two parties was almost equal in the 1999 European election, as the FN polled its lowest national score since 1984 with just 5.7%, and the MNR won 3.3%. The effects of the split, and competition from more moderate nationalists, resulted in their combined support being lower than the FN result of 1984.
For the 2002 presidential election, opinion polls had predicted a run-off between incumbent President Chirac and Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin. In a shock outcome, Le Pen outperformed Jospin (by 0.7%) in the 1st round, placing second and advancing to the runoff. This resulted in the first presidential run-off since 1969 without a leftist candidate and the first ever with a candidate from the far-right. To Le Pen's advantage, the election campaign had increasingly focused on law-and-order issues, helped by media attention on a number of violent incidents. Jospin had also been weakened due to the competition between an exceptional number of leftist parties. Nevertheless, Chirac did not even have to campaign in the second round, as widespread anti-Le Pen protests from the media and public opinion culminated on May Day in a demonstration of 1.5 million participants across France. Chirac also refused to debate with Le Pen, and the traditional televised debate was cancelled. In the end, Chirac won the presidential run-off with an unprecedented 82.2% of the vote, with 71% of his votes—according to polls—cast simply "to block Le Pen". Following the presidential election, the main centre-right parties merged to form the broad-based Union for a Popular Movement (UMP). The FN failed to hold on to Le Pen's support for the 2002 legislative elections, in which it got 11.3% of the vote. It nevertheless outpolled Mégret's MNR, which had fielded the same number of candidates but won a mere 1.1% support.
A new electoral system of two-round voting had been introduced for the 2004 regional elections, in part in an attempt to reduce the FN's influence in regional councils. The FN won 15.1% of the vote in metropolitan France, almost the same as in 1998, but its number of councillors was almost halved due to the new system. For the 2004 European elections, too, a new system less favourable to the FN had been introduced. The party regained some of its strength from 1999, earning 9.8% of the vote and seven seats.
For the 2007 presidential election, Le Pen and Mégret agreed to join forces. Le Pen came 4th in the election with 11% of the vote, and the party won no seats in the legislative election of the same year. The party's 4.3% support was the lowest figure since the 1981 election and only one candidate, Marine Le Pen in Pas de Calais, reached the runoff -where she was defeated by the Socialist incumbent. These electoral defeats partly accounted for the party's financial problems. Le Pen announced the sale of the FN headquarters in Saint-Cloud, Le Paquebot, and of his personal armoured car. In 2008, a French court handed Le Pen a three-month suspended sentence and a €10,000 fine for remarks he made in 2005 that contravened France's law against Holocaust denial. Twenty permanent employees of the FN were also dismissed in 2008.
In the 2010 regional elections the FN appeared to have re-emerged on the political scene after surprisingly winning almost 12% of the overall vote and 118 seats.
