With a no-confidence vote scheduled for Monday, France’s far-right National Rally (RN) is sifting through its list of candidates in a PC clean-up exercise as it prepares for a possible snap parliamentary election. The party is determined to avoid nominating the kind of so-called “black sheep” candidates blamed for the party’s failure to win a majority vote last time out.
Marine Le Pen‘s party believes the only way President Emmanuel Macron‘s administration can survive France’s latest budget crisis is to dissolve the country’s deeply divided parliament.
“We’re calling for an ultra-rapid dissolution,” she said on Tuesday, having met with Prime Minister François Bayrou. “That’s the only democratic solution.”
Should that happen, the RN, currently France’s largest parliamentary party, is betting it can win the elusive majority that it has sought for so long.
There are risks involved, nonetheless, since it is up to Macron to declare an election. Moreover, the latest polls suggest the RN is unlikely to do any better than last year, when opposition parties aligned against it and many voters remained unconvinced that it had abandoned its divisive, anti-immigrant record.
Racist comments and the antisemitism and Islamophobia of some RN nominees – subsequently described as “black sheep” by party President Jordan Bardella, who blamed “casting errors” for their inclusion on the list of candidates – did not help.
Party leader Le Pen is barred from running in France’s 2027 presidential election following an embezzlement conviction, which she has appealed. A parliamentary election right now, with the possible loss of her seat, would undermine her position of national influence. However, she appears unperturbed, trusting that a new parliamentary election plus her various legal appeals against her ban will leave her and the RN well positioned for 2027.
Party sources have told Reuters about the RN’s latest efforts to recruit, train and develop would-be members of parliament. With 85% of RN candidates already chosen and only a few dozen slots remaining unfilled, the party is gearing up to contest most of France’s 577 constituencies.
MP Edwige Diaz is in charge of an RN Training account on YouTube with nearly 8,000 followers, which includes videos entitled “Patriotic Women and the Need for Political Engagement,” and “Agriculture: bad news from Brussels.”
The candidates, Diaz told Reuters, typically come from the party’s some 130,000 members. Each is interviewed for 15 minutes by a 12-person panel of RN officials. If they cannot decide, Le Pen or Bardella make the call. Approved candidates undergo obligatory media training.
A senior RN official speaking off the record described how the party has become much stricter about the language used by its representatives.
“We tell the deputies: ‘You cannot say that because we are close to power. If you are polling at 5%, you could say it, be excessive. But now you can’t anymore.”
Speaking anonymously, one would-be candidate told the news agency that the party had hired an outside firm to screen aspiring candidates’ social media and make other background checks.
