Revisiting the French National Front

Abstract

The French National Front under the leadership of Jean Marie Le Pen is postwar Europe's longest standing right-wing political party. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the Front began to steadily gain electoral support. In April 2002, Le Pen managed to come in second in the first round of the French Presidential elections. I visited the National Front's annual festival in 1998, and again in 2005 as part of a larger study on the political culture of the European right. Visiting and revisiting the festival, by adding a temporal comparison to my study, permitted me to see that between 1998 and 2005, the Front had normalized (domesticated) and professionalized. In addition, the visit allowed me to assess the level of political emotion and commitment among Front supporters. I concluded that the new level of emotion and energy that I observed indicated that the Front had possibilities for future electoral success.