“Changes in the electorate make it possible for Marine Le Pen to win the presidential election”
THE ESSENTIALS
- With eight months to go before the election, polls show Marine Le Pen winning in 2027, regardless of who her opponent is in the second round.
- According to Jean-Yves Dormagen, a political scientist and founder of the Cluster 17 Institute, the Republican front has been deactivated.
- The rise of far-right parties is affecting all Western countries. What do studies in electoral sociology reveal about this elusive phenomenon?
Jean-Yves Dormagen, University of Montpellier
The Conversation: The latest polls show Marine Le Pen winning the second round of the 2027 presidential election, regardless of who runs against her. Is this a new development?
Jean-Yves Dormagen: Yes, this is the first time in French electoral history that the National Rally has been projected to win in the polls. So the central question of the campaign is a new one: Can Marine Le Pen lose? If the current balance of power holds, she will be elected President of the Republic. In 2022, Emmanuel Macron seemed nearly unbeatable; the nature of the election has changed.
Of course, the polls do not reveal the outcome of the second round, which will take place on May 2, 2027. In eight months, the landscape will have changed, and a campaign will be underway. A lot can happen, and public perception of the candidates may shift. These polls merely reflectthe current state of public opinion, but they do help to outline the terms of the electoral equation, so to speak, and it is important to recognize what has changed.
Until now, the RN had been subject to a majority veto. Regardless of who ran against the National Rally, a majority of voters would, as a matter of principle, cast a “blocking” vote against the RN. Today, according to our studies, that barrier no longer exists: the “Republican front” is no longer active.
Yet many find it hard to believe in this possible victory…
J.-Y. D.: Marine Le Pen’s victory is hard for some analysts and citizens to believe. This is undoubtedly partly because they don’t want to believe it—as a way to reassure themselves—and partly because the FN, and later the RN, has consistently lost the presidential election for over forty years.
There’s always this idea that, at the last minute, a “blocking vote” will take place, and that a majority of voters will reject it. I hear this all the time. But this line of reasoning is now more a matter of wishful thinking than the reality of the numbers.
In fact, our regular surveys reveal a trend that could prove decisive: Marine Le Pen is now less rejected than any of her rivals. While the rejection rates are very close, hers is lower than those of Édouard Philippe, Raphaël Glucksmann, or Gabriel Attal; Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on the other hand, is rejected more than the others. Broadly speaking, one in two voters says it is impossible to vote for her, but slightly more than one in two voters says it is impossible to vote for one of her rivals.
As a result, Macron-aligned candidates face strong opposition not only from nationalist right-wing voters but also from part of the traditional right-wing electorate and, of course, from a significant portion of the left. Among all these voter groups, the transfer of votes to Édouard Philippe or Gabriel Attal is very poor compared to Marine Le Pen.
On the other end of the spectrum, many moderate left-wing voters say they will cast a blank or invalid ballot if Jean-Luc Mélenchon makes it to the second round against Marine Le Pen. When a hypothetical second-round matchup between Raphaël Glucksmann and Marine Le Pen is presented, more than half of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s voters say they will abstain.
All these cross-voting patterns make a victory for the RN highly plausible. It is therefore the evolution of these rejection rates and, more broadly, the shift in votes across voter groups that we will need to monitor, as this is the key to this presidential election.
How can we explain the National Rally's dramatic rise in recent years?
J.-Y. D.: The traditional right-wing electorate has shifted further to the right, and it is this group that has driven most of the National Rally’s growth over the past four years. On issues of values, immigration, authority, and identity, it has moved closer to the National Rally. Overall, studies show that French society is becoming more radicalized and polarized. The right is shifting further to the right, and the left is shifting further to the left.
Starting in 2022, the RN reached a new level, and its electoral gains came primarily from voters who, until then, had voted for Les Républicains—those who, in 2007 or 2012, had voted for Nicolas Sarkozy.
The growing conservatism among voters thus aligned with the National Rally’s strategy of normalization: increasingly conservative voters were met with a platform that sought to win them over through the “tie strategy.”
This trend is partly amplified by the Bolloré media and social media, but many other factors are at play. On the left, we see the same phenomenon, with a segment of the electorate becoming increasingly progressive on values and identity issues. But Jean-Luc Mélenchon has not adopted a strategy of normalization; on the contrary, he has chosen to polarize, at the cost of strong rejection from neighboring or more distant voter bases.
The far right is also very active in the United States, Germany, and many other Western countries. What underlying factors explain this?
J.-Y. D.: The issues highlighted by far-right parties in Europe and the United States are similar, even though the contexts differ. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was driven primarily by issues of identity and race.
One question posed to voters pretty much summed up the electoral equation at the time: “Do you think Black people are poorer because they are stigmatized or because they don’t work hard enough?” Based on the answer, one could pretty much predict whether someone would vote Democratic or Republican… I conducted statistical analyses of the United States in 2024, and contrary to what has been claimed, purchasing power had very little impact on the vote. Issues related to racial groups and public opinion regarding those groups were by far the most significant predictors of how people voted.
Trump’s voters identify as white and believe that white people are under threat, treated unfairly, disadvantaged, and so on. In France, we see this same logic at work, albeit with different categories and expressions. Here, attitudes toward Islam and border issues function somewhat as an equivalent to racial divisions in the United States. We see the same logic at play withthe AfD, which advocates for a “Germany of the origins,” or in Great Britain. In Argentina, the vote for Javier Milei is, too, an ultraconservative vote strongly correlated, for example, with the rejection of indigenous peoples’ rights…
Ultimately, minority groups—perceived as marginal, dangerous, or threatening—become the focus of identity-based projections. Today, the dominant narrative is that these minorities are “unfairly privileged,” with conservative voters refusing to “pay for others”—such as Black people in the United States or immigrants “taking advantage of social benefits” in France. Hence the success of the “Great Replacement” narrative, which portrays the “other” as an invader. It is the “other” who comes to “colonize,” imposing their norms, practices, rules, and choices—a reversal of the colonial paradigm.
But what is fueling this identity crisis? Is it the result of liberal globalization, which has weakened the old industrial nations?
J.-Y. D.: I’m cautious about a numberof economic explanations. When we analyze the vote for conservative parties—in Europe as well as in the United States—it’s difficult to identify clear-cut socioeconomic factors, such as income, unemployment, or access to home ownership. This doesn’t align with survey data, since nearly all income brackets are represented among these voters. The only sociological factor that holds up fairly well is educational attainment: voters who support the far right tend to have lower levels of education on average. This can be explained by the fact that education and cultural capital increase the likelihood of holding progressive values.
I think we should instead look to the transformations that Western societies have undergone over the past two generations: technological changes, shifts in social organization, urbanization, and changes in populations, social norms, and lifestyles. Changes in the family, the normalization of homosexuality and same-sex parenting, and the emergence of a multicultural society are profoundly altering these societies. The conservative and ultra-conservative backlash is fueled by a reaction to all these changes. It is driven by a dynamic that can rightly be described as reactionary. Moreover, it generally refers to a highly idealized past, as in Éric Zemmour’s 2022 campaign video, which featured images of 1960s France showing a traditional white couple with a baby stroller. The sentiment “Things were better before” is ubiquitous in all these movements; it is the glue that holds these coalitions together.
Under what circumstances could one of Marine Le Pen’s rivals still win in May 2027?
J.-Y. D.: Marine Le Pen could still lose. But she will likely not lose simply because of the automatic reactivation of a republican front that already existed. At this point, that front no longer exists as a ready-made majority.
His primary vulnerability lies in the framing of the campaign. The issues of immigration, identity, and authority unite his electorate. A campaign focused more on Europe, war, economic credibility, pensions, or the functioning of institutions would reveal deeper divisions between the sovereignist and breakaway core of her camp and the voters more attached to stability—a group she must win over to secure victory.
The second condition would be the emergence of a credible challenger on the right, or an opponent capable of simultaneously uniting part of the left, the center, and the traditional right. None of the candidates currently under consideration embodies this synthesis. But the 52-48 matchup shows that a close race can be reversed by a few percentage points of voter mobilization or vote transfer.
Finally, the National Rally’s mainstreaming remains incomplete. Marine Le Pen is no longer rejected any more than her rivals, but she continues to be associated, among a segment of the electorate, with institutional and authoritarian risks. A campaign that were to strongly reignite doubts about her ability to govern could rekindle a “lesser-of-two-evils” vote against her. Her victory is now a credible possibility; it is not a foregone conclusion.
Interview by David Bornstein.
Jean-Yves Dormagen, Professor of Political Science, University of Montpellier
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Readthe original article.