National Rally: A party that ‘scares’ French people
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00:00I'm going to go to Philip Till. Philip, at the start of the day,
00:04I don't think many people in France and throughout the world would have envisaged
00:09this turnaround, especially given the polling that we've witnessed.
00:12And yet, here we are. Fundamentally, what do you put the swing down to?
00:18I think there are a few important factors here.
00:21First of all, you had the national rally that came first in the European elections last month
00:26and came first in the first round of the legislative elections last Sunday,
00:31polling in about 34%.
00:33Now, right at the start of the results being given out last weekend,
00:39it was clear to quite a lot of political analysts that the hope of the national rally,
00:44they were going to get an overall majority in the National Assembly, was not going to happen.
00:49It was just going to be very, very difficult for them to get the 289 seats they need
00:54to be able to obtain that overall majority.
00:57Now, since that happened, there has been a coming together of the entire left wing,
01:01almost in the political spectrum here in France, right from the far left, France Insoumise,
01:07right up to the Socialist Party, the former president, Francois Hollande, coming together,
01:13putting their quarrels aside, saying, OK, we're going to get together to try to beat
01:17the national rally to stop them from taking power.
01:19This is called in France a Republican front.
01:23And it's been used several times in the past to try to stop the far right from the extremes
01:28from taking power.
01:29Now, many say it was dead and buried.
01:30It wasn't going to work anymore.
01:31The national rally cleaned its image up.
01:33It was no longer the national front of Jean-Marie Le Pen.
01:35It was the national rally of Marine Le Pen.
01:38She had a brand new president, Jordan Bardella, a young, respectable, vote-pulling young man.
01:45But behind it all, I think that there is a factor here, two factors that have changed
01:51people's minds about the national rally.
01:53The first one is that it's a party that still does scare quite a lot of French people.
01:59Whatever they say, whatever they try to portray as being a normal Republican Party image,
02:05there are those behind who seem to think that maybe it would not be a good idea if the national
02:09rally took power.
02:10And the second point is that before this election took place, the national rally more or less
02:15put paid to all of its political program by saying, well, we'd like to do this, but
02:19we can't do it.
02:20We would like to call for an end to the retirement bill that Emmanuel Macron put through, but
02:25we can't do that now.
02:26We're going to do it later.
02:27So all of these different points were put by the wayside.
02:31And I think that has dissuaded a lot of people from voting for them.
02:34So those two points have made it pretty clear today that the national rally still has the
02:38most number of seats or will have the most number of seats, but it won't have the highest
02:43number of seats and won't have the overall majority.