Marine Le Pen already rules France

When it comes to changing Prime Ministers, Emmanuel Macron has much in common with the Conservative Party. Both are on their fourth premier in seven years with the French President this week unveiling Gabriel Attal as the latest leader of his government.

At 34, Attal is the youngest PM in the history of the Fifth Republic and a complete contrast in character to the woman he replaces, Elisabeth Borne, the epitome of the grey French technocrat. Attal is articulate, telegenic, self-confident and, so Macron hopes, the man who can halt the momentum of Marine Le Pen, The Telegraph reports.

Poll after poll puts Le Pen at the top of voting intentions, not just for the 2027 presidential election but also the Europeans in June this year. Last month, Le Monde newspaper claimed that Macron was “shaken” at the rise of Le Pen, which some have attributed to her “normalisation”.  

When she replaced her father as head of the National Front in 2011, the Le Pen brand was toxic. But she has shaken off the sins of her father, in particular his anti-Semitism: in November, one of France’s respected Holocaust awareness campaigners expressed his delight that Le Pen and her 88 MPs were participating in a rally against the rise of anti-Semitism in France following Hamas’s attack on Israel.  

Macron must bear much of the blame for this normalisation of Le Pen. He has presided over soaring rates of illegal immigration, Islamic extremism and insecurity, promising much but delivering little. Last month, Le Pen’s National Rally (as she rebranded the party in 2018) and the centre-right Republicans conspired to pass an immigration bill that she hailed as “an ideological victory” for her party.  

Macron hopes that Attal will be a more formidable opponent to Le Pen than Borne. It’s a slim hope. Attal may be young but he’s been schooled in the usual elite French institutions, he grew up in an affluent suburb of Paris, became a consultant and joined the Socialist party. In short, he ticks all the boxes of what the French dub “la gauche caviar”. Furthermore, changing the PM won’t solve the fundamental problem facing Macron: that his Party lacks an absolute majority in a fractious parliament in which opposition MPs – whether left or right – loathe the president.

Another reason for Le Pen’s popularity is the way she has tapped into the anxieties of lower-income workers – France’s Red Wall – in a way no other party has managed. These are concerns not just about identity and insecurity, but also a cost of living crisis that shows no sign of easing.  

In this respect, Le Pen is greatly helped by her No2, Jordan Bardella, a 28-year-old from a housing estate in Seine-Saint-Denis, an impoverished district to the north of Paris. He was elected president of the National Rally in 2022 and has swiftly made a name for himself as a deft debater with a good grasp of detail; a fortnight ago the French public elected their 100 favourite personalities of the year. Bardella was the top ranked politician at number 30; second was Attal at number 57. Macron was 63rd.

It’s hard to see the dapper but privileged Attal winning the hearts and minds of blue-collar workers. They are angry, gloomy and frightened, and they blame Macron. Campaigning for the 2017 election, Macron said he was “neither left or right”, and when he was elected he declared in his victory speech that a “new page” had been turned in “our history”. But it wasn’t. He has proved to be just another elite Paris technocrat. Instead of transforming France into a Start-Up Nation, as he boasted he would do, he’s turned the country into a Broken Down Nation, bedevilled by riots, strikes, crime and a bloody drugs war between rival gangs.

The French feel let down by their president so they are now thinking that as they’ve tried every other party, why not try Le Pen’s? After all, Giorgia Meloni hasn’t ruined Italy – despite all the fear-mongering on the left about her being Mussolini in a blouse.

Once, the prospect of a Le Pen in the Élysée would have been inconceivable, but now it’s a distinct possibility. Should it happen in 2027 then that really would mark a new chapter in the history of France.