The Poster Child for the Radical Right Ascent: Rassemblement National and the 2024 European Elections
The Poster Child for the Radical Right Ascent: Rassemblement National and the 2024 European Elections

Summary/Abstract: In the three elections cycles for the European Parliament (EP) organized between 2014 and 2024, Rassemblement National (National Rally) (RN) has consistently placed in the first place, each time comfortably receiving more than 20% of the votes (in 2024, even crossing the 30% threshold). These results, in turn, enabled it to claim the most numbers of seats in the EP from those apportioned to France. RN’s victory in the 2014 European elections – while not singular – marked the beginning of a radical right trend that would come to dominate European politics for the next decade. While to an extent, RN’s performance can be attributed to the second order nature of the European elections, the consistency of the results coupled with the broader radical right trend at the European level are indicative of the fact that European elections are turning into critical contests that allow these parties to strive and challenge the mainstream status quo in order to advance their political agenda in the national arena. The present article analyses the political manifesto that RN adopted for the 2024 EP election, with the research providing a qualitative framework to identify and categorize the prevalent themes used by RN during the electoral campaign, in order to assess the extent to which the party stayed within the established right-wing patterns rooted in Euroscepticism and anti-immigration, or, on the contrary, whether, it had moderated its stances in order to appeal to a broader electorate.

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