Marine Le Pen’s secret weapon: why three presidential losses have not stopped her rise
Marine Le Pen enters the 2027 presidential race in a position that would once have seemed difficult to reconcile.
She has already lost the presidency three times.
In July, the Paris Court of Appeal upheld her conviction over the misuse of European Parliament funds. Her party, the far right Rassemblement National, or RN, has meanwhile produced Jordan Bardella, a younger leader who can poll as well as she does and increasingly cultivates a political identity of his own.
Yet Le Pen begins the campaign far ahead of every other potential candidate.
There is an irony at the heart of Emmanuel Macron's political legacy.
His victory in 2017 broke the party system that had governed France for decades. The Socialist Party and the traditional right had alternated in power throughout most of the Fifth Republic. Neither reached the presidential runoff that year. Macron instead assembled much of the moderate centre left and centre right behind a new political force and argued that the old division between left and right had become obsolete.
By weakening the parties that had traditionally occupied the space between the governing centre and the extremes, Macron also strengthened the position of the forces opposing him from outside it.
Macronism and Le Penism consequently became mutually structuring political poles. Macron could present himself as the European, liberal and republican barrier against nationalism. Le Pen could present herself as the principal alternative to a political order increasingly identified with Macron.
This suited both sides electorally.
Macron defeated her twice, but every campaign in which the Élysée portrayed Le Pen as the principal threat also reinforced her status as its principal competitor. By 2022, their second consecutive runoff no longer looked like an accident. It looked like the new structure of French presidential politics.
The contrast with Jean Marie Le Pen is revealing.
His qualification for the second round in 2002 was treated as a national political emergency. Jacques Chirac subsequently won with more than 82% of the vote. Marine Le Pen qualified in 2017 and again in 2022. Her repeated defeats should, in principles, have weakened her. They also produced something more useful: presidential familiarity.
For an ordinary candidate, losing three times can signal exhaustion. For Le Pen, those defeats also demonstrate that she repeatedly gets closer to the Élysée than almost anyone else.
The system around her has meanwhile become less coherent. The French party system is fragmented but increasingly characterised by the dominance of one political force, the RN, because none of its competitors possesses a comparable electoral position. The old governing parties remain diminished, Macron's camp has struggled to become a durable political organisation independent of its founder, and the left remains divided over both leadership and strategy.
Le Pen is therefore no longer merely the candidate of an outsider movement trying to force its way into French politics. She represents its most consolidated electoral bloc.
Macron will leave the Élysée in 2027 because the Constitution prevents him from seeking a third consecutive term, and Le Pen has never been closer to be the next resident of Elysée’s Palace.
The economic explanation for Le Pen's strength requires more care than the language of French "decline" sometimes suggests.
France is not an economy in collapse. It remains one of Europe's largest economies, with strong infrastructure, high productivity in many sectors, major industrial capabilities and significant foreign investment. Even after a difficult year, France remained Europe's leading destination by number of foreign investments projects in 2025.
Yet the direction is less reassuring.
EY recorded a 17% fall in such projects last year, while several European competitors gained ground, and investors increasingly identified political stability, regulatory predictability and costs among France's weaknesses.
Meanwhile, France's political problem is not the absence of resources or potential weaknesses identified by financial analysts. It is increasingly the distance between the resources the country possesses and what citizens believe they receive from them.
France combines high taxes and extensive public spending with correspondingly high expectations of the state. Citizens expect functioning hospitals and schools, reliable transport, pensions, policing and a degree of equality between territories.
When these services appear less reliable while debt remains high and successive governments struggle to pass budgets or sustain parliamentary majorities, dissatisfaction questions whether the state remains capable of delivering what it promises.
Marine Le Pen has spent much of her leadership pursuing what the French call dédiabolisation, the attempt to remove the stigma inherited from her father and the old Front National. She expelled Jean Marie Le Pen from the party, abandoned some of his most provocative language, changed the organisation's name and professionalised its public presentation.
The RN continues to defend positions on immigration, nationality and "national preference" that remain far outside much of the old governing consensus.
Normalisation has gradually become reciprocal.
French political life has also changed its relationship with the RN. Fifteen years of presidential campaigns, television appearances, parliamentary debates and electoral victories have progressively gave the RN institutional legitimacy. The RN then acquired something the old Front National rarely possessed: institutional legitimacy.
It won municipalities. It sent 89 MPs to the National Assembly in 2022. Its parliamentary presence became larger again after the 2024 elections. Its politicians became regular participants in institutional life rather than permanent outsiders to it.
French voters have watched Marine Le Pen’s debate two presidential elections against Macron. They have watched her lose. They have watched her return.
The RN has not necessarily become moderate, but it has become ordinary.
Le Pen's legal situation should, in theory, have interrupted this progression.
The Paris Court of Appeal upheld her conviction in July over the misuse of European Parliament funds and sentenced her to three years' imprisonment, two suspended and one to be served under electronic monitoring, alongside a €100,000 fine.
The court reduced her ineligibility sentence to 45 months, 30 of them suspended, meaning that the effective portion had already been served and no longer prevented her from running in 2027. Le Pen immediately confirmed her candidacy and appealed to the Court of Cassation.
As things stand, she remains eligible, although the legal process is not over.
The outcome leaves her in a politically peculiar position. She was not acquitted, but neither was she removed from the election.
That allows loyals supporters to interpret the proceedings through an existing populist narrative in which institutions seek to prevent voters from making their own choice.
Le Pen increasingly presents institutional constraints in precisely these terms, treating popular sovereignty as a competing source of legitimacy. Yet the evidence does not justify assuming that conviction has created a broad martyr effect.
The September Ipsos poll instead suggests polarisation. Her electoral base remains exceptionally loyal, but almost half of voters continue to say that she worries them a great deal.
Jordan Bardella creates a different challenge to her personal position.
His ascent initially appears to undermine the idea that Le Pen herself retains an exceptional appeal. He is younger, carries less of the Le Pen family's historical baggage and has demonstrated that he can match or occasionally outperform her in presidential polling. The RN's further normalisation may eventually require Marine Le Pen to recede.
But Bardella's emergence can work in both directions.
For most of the Front National's history, the movement appeared inseparable from one family. Bardella demonstrates that the RN can produce a nationally recognised leader without the Le Pen surname.
The party consequently looks less like a family vehicle and more like a durable political institution with a succession mechanism of its own.
The man who proves that Marine Le Pen is replaceable may therefore also make her candidacy appear less risky, because an RN victory no longer implies entrusting the country to a movement entirely dependent on one individual.
Their relationship is not without tension.
Bardella has recently distanced himself from elements of Le Pen's programme on pensions and the proposed ban on Islamic headscarves in public, reinforcing the impression that he is developing a somewhat different, more economically orthodox profile. But that divergence also reveals how far the RN has travelled. It can now contain different political styles within the same national leadership.
Bardella is Le Pen's successor, insurance policy and increasingly her rival.
He is also evidence that the RN's electorate is no longer reducible to personal loyalty towards Marine Le Pen.
This is perhaps the most important point in understanding her position seven months before the election.
A French presidential candidate does not need majority enthusiasm in the first round. Le Pen needs her political bloc to remain more cohesive than those competing with it, qualify comfortably for the second round and then prevent the rest of the electorate from coordinating effectively enough to stop her.
That is where her current advantage becomes structural.
Data gives her between 34% and 36% in the first round while her competitors remain far behind and and divided among several political families.
Her support is unusually transferable from one election to the next: more than nine out of ten of her 2022 voters currently intend to return to her.
Her position is therefore strong, but victory is not inevitable.
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11 of September 2026
