PARIS — The one-on-one duel that has shaped French political life for nearly a decade ratcheted up a notch last week, with the far-right leader Marine Le Pen claiming one big scalp, and giving notice of going after a bigger one, President Emmanuel Macron.
No one doubted that she was calling the shots. Yet by Monday, Mr. Macron had relegated Ms. Le Pen and her party, the anti-immigrant National Rally, to “pariah” — her word — status. He did not deign to meet with her in his search for a new prime minister to replace the one she had largely ousted last week.
Leaders of other parties had tête-à-têtes with Mr. Macron at the presidential palace; but not Ms. Le Pen, who was excluded because she is part of the “anti-Republican front” — his words.
That could turn out to be a big mistake. Last week, Ms. Le Pen announced the demise of the hapless prime minister, Michel Barnier, in Parliament; sure enough he was overthrown in a no-confidence vote soon after.
Mr. Barnier had tried to force through a budget proposal without a vote, and above all he had barely consulted with Ms. Le Pen, who has the largest bloc of parliamentarians and cannot be ignored.
She has suggested successive Macron governments could fall, until he steps down — making clear she is after a more consequential trophy: the president himself.
Mr. Macron was barely off the plane from Saudi Arabia as she spoke last Wednesday night. As the bemused parliamentarians listened, she promised “deliverance” for France from its woes, “maybe, very soon.”
That seemed as much promise as threat.
It all rested on one man’s decision, she said, avoiding Mr. Macron’s name while suggesting she was pushing him toward the exit. Her target was clear.
“It’s up to the person concerned, by himself, to decide whether he should stay,” she said. “It’s on his conscience, to determine whether he should sacrifice public policy, and France’s fate, for the sake of his own pride.”
Ms. Le Pen then twisted the knife, appealing mockingly to Mr. Macron’s famous cool rationality: “It’s up to his reason to decide if he can ignore the people’s massive rejection, which, in his case, I believe is definitive.”
Mr. Macron, though, has insisted he isn’t going anywhere.
Ms. Le Pen, as the arbiter of France’s political fate, is closer to power than she has ever been. She has effected an extraordinary transformation of her party in just over a decade, replacing the crude post-fascist operatives of her antisemitic founder-father Jean Marie Le Pen’s era with the smooth-talking, well-tailored parliamentarians of today.
And she has used her solid electoral base — last week’s no-confidence vote enjoyed strong popularity with her voters — to elevate her party’s stature and drive a wedge between the other parties.
The person most responsible for helping her in that endeavor is none other than Mr. Macron, who has framed his political career on keeping her out of power.
That was the logic behind his two presidential campaigns, in 2017 and 2022 — when he was liberal democracy’s redoubt against the onslaught of the far right — and it was the underpinning for much of his support both times.
“Emmanuel Macron’s line was, ‘I’m the rampart against Marine Le Pen,’” said Guillaume Letourneur, an expert on the National Rally at the European Center for Sociology and Political Science. “You’d have to say that the result has been pretty weak.”
In his campaigns, Mr. Macron was able to draw support from left-wing voters who normally would have recoiled at his pro-business policies because they abhorred Ms. Le Pen more. He also had the backing of traditional right-wing voters who disdained the rough-edged origins of the party of her father, now 96.
But now Mr. Macron has been discredited, among his own voters and the left, after he opened the door to the National Rally’s plurality in the lower, important house of Parliament by calling an unnecessary snap election in June. In doing so, he said he wanted clarity: but what the election made clear was that voters prefer the far right, and the left, to him.
Still, though Ms. Le Pen scored a masterstroke last week, the path is not clear for her either. She has to move quickly, as the threat of a guilt verdict and a stiff sentence in an embezzlement trial, potentially coming March 31, hangs over her. She could be disqualified from running if prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations are upheld.
Ms. Le Pen is employing Donald J. Trump-style rhetoric, insisting she is being targeted in the courts for her politics.
“The objective is to attack somebody in the political opposition,” Ms. Le Pen said on French television last month. “I’m telling the French that the idea that they could be deprived of their choice is a very violent attack on democracy.”
But the evidence against her and 24 party associates also on trial has been strong and a conviction remains a distinct possibility. Testimony in court left little doubt that, as charged, the National Rally used money from the European Union for domestic party purposes, a misuse of over $7 million in public funds.
Witnesses said Ms. Le Pen told her European Parliament subordinates that a portion of the E.U.-allocated money would have to go to the national party; court documents described a “fraudulent system” engineered by the party hierarchy.
She is running against the clock. But Ms. Le Pen is also operating under what the political scientist and expert on the far right Jean-Yves Camus, of the Jean Jaurès Foundation, calls a “double constraint.”
She must appear to the voters both “as normal as possible, and also as disruptive as possible,” he said.
On the normal side: she went out of her way, in her speech in Parliament last week, to insist she was the true defender of not just France’s values, but of its Republican institutions.
That marked a notable difference with the far-right figure with whom she is sometimes compared, Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump may be keen on wrecking the institutions of government; definitely not Ms. Le Pen.
She characterized Mr. Macron as the institution-wrecker, the one who has “worked ceaselessly to tear down everything that he could: the Quai d’Orsay,” France’s foreign ministry; “the prefectures,” France’s local governors; “the investigative police, the pension system, unemployment insurance, the national railroad.” Ms. Le Pen’s list was exhaustive.
Her supporters want more state control and management, not less, unlike Mr. Trump’s. “No voter for Marine Le Pen wants that, tomorrow, the ministry of justice to no longer exists,” Mr. Camus said. “And they want more interference from the interior ministry.”
On the disruptive side: The “nearly eleven million” — the size of the party’s electorate in the last vote, often cited by National Rally members — have no interest in backing traditional center-right conservatives like the toppled prime minister, Mr. Barnier.
They are keen to see Ms. Le Pen undermining such figures.
“Her voters don’t go to the polls to help out the traditional right,” Mr. Camus said. “They want something the traditional right can’t give them — a state that provides even more services, except reserved only for French people.”
The party’s general secretary in Parliament, Renaud Labaye, said in an interview: “It’s all pretty simple. We’re defending the interests of the French, and of our voters. We’re defending the general interest. The politicians haven’t defended it.”
Underlying both desires — more order and more disruption — is a burning sense of class resentment that was evident in the move to overthrow Mr. Barnier. Ms. Le Pen and her troops believe they have been treated with condescension and disdain by Mr. Macron’s government, in whatever iteration. Usually these sentiments are not even hidden.
Mr. Barnier only met with Ms. Le Pen for what was portrayed as a serious discussion some 10 days before the no-confidence vote, Philippe Olivier, Ms. Le Pen’s brother-in-law and adviser, said in an interview.
“She met somebody who said, ‘I’m going to explain my budget to you.’ He never tried to find a compromise, not for one second,” said Mr. Olivier, who is also a member of the European Parliament. “He didn’t understand that it should have been a negotiation,” Mr. Olivier added.
“He took us for Boy Scouts. He took us for nothing. Behind all this there is class contempt. But the time for calling up the servants is over.”
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