MARSEILLE, France—Martin, a 26-year-old teacher in the southern French town of Carpentras, firmly supports the far-right National Rally (RN) party. He voted for Marine Le Pen, the party’s figurehead, in both rounds of the 2022 presidential election as well as the RN candidate in the first round of last year’s legislative elections.
When it comes to U.S. President Donald Trump, however, he has more mixed feelings.
“I do appreciate this iron will to show he’s the one leading the world and that nobody else is going to tell him what to do or what to think or how the United States should act,” said Martin, who asked not to disclose his last name for professional reasons. “He’s the type of strongman we’d like to see in France, someone who says he’s protecting America first and thinking of America first.”
On the other hand, Trump’s actual policies have Martin less enthused—in particular, his tariffs and massive cuts to the public sector. “I can’t agree with everything he’s done because it has direct consequences on us and our companies in France,” he said. “If the French state applied the same policies that he’s applying, it’d be too hard, too brutal, not social enough.”
Martin’s skepticism highlights an awkward topic for the French far right, as the country is awash in media coverage of Trump ahead of its own 2027 presidential race. The RN and its ideological allies in France share plenty of common ground with the U.S. right—they, too, dream of capturing the presidency by railing against immigration, harnessing cultural grievances, and vowing to restore a wounded sense of national pride, appealing to traditional conservatives and disaffected working-class voters alike.
Yet according to a March poll, four out of five French people have a negative view of the U.S. president, including 57 percent of self-described RN sympathizers. Now, the French far right must also contend with Trump’s polarizing image among the very voters they seek to mobilize.
Le Pen once longed to be associated with the U.S. president. The day after Trump’s first victory in 2016, she congratulated the “American people” for being “free” and proclaimed his election “good news for our country.” In January 2017, she even showed up at Trump Tower in New York and waited in the building in the hopes of meeting the president-elect. While the one-to-one never happened, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon spoke at a party congress for the RN—then known as the National Front—in Lille the following year, telling attendees they were a part of an international movement against “globalism” and encouraging them to wear accusations of racism and xenophobia “as a badge of honor.” As recently as 2021, two RN members of the European Parliament visited the United States, where they met with a group of MAGA hard-liners in Congress that included then-Rep. Matt Gaetz and Rep. Paul Gosar.
During Trump’s second term, the RN has taken a different tack. Le Pen’s tweet congratulating Trump the day after his election was empty of any praise for his agenda, while her limited public assessments of his administration have been critical: In March, she deemed Washington’s move to slash aid to Kyiv “cruel,” and in July, she slammed the EU-U.S. trade deal as a “political, economic and moral fiasco.” Louis Aliot, the RN’s first vice president, attended Trump’s inauguration, but not before posting a disclaimer that warned his presence did “in no way constitute support” for the U.S. president.
Meanwhile, the party’s one high-profile attempt to publicly associate itself with U.S. Republicans since Trump’s return to Washington ended in disaster. In February, the RN’s young president, Jordan Bardella, canceled his appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference after Bannon concluded his speech with a Nazi salute. The party’s founder, Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, may have once called the gas chambers “a detail” of World War II history, but for today’s RN, Bannon’s provocation was deemed a step too far.
For the RN, the episode illustrated the perils of publicly associating with U.S. conservatives while maintaining a commitment to “de-demonization,” the largely successful strategy undertaken by Marine Le Pen to downplay her party’s extremist roots and project an aura of moderation. Under Trump, Republicans are testing the bounds of acceptable discourse—but under Le Pen, who served as the RN’s president from 2011 to 2021 and orchestrated its name change in 2018, the party has sought to prove to voters precisely how normal it is.
In an interview with Foreign Policy, Sébastien Chenu, an influential RN parliamentarian who sits on the party’s 12-person executive bureau, acknowledged there are “points of convergence” between his party and Trump, noting the U.S. president’s “patriotism” and unwillingness to make concessions to adversaries. Yet he primarily focused on their differences. “Trump is someone who’s much more liberal economically—we can’t simply transfer his program to France,” Chenu said. “He’s more conservative, or in any case his entourage is, including the way they view religion. We’re not a conservative party. We voted to enshrine abortion rights in the Constitution. We don’t want to go backward on gay marriage, though we’re not wokists.”
According to Chenu, Trump’s communication style is a double-edged sword among RN voters. “What I think makes Trump appealing to our voters is the ‘direct’ style that he has … because it breaks with the mold and the kind of political correctness that exists here,” he said. “Nevertheless, what people like less is the manner in which he expresses himself. There’s a kind of outrageous, even vulgar way of speaking.”
When pressed to explain why the RN has pared back its vocal support for the U.S. president, Chenu pointed to Trump’s record in office. “We saw what he was like in power, we saw his excesses, and especially his refusal to recognize the results of the 2020 election.”
Arnaud Stéphan, a former advisor to Le Pen during her 2022 campaign, doesn’t buy the theory of an RN leadership horrified by Trump’s assault on U.S. democracy. “They don’t care at all about Jan. 6,” he said.
According to Stéphan, now a TV news commentator, the RN’s move to dial back public support for Trump can be explained by the party’s anxieties over being lambasted by the French media. “It’s about the fear of appearing ridiculous by being associated with someone who everyone is consistently mocking in the media—the ‘orange president,’ the haircut, all the impressions—they’re embarrassed by that,” he said. “They’re uncomfortable about the prospects of being held accountable for the surreal personality that is Donald Trump.”
As Stéphan put it, the RN has learned its lesson after attempting to build ties with Vladimir Putin—a courtship that culminated in a now-infamous 2017 photo of Le Pen shaking hands with the Russian dictator in Moscow. Like the failed encounter with Trump that year, the meeting was driven by RN leaders intent on painting their party as one of competent statesmen. “There’s this desire to want to say, ‘OK, I’m not a loser, I don’t want to be cut out of the photo with world leaders, because when I’m president, I’m going to be with all these people,’” Stéphan said.
Of course, the Putin meeting backfired badly. Not only did it come with minimal political benefits in France, according to Stéphan, but it became a major liability after Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, generating suspicions over the RN’s allegiances as well as renewed attention over a $10 million loan the RN took out from a Russian bank in 2014. “They absolutely do not want to go down this path again,” he said.
Stéphan argued the RN’s obsession with its image drives its public positions more than any other factor—and with early polls indicating Le Pen’s party may seriously contend for the presidency in 2027, party heavyweights are terrified about alienating potential voters. Following her conviction in March for the embezzlement of EU funds, which banned her from running for public office until 2030, Le Pen herself may not be the candidate. But Bardella is prepared to step up if Le Pen’s appeal trial, set to begin in January, does not end in her favor.
“The RN’s frame of reference today is less about politics or ideology—it’s about public relations,” Stéphan said.
The RN’s discomfort hasn’t stopped others on the French far right from praising the U.S. president. Journalists and pundits regularly voice their support for Trump’s policies on outlets owned by conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré, including the TV news network CNews and weekly magazine JDNews. Other prominent hard-right politicians outside the RN have no qualms about praising Trump. The list includes Marion Maréchal, Le Pen’s niece who now heads her own small party, Identité-Libértés, which is more economically liberal and socially conservative than the RN; Éric Ciotti, the former head of the mainstream-right Les Républicains, who was expelled from the party after attempting to form an alliance with the RN in last year’s legislative elections; and Éric Zemmour, a polemicist convicted multiple times of hate speech who founded the Reconquête party and earned 7 percent of the vote in the 2022 presidential race, running to the right of Le Pen.
In an interview with Foreign Policy, Reconquête’s sole member of the European Parliament, Sarah Knafo, acknowledged that Trump’s “style” can turn off French voters, but she nevertheless praised his reelection.
Trump’s return is “a political shock in the best sense of the word,” Knafo said. “Trump shines a light on what our peoples are waiting for everywhere in the West and what French leaders no longer dare to say: defending their borders, their industry, and their people. Our political caste talks about ecology, diversity, and inclusion, but refuses to act on concrete subjects: security, immigration, public debt, technological sovereignty. Trump is showing these subjects can become central again, that it’s possible to disobey the dominant dogmas.”
Knafo, who traveled to Washington in January for Trump’s inauguration, criticized Le Pen’s attempt to distance herself from the U.S. president. “It’s very revealing,” she said of her rival’s shifting public stance. “Trump hasn’t changed. It’s his former supporters who’ve stepped back. The French understand it more and more: When you want to ‘de-demonize’ yourself, you end up becoming banal.”
Knafo may have a point, at least when it comes to a share of the hard right—after all, the same polls that show widespread disgust with Trump in France also reveal that a non-negligible share of the far-right electorate feels differently. Most voters may be shaking their heads in horror at the news from Washington, but some RN sympathizers are watching the spectacle and nodding along.
In the latter camp sit people like Meniker Amar, a 54-year-old who works in the cultural services section for Perpignan, the biggest city in France governed by the RN. “I like his frankness. I like his authenticity,” the longtime activist devoted to celebrating the memory of the harkis, Algerians who fought alongside France during the Algerian War, said of Trump. “At least, he tells it like it is.”
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