All About

Front National is a nationalist political party in France. The party was founded in 1972, seeking to unify a variety of French far-right currents of the time. Jean-Marie Le Pen was the party's first leader and the undisputed centre of the party from its start until his resignation in 2011. While the party struggled as a marginal force for its first ten years, since 1984 it has been the unrivalled major force of the French far-right. The FN has established itself as the third largest political force in France, after the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) and the Socialist Party (PS). The 2002 presidential election was the first ever in France to include a far-right candidate in the run-off, as Le Pen beat the socialist candidate in the first round. In the run-off, Le Pen nevertheless finished a distant second to Jacques Chirac. Due to the French electoral system, the party's representation in public office has been limited, despite its electoral success. The current leader of the party is Marine Le Pen, who took over from her father in 2011.
Its major current policies include economic protectionism, a zero tolerance approach to law and order issues, and a strong opposition to immigration. Since the 1990s, its stance on the European Union has grown increasingly eurosceptic. The party's opposition to immigration is particularly focused on non-European immigration, and includes support for deporting illegal, criminal, and unemployed immigrants; its policy is nevertheless more moderate today than it was at its most radical point in the 1990s.
Some party officials have historically been subject to controversy for occasionally promoting historical revisionism, specifically related to the Second World War. However, the party's current leader, Marine Le Pen, has actively distanced herself from this.

The FN springs from a far-right tradition in France that dates back to the French Revolution of 1789, and the party rejects both the revolution and its legacy. One of the primary progenitors of the party was the Action Française, founded at the end of the nineteenth century, and its descendants in the Restauration Nationale, a pro-monarchy group that supports the claim of the Count of Paris to the French throne. More recently, the party drew from the Poujadism of the 1950s, which started out as an anti-tax movement without relations to the far-right; included among its parliamentary deputies, however, were "proto-nationalists" such as Jean-Marie Le Pen. Another conflict that is part of the party's background was the Algerian War (many frontistes, including Le Pen, were directly involved in the war), and the far-right dismay over the decision by French President Charles de Gaulle to abandon his promise of holding on to French Algeria. In the 1965 presidential election, Le Pen unsuccessfully attempted to consolidate the far-right vote around the far-right presidential candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour.During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the French far-right consisted mainly of small extreme movements such as Occident, Groupe Union Défense (GUD), and the Ordre Nouveau (ON).


Marine Le Pen (2011–present)




Jean-Marie Le Pen, flanked by the two main candidates to succeed him; his daughter Marine (left) and Bruno Gollnisch (right).
Jean-Marie Le Pen announced in September 2008 that he would retire as FN president in 2010. Le Pen's daughter Marine Le Pen and FN executive vice-president Bruno Gollnisch campaigned for the presidency to succeed Le Pen, with Marine's candidacy backed by her father. On 15 January 2011, it was announced that Marine Le Pen had received the two-thirds vote needed to become the new leader of the FN. She so Opinion polls showed the party's popularity increase under Marine Le Pen, and in the 2011 cantonal elections the party won 15% of the overall vote (up from 4.5% in 2008). However, due to the French electoral system, the party only won 2 of the 2,026 seats up for election.
For the 2012 presidential election, opinion polls showed Marine Le Pen as a serious challenger, with a few polls even suggesting that she could win the first round of the election.


Political profile


The party's ideology has been broadly described by scholars such as Shields as authoritarian, nationalist, and populist. The FN has changed considerably since its foundation, as it has pursued the principles of modernisation and pragmatism, adapting to the changing political climate. At the same time, its message has increasingly influenced mainstream political parties, although the FN too has moved somewhat closer towards the centre-right. While some have denounced its policies as "fascist", features that are integral to historical (and generic) fascism are absent in the party.


Issues of revisionism
The FN has historically preserved its affinities with many of the traditional values of Vichy France, including the motto Travail, famille, patrie. In line with this, some FN party officials, notably Jean-Marie Le Pen and Bruno Gollnisch, have occasionally espoused what has been seen as latent anti-Semitism in the party, including minimisation of the Holocaust and the Occupation. In 2005, Jean-Marie Le Pen considered in the far-right newspaper Rivarol that the German occupation of France "was not particularly inhumane even if there were some blunders," and in 1987 referred to the Nazi gas chambers as "a point of detail of the Second World War."

 He has repeated the latter claim several times. Also in 2005, Bruno Gollnisch cast doubt on the findings of the post-war tribunals and the official version of the Holocaust. Both received fines for these incidents. The current leader of the party, Marine Le Pen, publicly rebuked Gollnisch for his remarks, and distanced herself for a time from the party machine in protest against her father's comment. Mme. Le Pen has, during the 2012 presidential elections, worked hard to align herself with the many Jewish people in France, in an attempt to obtain their support in the election.