kai arzheimer

36 years of research on the Front National, the Le Pens, & their voters

The year is 2022. For the third time, a Le Pen is proceeding to the run-off for the French presidency. And unlike 2002 (when her father stood) and 2017, Marine Le Pen has a chance to win this time.

Without doubt, a Le Pen presidency would upend French, European, and even global politics. This is why (depending on individual predispositions) everyone is so excited, worried, or even joyful about it. For the next ten days, everyone in the west will turn into a (part-time) France-watcher and expert, unless that person happens to be German, in which case another round of navel-gazing is in order.

“Jean-Marie LE PEN – Cannes – 17 décembre 2011” by Philippe MARC – Arles 13200 is licensed under CC by-nc-nd-2.0

But while we are necessarily unsure about Le Pen’s and our own future, we should already know a lot about her, her party, and their voters. The Rassemblement National (formerly the Front National) was founded almost 50 years ago. In the older literature, it was often presented as the “mastercase” or “archetype” of its party family. In all likelihood, it is one of the most well-researched radical right parties in Europe.

To check my intuition and save you some work, I therefore ran a simple keyword search on The Eclectic, Erratic Bibliography on the Extreme Right in Western Europe. After manually removing some false positives (remember the irrelevant National Front in Wallonia that eventually had to change its name because it infringed on Le Pen’s copyright?), I ended up with 63 titles, published between 1985 and 2021. While some of them are comparative (once upon a time, two- and three-country studies were a popular genre), most are exclusively devoted to France, the FN/RN, and the Le Pens. This treasure trove should be enough to occupy you until election night.

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