In the first round of voting in France’s snap parliamentary elections on Sunday, Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National took 33.4 percent of the vote – their score slightly boosted by an electoral pact with some members of the right-wing (formerly centre-right) Les Républicains party.

In the European elections a month earlier the party took 31.7 percent of the vote, and in fact the party’s vote share has been consistently at around 30 percent for some time – representing the three-way split that has existed in French politics since 2017 with voting blocks divided into Macron’s centrists, the far-right and the far left. 

Turnout in the first round of voting on Sunday was high at 66.7 percent, so that puts the number of French people who voted RN at around 9.4 million people, out of a total population of 67 million.

So who are these voters?

From being a fringe party of extremists when it was founded in the 1970s as Front National, the rebranded Rassemblement National (RN) is now a major political force and attracts support from a wide variety of people.

But while all voters are different, there are some consistent trends to Rassemblement National’s support.

Geography

RN is not a city phenomenon – the greatest part of their support comes from rural and small-town France. Vote share for RN in the first round of 2024 elections was 1.6 times higher in small to medium towns (50,000 inhabitants or less) than in the big cities.

And this is a long-term trend – in fact modelling from 2015 suggested that the biggest single factor in the likelihood of a person voting RN is how far away they live from an SNCF railway station.

The party has extremely weak support in the country’s biggest towns and voting maps tend to show cities as islands of leftist or centrist votes amongst the swathes of RN votes in rural France.

The below graphic shows the vote share among France’s biggest cities – strongly in front is the leftist alliance of the Nouveau Front Populaire (in pink) following by the centrist Ensemble (orange) and Rassemblement National in third.

#legislatives2024 Voici le rapport de forces politiques dans les 23 métropoles françaises. En moyenne : NFP (42,9%), Ensemble! (25,8%), RN (19,1%).
Toulon et Nice dominées par le #RN.
Toutes les autres dominées par le #NouveauFrontPoplulaire @CEVIPOF @France_urbaine pic.twitter.com/KfAuP75IFk

— Martial Foucault (@MartialFoucault) July 2, 2024

Although they are definitely a nationwide movement these days, the party’s heartland is in north-east France – formerly the industrial heartland, the north-east now has relatively high levels of unemployment and low-wage jobs. As the working patterns shifted and jobs were lost the area moved from being a Communist stronghold to the power base of the far right.

Marine Le Pen’s seat is the former coal-mining town of Hénin-Beaumont – there the RN regularly scores 60 percent of the vote. She was re-elected outright in the first round of voting on June 30th after scoring 58 percent of the votes.

Demographics

Data collated by France Info, based on Ipsos polling, shows that RN support is strongest among the 34 to 69 age bracket – younger people are more likely to vote for the left while the centre is strongest among the over-70s.

The party gets the most support among people who classify themselves as ouvrières (workers, usually people in manual or low-skilled jobs), the left is strong among managers and professionals while retirees tend to vote centrist.

Education is also a strong marker of RN support – people who don’t have the Bac (high school diploma) are most likely to vote far-right while those who have a masters level or above university education are least likely to vote for them.

The French state’s ‘colourblind’ policy means that no data is collected on race or religion.

However, anecdotal evidence suggests that those who are immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants tend not to vote RN for obvious reasons – the party’s current policy wouldn’t just discriminate against immigrants in the job market and housing, it would also ban dual nationals from certain jobs. Of France’s 3.3 million dual nationals, most are people born in France who have a second nationality due to having a foreign parent.

However data also shows that French people who live in areas with a large immigrant population tend not to vote RN either.

Olivier Roy, research director at France’s CNRS (national centre for scientific research) says: “There are many towns with high concentrations of people of immigrant origin, and they vote [hard left] La France Insoumise.

“There’s an interesting lesson to be drawn from this: when a city is genuinely mixed, complex and diverse, the RN vote doesn’t rise – on the contrary. 

“In the countryside, on the other hand, the RN vote is massive – and that’s partly why the constituency level can lead to a majority of RN votes.”

Issues

So what motivates RN voters? The party itself has long been an anti-immigration party – its roots are racist and anti-Semitic and many of its candidates are proponents of conspiracy theories.

Although some RN voters are undoubtedly racist, polling suggests that more practical issues motivate many of its voters.

The issue of ‘medical deserts’ – areas without enough doctors to serve the population – and poor or non-existent public transport are seem as emblematic of how the RN heartlands of rural and small-town France has been left behind.

Olivier Roy added: “In many areas it is now very difficult to find a doctor; it is so difficult that it leads to a widespread feeling of impoverishment and loss of quality of life.

“This feeling of being downgraded also applies to transport: it is regularly announced – and in many places – that there will be no trains at weekends, that this is just the way it is, or that there will be no trains after 9.58pm for example.

“It’s all leading to a kind of fed-up, anti-establishment, anti-elite, anti-Parisian contempt.”

Although RN was not successful in co-opting the movement, much of its support comes from the heartlands of the ‘yellow vest’ protesters, who also embodied resentment against a perceived Paris-based elite and frustration at the areas that feel ‘left behind’.

In recent years the party, recognising that economics matter strongly to its voters, has modified its policies and is now a strong proponent of state intervention and financial aid.

During the 2022 election Marine Le Pen was among the first politicians to realise that the cost of living, especially in the wake of European inflation following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, would be the key issue of the campaign – her election platform placed huge emphasis on helping ordinary people deal with cost of living increases. 

The party is also strong on law and order, and frequently uses exaggerated or out-of-context figures to suggest that crime in France is out of control – and often tries to link crime, especially violent crime, to immigration or to young French people of immigrant background.

Identity

Although the party is founded on identity issues, it tends to avoid US and UK style ‘culture war’ topics such as trans rights of leftist bias in academic, perhaps recognising that they do not resonate strongly with voters who are struggling with more practical matters like paying bills.

The extreme right party Reconquête – founded by right-wing polemicist Eric Zemmour – has leaned in much more to culture war topics, although it does not so far seem to be a strategy that is paying off at the ballot box.

However the party does lean in to issues of French identity and is often to be found saying that “French people don’t recognise their country any more”.

In part this is due to the exaggerated fears of crime mentioned above, but the party has also weaponised football – saying that the French national team, which has many Black players, is “not representative”.

‘We’ve never tried that’

Rassemblement National also benefits from being the only one of the leading parties to have never disappointed the French electorate (because they have never been in power).

Over the past 70 years France has had left-wing governments, right-wing governments and more recently centrist governments. And all of them have managed to annoy a significant portion of the population through unpopular reforms or a lack of reforms – and French voters reliably detest all of their leaders in the end.

This gives RN the impetus to present themselves as a fresh face and a chance for something new.

It has also led to a flood of memes from non-RN voters, pointing out that sometimes things have never been tried for a very good reason.