France's 2027 presidential election: Can the far-right National Rally win without Le Pen?

France's 2027 presidential election: Can the far-right National Rally win without Le Pen? With less than a year to go until France's April 2027 presidential election, the far-right National Rally party still hasn't designated a candidate. As Marine Le Pen appeals a graft conviction that barred her from seeking office for five years, her young protégé Jordan Bardella is poised to step in. But some doubt whether the young Bardella has what it takes to win the Élysée Palace. Since its founding as the National Front in 1972, France's main far-right party was long synonymous with its founder, Jean‑Marie Le Pen. His daughter Marine Le Pen, who took the reins in 2011, has since rebranded the party as the National Rally (RN). After two strong but unsuccessful presidential campaigns against Emmanuel Macron, it appeared that 2027 could be Marine Le Pen's best opportunity yet. Macron’s approval ratings are low and his political camp has been weakened while the RN is polling well ahead of other contenders, with its candidate typically drawing around 31–36% of voting intentions for the first round. But Le Pen’s candidacy has been thrown into jeopardy. In March 2025, she was convicted of embezzling European Parliament public funds to pay RN employees and barred from running for public office for five years. She filed an appeal shortly after the ruling and is awaiting a verdict on July 7. Now, Le Pen and the RN are faced with a key question: Can the party win without its figurehead? Read moreFrench prosecutors seek 5-year ban from office for far-right leader Marine Le Pen in appeal trial A TikTok-sanctioned alternative The RN seems to be considering only one possible replacement for Le Pen: Jordan Bardella. The 30-year-old took over as president of the party in 2022, using his social media savvy to bring in a new demographic of young supporters and leading the party to a historic victory in the 2024 European elections. Bardella is even polling slightly ahead of Le Pen. Thibault Muzergues, political director at Shared Ground and the author of “La droite woke” (The woke right), said this could be because “Bardella is positioning RN policy much more around the left versus the right”. While the RN has maintained a “neither right nor left” position, as Le Pen is fond of saying, Bardella has somewhat strayed from tradition. He said he would personally vote for right-wing Les Républicains party candidate Rachida Dati in Paris’s municipal election. Baptiste Roger-Lacan, a researcher at the Fondation Napoléon and author of “Le Roi, une autre histoire de la droite” (The King: another history of the right), argues the French electorate would be ready for a “union of the right” that includes the RN. Still, he is not convinced that Bardella could deliver a victory come election day. “[Bardella’s] popular on TikTok, but there’s no infrastructure at the RN that has been working on how to convert this digital support into actual votes,” Roger-Lacan said. Bardella is also a relative newcomer. If elected president, he would become France’s youngest leader since Napoleon Bonaparte, having joined the party in 2012 and having no experience in a profession outside of politics. “[Bardella] will be facing other seasoned candidates,” Roger-Lacan notes. “He’s extremely inexperienced, and that’s an issue.” Read moreWhat to know about French far-right leader Marine Le Pen's graft appeal Who’s stopping them? Whether Le Pen or Bardella take the lead, any challenger will have to put up a considerable fight to beat the RN, the only party that is almost certain to make it to the second round, according to current polls. From the left, one of the leading challengers will be France Unbowed’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a divisive former Trotskyist polling between 13% and 13.5%. While Mélenchon is popular among Gen Z voters, he is also the most disliked political figure in France, according to a recent poll. Read moreExplainer: How does France's two-round presidential election work? This could always change, but Victor Mallet, a senior editor at the Financial Times and the author of “Far-right France: Le Pen, Bardella and the Future of Europe”, says that if Mélenchon makes it to the second round against the RN, the far-right party will be more likely to win – with or without Le Pen. “Nobody on the center right is going to vote for somebody on the far left, whereas they would vote for Bardella,” said Mallet. “Embarrassment about being linked to the RN is really fading into the past.” This leaves the candidates on the centre and the right, who Mallet sees as posing a bigger threat. Currently, the options garnering the most attention are Édouard Philippe, the Horizons party leader and former prime minister, who is polling at 13 to 14.5%, and Gabriel Attal, another former prime minister from Macron’s own Renaissance party, polling from 8.5 to 9.5%. Read moreHow Jordan Bardella became France’s far-right poster boy Muzergues is not confident in any candidate’s chances of beating Le Pen or Bardella. To him, an RN presidency is not a matter of if, but when. However, Célia Belin, head of the European Council on Foreign Relations’ Paris office, thinks that the RN could see a dip in the polls once Le Pen’s verdict is announced, arguing the party is more popular with both Bardella and Le Pen at the helm. “The RN might be currently at the height of their power because they have these two people,” said Belin. Belin also points out that French presidential campaigns remain highly unpredictable. The 2017 election, in which Emmanuel Macron rose from polling in the low teens just months before the vote to ultimately winning the presidency, illustrates how quickly the political landscape can shift. So she cautions that it is still too early to draw firm conclusions about the outcome of the 2027 race. “It’s impossible to predict at this point,” said Belin. “Anything could happen.”