France’s far right is on the brink of power. Blame its centrist president.

Much of this was about language. As Vinocur reports, she shifted the party’s demagoguery away from direct attacks on Muslims and Arabs and toward dog-whistles about cultural change and terrorism.

She would occasionally discipline party members who crossed her lines — including, most notably, her father. In 2015, when Jean-Marie once again got into trouble over comments about Jews and the Holocaust, Le Pen did the unthinkable: She expelled her father from the party he founded. He should “no longer be able to speak in the name of the National Front,” she said at the time.

In 2018, following a decisive presidential defeat, she changed the party’s name from National Front to National Rally. While seemingly minor, the move helped distance the party from her father’s relatively toxic brand and establish Le Pen’s independence as a political figure.

In the current election, she has tried to elevate candidates — most notably, 28-year-old party leader and proposed prime minister Jordan Bardella — who come across as normal, suit-wearing politicians rather than bombastic confessed torturers.

Don’t be fooled. Experts on French politics say that Le Pen’s moderation is primarily symbolic. While she has sanded off the RN’s rough edges, she also has maintained the far-right policy core — most notably, the “national priority” system mandating discrimination against immigrants in public goods — that helped make her father’s party so toxic in the first place. During the current campaign, Bardella vowed to ban dual nationals from holding government jobs.

“From [a policy lens], there’s very little difference between what Marine Le Pen is running with and what Jean-Marie was defending,” says Marta Lorimer, a Cardiff University expert on French politics.

Together, in short, the Le Pens accomplished one of the most successful political rebrandings in modern history. They created a party rooted in thinly veiled bigotry and, without significant policy compromise, turned it into something that the median French voter might actually consider supporting.

The RN’s recent success is not merely a story of Marine Le Pen’s political skills. Like most European far-right parties, it benefited hugely from the 2015 refugee crisis, which turned its signature issue of immigration into the issue across the continent.

Le Pen also benefited from the rise of Emmanuel Macron, a self-proclaimed “radical centrist” who shattered the foundations of France’s party system. In doing so, he created the perfect conditions for Le Pen’s rebranding to succeed.

The traditionally dominant factions of the center right and center left, today called the Republican and Socialist parties, saw themselves as rivals with a shared responsibility: guarding the republic from extremist forces that would harm it. They agreed never to share power with the FN/RN, an agreement referred to as “the republican front” or “cordon sanitaire.”

Macron broke the two-party system. In 2016, he quit his position as finance minister under a Socialist president to run for president at the head of a party he just founded, now called Renaissance. At the time, this may have seemed like an act of extreme hubris. But Macron proved far more popular than either of his mainstream rivals, and he won the most voters in the first round of France’s 2017 election. He faced Marine Le Pen in the head-to-head second round and crushed her.

After winning power, Macron made two moves that would serve his short-term political interests but end up paving the way for the RN’s rise in the long run.

First, Macron built his new party as a kind of centrist empire, one designed to occupy the entirety of the territory between radical right and extreme left. Containing both former Socialists and Republicans, its rise sapped the vitality from the already-weakened established parties.

Their decline should, in theory, have left Macron and Renaissance the only serious choice for most French voters. Certainly that was Macron’s theory.

No politician, even one as “Jupiterian” as Macron, can maintain a personal majority forever. Macron has become deeply unpopular, with a mere 26 percent of French voters approving of his current performance. It’s easy to blame specific policies, like his pension reform and failed gas tax, but it also might be plain old exhaustion. Around the world, incumbents are unpopular, and Macron has been in office for seven years.

So if French voters want to vote against Macron, who should they turn to? The center right is a shadow of itself. The center left has been forced into an unwieldy “new popular front” alliance with the polarizing and unstable extreme left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. There’s a smaller extreme-right party, led by comedian Eric Zemmour, but he’s even more radical than Le Pen.

That leaves only one non-Macron option with a proven electoral track record: the RN.

“There’s only two options for voters,” says Florence Faucher, a professor of political science at France’s Sciences Po research center. “At some point, people are going to want change from the majority of Macron.”

But Macron didn’t just demolish the other centrist parties. He actually aided Le Pen’s strategy of normalizing her party by tacking to the right on immigration. “It’s not so much that the National Rally has moderated [on immigration] than that the entire political system has radicalized,” says Lorimer.