Le Pen Loses Luster, Signaling Far Right’s Retreat in France, and Maybe Beyond

SOISSONS, France — Just this spring, Marine Le Pen’s presidential campaign drew vast crowds who enthusiastically embraced her National Front’s stridently nationalist, anti-immigrant vision of France.

This week in Soissons, a somnolent provincial town far from the gaudy cast-of-thousands extravaganzas of the campaign, Ms. Le Pen was greeted by a few dozen somber National Front activists in a drab meeting hall. Even hecklers didn’t bother: Just a handful of weak-voiced protesters quickly dispersed.

Ms. Le Pen’s party, crushed by Emmanuel Macron’s 66 percent in the presidential runoff in May, fared dismally in last Sunday’s legislative elections. The National Front will most likely confirm these losses in a second round of voting this Sunday. And each day brings new revelations of internal backbiting and squabbles over strategy within the Front.

It is a head-spinning turnabout that reflects, at least for now, the fizzling of Ms. Le Pen’s fortunes in France. The National Front’s retreat also adds to the impression that far-right populism is losing its appeal more broadly.

That retrenchment has been aided by the steady sagging of the Trump administration under an air of scandal, and the belated British realization that pulling out of the European Union may not be as fast, easy and excellent as voters were led to believe.

But whether it lasts will in no small part depend on the performance of political innovators like France’s young president, Mr. Macron, 39, a challenge that he himself has acknowledged.

Ms. Le Pen once dreamed of leading the principal opposition party to Mr. Macron and of marshaling a hundred or more parliamentary deputies to push the Front’s harsh nationalist agenda. Now she could well end up as the party’s only member of the National Assembly.

It is a lonely place to be, and it left the once-buoyant Ms. Le Pen, still looking exhausted from the sleepless presidential campaign, defensive and denouncing a “gigantic scandal for democracy” to reporters in Soissons this week.

But if the champion of France’s populist far right is now contemplating years of political marginalization, she has largely herself to blame, in the eyes of analysts as well as many in her own party. They say she is paying a bitter price for an incoherent message badly delivered.

Now her party faces a new round of painful existential questioning over what it can do to revive itself. Go left? Go right? No decisions have yet been made.

Support for the far right has close to evaporated, at least at the polls: From an already disappointing 34 percent in the May 7 presidential vote, it dropped to barely over 13 percent in last Sunday’s first-round parliamentary elections.

The Front’s voters stayed away in droves; their abstention rate was well over 50 percent, according to pollsters.

The first culprit is the Macron wave that has swept over France. The president’s field of nonpolitician amateur parliamentary candidates has touched a chord in a country fed up with established parties that brought no solutions to France’s chronic problems.

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