ABSTRACT
Nicolas Sarkozy’s victory in the April 2007 French presidential election was widely touted in France and abroad as heralding the demise of the Front National (FN). Having obtained only 10.4 per cent of the vote and seen its electorate shrink by nearly a million votes compared to April 2002, the FN suffered its first electoral reversal in a presidential election and recorded its worst result since its initial breakthrough in the early 1980s. This slide appeared to be confirmed by the June 2009 European parliamentary elections, in which the party received only 6.3 per cent of the vote and garnered less than a third the number of votes it had obtained in the 2007 presidential election and more than half a million votes less than it had received in the previous European parliamentary election of 2004 (Abonneau 2010; Ministère de l’Intérieur 2011). According to many observers, these electoral results saw the ‘crowding out’ of the FN owing to the resumption of a traditional right-wing position by the mainstream French right, notably through Sarkozy’s co-optation of the themes of restoring social order and controlling immigration. For them, the FN’s electoral decline marked a return to the bi-partisan structure of political competition that it had obtained in France during the 1960s and 1970s, and that characterizes most other ‘post-industrial’ Western democracies. From this viewpoint, the FN was to be seen as essentially an aberration, a bad dream from which the country had (finally) roused itself as the ‘normal’ dynamics of electoral competition reasserted themselves and the extreme right was shut out of political contention.
