The National Union Party, heir to Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front, claimed that an Interior Ministry circular classifying its party's candidates as “far-right” undermines the “integrity of the vote.”
The French Council of State rejected a request from Marine Le Pen's party challenging the Interior Ministry's classification of the “far-right” party's candidates for the Senate elections scheduled for next September.
The National Union Party, heir to Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front, claimed that an Interior Ministry circular classifying its party's candidates as “far-right” undermines the “integrity of the vote.”
The party denounced the “unjustified difference in treatment” with the Communist Party and Unsubjugated France (the Radical Left), which are classified in the “Left” bloc.
The allocation of blocs (“far-left”, “left”, “other”, “centre”, “right” or “far-right”) is the responsibility of city councils, for the purposes of “electoral analysis” and “making electoral results clearer to the public”, As the Ministry indicated in its circular.
The Council of State, France's highest administrative court, confirmed the first interim decision in September 2023 regarding Marine Le Pen's party, which regularly protests its classification as far-right.
In February, French President Emmanuel Macron and his new prime minister, Gabriel Attal, showed signs of expanding the “republican arc,” similar to other European countries, such as Italy.
For example, Emmanuel Macron considered it “completely normal” to dialogue with Marine Le Pen's party represented in Parliament, while Attal said that “the Republican arc is the bicycle” – where 88 National Union deputies sit, out of 577 elected deputies. -, which represents a break with her predecessor, Elizabeth Bourne, who ruled out “extremism.”
The “Republican Arc” is a concept widely used in the presidential sphere, since Macron's first term, to distinguish the extremes (right and left) of government parties from the classical left and right.
But at the end of February, the French prime minister said there were “reasons to question whether Vladimir Putin’s forces were not already in France,” nominally targeting Marine Le Pen, in a tense exchange of arguments in parliament with his favorite lawmaker. For the 2027 presidential elections, he was accused of being close to the Russian president.
Three months before the European elections that will be decisive for France's presidential majority, Emmanuel Macron's camp is trying to confront the far right, which is widely seen as the favorite.
