Jordan Bardella, the president of the far-right National Rally, greeted his party’s 125 newly elected lawmakers on Wednesday morning with a few congratulations — and a lot of warnings.
“You are a source of pride for millions of French people,” Mr. Bardella told the lawmakers after they entered the National Assembly, France’s lower house of Parliament, to take their seats. But now, he added, “your responsibility, my dear friends, will be to underline the credibility of our project” and “to be absolutely irreproachable in the field and with the media.”
It was a none-too-subtle reference to the controversies that marred the National Rally’s campaign in France’s snap parliamentary elections. Many party candidates made racist remarks, failed to articulate their positions or were featured in French newspaper coverage for past antisemitic comments and pro-Kremlin positions. One candidate was pulled from the race after a photograph of her wearing a Nazi cap appeared on social media.
Several National Rally leaders and analysts said the controversies played a role in the party’s third place finish after it had been widely expected to win. The disappointing election results have now placed the National Rally at a crossroads as it looks toward presidential elections in 2027.
“We have to learn from these mistakes next time,” Louis Aliot, the party’s vice president, said in a phone interview on Thursday, noting that candidates with what he said was a problematic background should not have been endorsed. “We’re doing politics — it’s not a game. When our candidates have our logo on their backs, they have the responsibility to uphold our reputation, our honor, our legitimacy.”
There is no doubt that the National Rally increased its number of seats in Parliament by nearly 40 compared with the last general election two years ago, the biggest gain for any party. Marine Le Pen, the party’s de facto leader, described the results as a “delayed victory” that bodes well for the next presidential election, in which she is expected to run.
But political analysts say the party’s struggle to burnish its image remains a major obstacle in its path to power — one that could deter swing voters from supporting the far right and helping it achieve the majority of votes that has long eluded it.
“They’re not ready,” said Erwan Lecoeur, a political analyst who monitors the far right. “Today, we’re far from certain that the National Rally has 289 candidates who can hold their own,” he said, referring to the threshold needed to obtain a majority of seats in the National Assembly.
Mr. Lecoeur and Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right at the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, a research institute, said the party’s recent scandals had led people who were undecided about voting for the National Rally or abstaining to instead join a so-called republican front and support anyone but far-right candidates.
Safia Dahani, a sociologist specializing in the far right, said that “at every election, racist, antisemitic, sexist or homophobic comments made by National Rally candidates” continued to resurface, reinforcing suspicion among voters and experts that the party’s rebranding efforts were mere window dressing.
Mr. Bardella tried during the campaign to distance his party from longstanding pro-Kremlin positions. But on Monday, just after the snap election was over, the National Rally announced that he would lead a group of far-right parties in the European Parliament known for their friendly ties with Russia, including that of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, who visited President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow last week.
The announcement cast doubt on the National Rally’s efforts to distance itself from Moscow and suggested that the party might veer further right with new allies like Mr. Orban and the far-right Freedom Party of Austria.
During the snap election campaign, the National Rally also proposed barring citizens with dual nationalities from certain jobs it deemed “sensitive.” The proposal caused an outcry, with critics saying it foreshadowed the kind of discriminatory policies that could be put in place if the party came to power.
One National Rally lawmaker said a former education minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, who has dual French and Moroccan citizenship, should not have been given the post because her origins posed “a problem of dual loyalty.”
It was the kind of scandal the National Rally had hoped to avoid as part of a strategy to win power known as the “Matignon plan,” a reference to the name of the French prime minister’s residence. Jean-Philippe Tanguy, a prominent National Rally lawmaker, said the main goal of the plan was “to professionalize the profiles of our candidates in the constituencies likely to be won.”
But Mr. Tanguy admitted that in the constituencies most unfavorable to the party, such as the northwest, it had “failed to remove a number of candidates who should not even have been members of the National Rally.” The candidate who had been pictured wearing a Nazi cap was “crazy,” he said.
Mr. Camus said the party’s lack of structure had left it with little choice when selecting candidates in some constituencies. “They take the only party member who exists,” he said.
Given the French news media’s attention to the profiles of the National Rally candidates, Mr. Tanguy added, the party must be “more professional than the professionals” and be extremely cautious. Ms. Le Pen told her party’s new lawmakers on Wednesday that they were forbidden to express their personal opinions, according to the French newspaper Le Monde.
Mr. Lecoeur, the political scientist, said the party’s professionalization efforts had worked well in training spokespersons and leaders such as Mr. Bardella, whose clean-cut persona and messages delivered in a level tone went a long way to help soften the party’s image.
But he said these efforts had not trickled down to the party’s base. “When you walk into the shop, behind the window, you realize that there are still racists, xenophobes and people who absolutely don’t know how to talk to the public,” Mr. Lecoeur said.
The party’s rebranding efforts have hit snags on other fronts, too. The National Rally has been plagued by a history of shadowy campaign funding. Ms. Le Pen herself is scheduled to stand trial later this year alongside more than 20 other party members on charges of embezzling funds from the European Parliament from 2004 to 2016 and using the money for unrelated party expenses.
To make matters worse, the Paris prosecutor’s office said this week that it had opened a preliminary investigation into accusations of illegal financing of Ms. Le Pen’s campaign for the 2022 presidential election.
But within her own party, Ms. Le Pen could emerge strengthened from Sunday’s defeat, Mr. Lecoeur said. Much of the blame lies with Mr. Bardella, who ran the unsuccessful campaign and whose rising popularity had begun to threaten Ms. Le Pen’s leadership.
That rivalry will be put to rest, with Mr. Bardella now heading to Brussels to lead the new far-right bloc, Mr. Lecoeur said. He added that the fiercest critics of the campaign were party members with longstanding ties to Ms. Le Pen, including Mr. Aliot, her former partner, who competed with Mr. Bardella for the party’s presidency in 2022.
“What really lies behind” this call for change, Mr. Lecoeur said, “is Marine Le Pen taking the party in her own hands again.”
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