The French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has said her 2027 presidential campaign will be boosted after her anti-immigration party, the National Rally (RN), and its allies improved to a record 14 seats in partial senate elections this weekend.
Le Pen called the results a “historic victory” and a “major milestone” after her party cleared the 10-seat threshold to be able to form a senate group for the first time, after an indirect vote by local officials including mayors and councillors.
The party’s progress in the senate will allow it higher visibility and more funding in the second house of parliament before next spring’s presidential election. Le Pen is polling high as Emmanuel Macron prepares to step down after 10 years in office.
The French investigative website Mediapart reported on Monday that the RN party president, Jordan Bardella, allegedly made antisemitic comments in writing in 2013, when he was a young party member.
The alleged comments in a chat, which Mediapart said it had authenticated, included: “The Jew has to dominate other peoples, crush them, and rob them; a Zionist is necessarily a Jew, and fundamentally so.” He was also alleged to have written “all the banks are owned by Jews”.
Bardella responded on X that he “formally” rejected the allegations, which he described as “crude forgeries”, saying he would take legal action.
The RN MP Sébastien Chenu called the senate gains “a boost for the presidential campaign” and said there was “no more glass ceiling” for the party. Edwige Diaz, who secured a large senate win for the RN in Gironde outside Bordeaux, told Le Parisien: “This will be very useful for us before the presidential election.”
The 348-seat senate is France’s second chamber of parliament alongside the national assembly. Final results on Monday morning showed the senate remained dominated by the traditional right and centre right.
The upper chamber’s president of more than a decade, Gerard Larcher, 77, from the rightwing party Les Républicains, is expected to be re-elected next week.
Although the RN is now the biggest single opposition party in the national assembly and has the largest number of French members of the European parliament, it has until now never had a grouping in the senate, where its presence has been small.
Nine RN senators were elected on Sunday, in addition to the three who won seats in 2023. The RN ally, Éric Ciotti’s Union of the Right for the Republic party, won two seats.
The RN had entered the senate for the first time with two seats in 2014, when it was known as the Front National.
The senate has an indirect voting system, with local elected officials choosing new senators for half the upper chamber every three years, each to serve a six-year term.
Sunday’s vote by local mayors and councillors reflected the RN’s growth in support in medium towns at the last local elections in March. It also showed the party has support among independent rural mayors. Bardella called on politicians on the traditional right to join forces with his party.
The Socialist senator Laurence Rossignol said a crucial question would be whether the right and centre right in the senate now moved closer to the RN and hardened their own stance on issues such as immigration and welfare benefits. She told Public Sénat TV: “Will there be a republican barrier against RN ideas? That will be key.”
The right, the centre and the left’s Socialists remain the three major forces in the upper house.
The radical left party La France Insoumise won a senate seat for the first time, with Gabriel Amard elected in the Rhône. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the party’s leader, who is the highest-polling left candidate for the presidency, said Amard’s win was a “good omen” for his own 2027 presidential campaign.
