Why does France turn to be far-rightist?: Reconquête as a niche party faced with RN

It is remarkable that, during the French presidential election in 2022, there are two far-right parties: Reconquête and Rassemblée nationale(RN). After creation at the end of 2021, approval rating for Reconquête rose from 13% to 16% and then fell, winning 7.1% of the votes at the first round of 2022 presidential election. Approval rating for Marine Le Pen was in inverse proportion to that of Reconquête. This paper aims to analyze the rise of Reconquête with a niche party theory, trying to confirm it through parties leaders’ declarations, on the one hand, and election pledges of the Reconquête, Front national(FN) and RN party of 2002 and 2022, on the other hand. Analysis shows that the emergence of Reconquête was a consequence of Marine Le Pen’s “dédiabolisation” strategy. In order to keep distance from Jean-Marie Le Pen who caused several scandals by his radical remarks, Marine Le Pen changed the Party’s name from FN to RN, and tried to correct the excessively far-righted path, similar to fascist one. RN succeeded in becoming less extreme far-right party, and was finally criticized for being “too normal”, leaving an extreme far-right party’s place vacant. Reconquête took over the position of an extreme far-right party that had been vacant, and therefore became more politically similar to that of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Common points of two leaders are found in radical remarks which led them sometimes to be sentenced to be guilty, and in the similar campaign pledges of Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002 and Zemmour in 2022. For these aspects, Reconquête can be seen as a niche party, given that it does not depend on a specific ideology, and keeps strong policy rigidity. In addition, Zemmour’s policy follows extreme far-right tendencies of Jean-Marie Le Pen, which contributes to maintain a consistent minority support in the sense that existing parties are reluctant to deal with it. Moreover, the niche party strategy of Reconquête expanded the support base of the far-right parties. RN’s maximum approval rating was just over 26% before the rise of Reconquête, but, when the latter was included in the polls since September 2021, and during the first round of the 2022 presidential election, the total approval rating for the two far-right parties increased further to 30.3%, which is much more than 26% of RN. Yet, it is possible that the political position of far-rights parties in France would be depend on whether Reconquête will keep its stance as a niche party in the next elections, or its niche party position will be weakened.