France’s far right finally gets its own Senate group

France has a habit of treating political thresholds as if they were matters of destiny. On Sunday, the National Rally and its allies crossed one of them in the Senate, winning 14 seats in the 348-member upper house and, for the first time, enough numbers to form a parliamentary group. For a party that spent years knocking at the door of the institutions it likes to denounce, this is no small thing.

The gains were substantial by any measure. Nine RN senators were elected on Sunday, adding to the three seats the party had won in 2023. Two more came from Eric Ciotti’s Union of the Right for the Republic, or UDR, giving the far right and its allies a combined bloc that is now impossible to dismiss as a curiosity. The party entered the Senate in 2014 with just two seats, when it was still known as the National Front. Since then, it has moved from nuisance to fixture, which is often how political normalisation begins.

Marine Le Pen called the result a historic victory, and on this rare occasion the language was not entirely inflated. The Senate is elected indirectly: local elected officials choose new senators for half the chamber every three years, and each senator serves a six-year term. That makes the upper house less theatrical than the National Assembly, but no less revealing. If the far right is gaining ground even there, it is not because French politics has become more virtuous.

Jordan Bardella, the RN president, said the party’s senators would form a group with UDR allies. Ciotti, who left Les Républicains in 2024 after calling for an alliance with the far right, has now helped make that idea a parliamentary reality. Meanwhile, Gérard Larcher, the 77-year-old president of the Senate and a veteran of Les Républicains, is expected to be re-elected next week. The old guard remains in place, but the arithmetic is changing.

The timing matters. Le Pen is chasing what may be her best chance yet at power in next year’s presidential election, when Emmanuel Macron’s second and final term ends. Her party already emerged as the largest single force in the National Assembly after Macron called snap elections in 2024, though it still fell short of a majority and trailed the left-wing New Popular Front alliance. The Senate result does not hand Le Pen power. It does something more useful in politics: it makes her look inevitable, or at least harder to ignore. In France, that is often the same thing until the voters decide otherwise.

Written by Freya Stensrud freya.stensrud@alpineweekly.com