National Rally keeps distance from Trump while eyeing 2027 French presidency

Marine Le Pen's National Rally leads the polls for France's 2027 presidential election, yet the party is moving cautiously around the Trump administration. The far-right party shares the US president's nationalist, anti-immigration instincts, but French public opinion and the party's own electoral calculus demand distance. An European Council on Foreign Relations poll in June 2025 found 55% of French voters believe Trump's policies harm France. Among National Rally supporters, only 18% think his policies benefit their own country.

The polling problem

The ECFR survey, conducted as the National Rally prepared for its next presidential bid, reveals a striking dissonance. While 37% of RN voters consider Trump's policies good for American citizens, barely half that number see any benefit for France. The party's core electorate, heavily blue-collar and concentrated in deindustrialised regions, would be directly exposed to any US tariffs on European steel, agricultural products or manufactured goods. Zsuzsanna Vegh of the German Marshall Fund described the party's approach as one of vote maximisation: it must appear moderate enough to attract centrist voters without alienating a base that is itself sceptical of Trump's impact on French interests.

This puts the National Rally in a different position from counterparts in Germany and Italy. In February 2025, Trump allies including Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk publicly backed the Alternative for Germany, helping propel it to second place in that month's federal election. In Rome, Giorgia Meloni's warm ties to Washington have made her the European Union's preferred interlocutor with the White House. The National Rally, by contrast, received no invitation to Trump's January inauguration, a pointed omission that underscores the party's deliberate arm's-length posture.

Ideological alignment versus practical risk

Camille Lons of the ECFR notes the paradox: the National Rally is ideologically aligned with Trump on migration, national sovereignty and cultural conservatism, yet maintains more distance than almost any other European populist force. The Trump administration views eurosceptic parties as instruments to fracture European unity, a dynamic that plays out in Budapest and Warsaw as much as in Paris. Both Hungary and Poland hosted the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2025, a first for Warsaw, where the Trump-endorsed candidate Karol Nawrocki won June's presidential election. For the National Rally, however, the transatlantic relationship is less an opportunity than a liability.

The tariff threat illustrates the point. Trump has floated duties of 10% to 20% on all EU imports, with higher rates for specific sectors. French agriculture, aerospace and luxury goods would be in the crosshairs. Vegh argues the party cannot afford to appear friendly with a leader whose policies could devastate its working-class heartlands. The National Rally's 2024 manifesto promised to defend French farmers and industry against globalisation; cheering a US president who threatens both would undermine that pitch.

The Bannon incident and image management

The party's sensitivity to association with the Trump orbit was on display in February 2025. Jordan Bardella, the 29-year-old RN president and Le Pen's designated heir apparent, was scheduled to address CPAC in Washington. He withdrew after Steve Bannon, a central figure in the MAGA movement, appeared to make a Nazi salute from the podium. Bardella called the gesture a provocation and refused to share a stage with him. Bannon responded with a sharp public rebuke. Lons described the episode as a clear example of the reputational risk: the National Rally has spent years normalising its image, presenting itself as a party capable of governing, and a single viral moment with a fringe American figure could undo that work.

Le Pen's own trajectory reflects this calculation. Since taking over from her father in 2011, she has expelled Holocaust deniers, softened rhetoric on Islam, and courted gay, Jewish and younger voters. The party topped both the 2024 European Parliament elections and the subsequent French legislative elections, though it fell short of a majority in the National Assembly. That progress rests on a perception of respectability that Trump's more volatile allies threaten to disrupt.

Le Pen's legal troubles and Trump's intervention

The balancing act grew more complicated in March 2025, when a Paris court convicted Le Pen of embezzling European Parliament funds to pay party staff, a scandal involving fake assistant contracts. The verdict carries a potential five-year ban from public office, which would end her presidential ambitions. Trump denounced the decision as a 'witch hunt' on his Truth Social platform, echoing the National Rally's own framing. Weeks later, Politico and Reuters reported that a Trump-appointed State Department official had offered to bankroll Le Pen's appeal with US government funds. The party reportedly declined the offer.

The episode cuts both ways. Trump's support rallies the base and reinforces the narrative of a political establishment conspiring against the populist right. Yet it also hands ammunition to opponents who argue the National Rally is a foreign proxy. With Bardella waiting in the wings, he would replace Le Pen on the ballot if her appeal fails, the party must decide whether Trump's endorsement is worth the sovereignist contradiction.

Internal tensions and voter views

At a party-organised visit to the French Senate in June 2025, supporters offered a microcosm of the divide. Jacques Le Roy, a former flight attendant, praised Trump's tariffs, immigration crackdowns and mass federal layoffs, 'degreasing the system', he called it. He also welcomed weakening the European Union, which Trump has described as created to 'screw' the United States. 'We agree with a lot of Trump's ideas,' Le Roy said. 'It's normal we have our differences. But the ideas remain the same.'

Noé Marguinal, a finance student at the same event, disagreed. 'France and Europe are extremely tied to the United States, and in my opinion too much,' he said. 'I think it's better we decide more for ourselves than remain under the subordination of the United States.' The generational and occupational split mirrors the party's broader coalition: older, working-class voters who see Trump as a fellow traveller, and younger, more educated supporters who prioritise French strategic autonomy.

The Republican Front and the 2027 horizon

For the National Rally's opponents, the Trump precedent is a warning. Both Le Pen and Bardella lead presidential polling, and analysts question whether the historic 'Republican Front', the informal alliance of mainstream parties that has blocked the far right in runoff elections, will hold. At an anti-Trump protest in Paris in June, demonstrators drew explicit parallels. 'Could it happen here?' asked Clothilde Desjeunes, a musician. 'Yes. That's why we're out here fighting.' Cathy, a dual US-French national who declined to give her surname, said she saw 'a lot of parallels with the United States' and feared a National Rally victory would replicate the democratic erosion she associates with Trump's America.

The party's 2024 performance suggests the front is cracking. In the legislative elections, the National Rally won 37% of the first-round vote, its highest ever, before tactical voting and withdrawals by centrist and left-wing candidates limited it to 142 seats, still the largest single bloc. The 2027 presidential contest will test whether that ceiling has risen.

Hedging bets across the Atlantic

Lons believes the National Rally will continue to hedge. 'They'll keep a distance with Trump, so they're not affected by his controversial positions, but they'll still be reinforced by the overall rise of the far right across Europe.' The strategy is legible: benefit from the structural shift that Trump embodies, the normalisation of nationalist politics, the weakening of transatlantic liberal consensus, without owning his specific failures. If Washington imposes steep tariffs, the party can claim victimhood. If a European far-right alliance coalesces, the National Rally can claim leadership. If Trump's presidency implodes, the party has already insulated itself.