Le Pen: "Victory Delayed, Not Denied"

"Victory has just been delayed. There's no need to be disappointed as we have significantly increased our seats."

Marine Le Pen, the de facto leader and former representative of the far-right National Rally (RN), who ranked first in the first round of the French legislative elections but dropped to third in the runoff, made these remarks on TF1 on Sunday (local time). She confidently stated, "The wave of the far-right will continue to rise."

In the previous general election, the far-right coalition led by RN secured 88 out of 577 seats in the National Assembly, but this time, they nearly doubled their count to 143 seats.

Le Pen also commented that RN would have secured an outright majority in the National Assembly without the unnatural alliance between President Emmanuel Macron and the far-left.

She further predicted that the cohabitation between the left-wing coalition 'New Popular Union' (NUP) led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of 'France Unbowed' (LFI), and the centrist-right Macron would not last long. According to her, the two factions only combined politically to prevent RN from taking first place, and their fundamentally different platforms make it hard for them to unite organically.

However, there are observations that Le Pen's situation is similar to that of her father. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right politician who founded RN's predecessor, the National Front, placed a close second to President Jacques Chirac in the first round of the 2002 presidential election. But in the runoff, a large number of voters united against the far-right, leading to Chirac's overwhelming victory with 82%.


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