Nor would it provide a clarifying moment when the system is either affirmed or destroyed.
Instead, an RN victory would herald a slow transformation within, a politics of friction instead of explosion.
There was a time, not long ago, when the prospect of the French far right taking power was framed in operatic terms.
The word “Frexit” circulated with a kind of apocalyptic ease, anticipating that a triumphant Rassemblement National would trigger an immediate and terminal crisis for the European Union, a sudden snapping of the institutional ligaments that bind the continent together.
This was the era when the European project still liked to imagine itself as something like a constitutional order with a teleology: a direction, a purpose, a horizon of ever-closer union. To leave it was to fall off the map.
Then came Brexit.
The United Kingdom’s departure was so punishing, self-sabotaging, and exhausting that leaving the European Union has lost its appeal.
Even parties that once flirted openly with the idea of following suit have recalibrated. Under Marine Le Pen, the RN has followed this arc with almost textbook discipline: less talk of leaving the eurozone, less talk of dismantling the EU, more talk of sovereignty, borders, and the restoration of a national will allegedly diluted by decades of technocratic drift.
If Brexit was a divorce, a Rassemblement government would be a long, resentful cohabitation.
France, of course, is not just any cohabitant. Alongside Germany, it has functioned for decades as a dual core around which the EU’s institutional life has organised itself. When Paris and Berlin agree, things happen. Just because it’s a cliché doesn’t mean it’s not true.
An RN government would likely create a volatile imbalance between Western Europe’s two powerhouses. Germany remains broadly committed to a rules-based order, despite internal divisions. The French far right wins followers by labelling such rules as the problem.
The clash between these two mindsets would be awkward, with one partner continuing to sit at the table despite questioning its legitimacy.
The inevitable comparison is Hungary under Viktor Orbán, a state that has made an art form of strategic obstruction. But the analogy only goes so far. While Hungary can veto, delay, and irritate, it hasn’t been able to change the European Union’s overall direction.
France, by contrast, has the weight to do precisely that. If Paris begins to treat EU commitments as negotiable, others will pay close attention. Not necessarily out of ideological sympathy, but out of a perfectly rational sense that the body’s rules are only as binding as its most powerful members treat them.
We can already sketch the outlines of how this might play out in specific policy domains.
Migration, always a pressure point, would likely see the most change. The RN’s legitimacy comes from promises of stricter border control and an exclusionary national community. In the EU, this means pushing for tighter external borders, stricter asylum policies, and resisting the redistribution of asylum seekers.
More consequential, if less immediately legible, would be the impact of a Rassemblement National victory on the economic architecture of the European Union. The party has long been sceptical of the single market’s disciplinary mechanisms: competition rules, state aid restrictions, and various constraints that limit national governments’ capacity to intervene in their own economies.
In practice, the EU has already loosened some of these constraints in response to crises, most notably during the pandemic, when the need for rapid fiscal intervention overrode the usual scruples. But these were exceptional measures, temporary deviations from a norm that would eventually be restored.
Under the RN, France would be unlikely to accept that framing. It would instead treat these exceptions as precedents, pushing for a more permanent reconfiguration of the rules in favour of national industrial policy.
This would not necessarily involve a frontal assault on the legal structure of the single market—such an approach would be both politically costly and administratively complex—but rather a more incremental process of reinterpretation and selective enforcement.
Rules would be followed when convenient, stretched when necessary, and ignored when politically advantageous. Over time, this would not lead to a formal breakdown so much as functional fragmentation.
In theory, the single market would persist; in practice, its implementation would be increasingly uneven.
The eurozone, that delicate contraption held together by a combination of legal commitments and political will, would face similar pressure. RN has retreated from its earlier flirtation with abandoning the euro, recognising that such a move would be economically destabilising and politically risky.
Nevertheless, scepticism about the fiscal constraints associated with eurozone membership remains a core element of the party’s policy. In a period of economic downturn, a Rassemblement-led France might choose to prioritise domestic spending over compliance with EU deficit rules, betting that the Union would be unwilling to impose serious sanctions on one of its largest economies.
This is where the deeper logic of the situation begins to reveal itself. In many ways, the European Union is a system that relies on the voluntary compliance of its most powerful members. While its enforcement mechanisms are real, they are also politically mediated.
If France were to test the limits of these mechanisms, it is not at all clear that the system would respond with the firmness its formal structure suggests. More likely, it would adapt and accommodate, thereby further eroding the sense that its rules are binding in any robust sense.
Foreign policy and defence offer another arena in which the effects of an RN victory would be felt, though perhaps in a more diffuse manner. France has long been a driving force behind efforts to develop a more autonomous European defence capacity, a project that has gained renewed urgency in the wake of the war in Ukraine.
Rassemblement National’s military positions are somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, the party emphasises national sovereignty and might therefore be sceptical of deeper integration. On the other hand, it has historically taken a more accommodating stance toward Russia, though one tempered by recent events.
The likely outcome would not be a dramatic realignment, but a subtle recalibration. France might become a less reliable advocate for long-term support to Ukraine, more inclined toward negotiation or de-escalation, and less enthusiastic about pooling defence resources at the European level.
Given France’s central role in these initiatives, even a modest shift in its position could have significant ripple effects, slowing or redirecting the trajectory of European defence policy.
Such likely outcomes of an RN victory point toward a broader transformation of the European project itself.
The EU has always been something of an ambiguous entity, oscillating between the language of supranational integration and the reality of intergovernmental bargaining. In periods of relative consensus, it can present itself as a quasi-polity, a space in which collective decisions are made and implemented.
In periods of conflict, it reverts to a more transactional mode, a forum in which national governments negotiate, compromise, and occasionally obstruct.
An RN-led France would decisively push the system toward the latter mode. Although the EU would not disappear, it would become less coherent, less predictable, and less capable of sustained collective action. The sense of a shared trajectory—a common project moving, however haltingly, in a particular direction—would fade further into the background.
There is, however, a paradox here that is worth dwelling on. The rise of parties like the Rassemblement National is often interpreted as a symptom of the bloc’s democratic deficit, a reaction against a system that appears distant, technocratic, and unresponsive to popular concerns. Yet the effect of bringing such parties into power at the national level may be to deepen precisely the conditions that produced them.
By turning the European Union into a site of constant, low-level conflict without changing its constraints, an RN government would likely intensify the feeling that politics is visible but ineffective.
It is also possible that an Rassemblement National victory would provoke a counter-movement.
Historically, European integration has advanced not only through elite consensus but also through crisis, as moments of disruption have forced member states to clarify their commitments and, in some cases, deepen cooperation.
The shock of Brexit, for all its disruptive effects, also produced a certain consolidation among the remaining member states, a renewed appreciation of the costs of exit and the benefits of coordination.
Something similar could occur in response to a far-right government in France. Other member states, particularly those with strong pro-EU constituencies, might seek to reinforce existing mechanisms, to build alternative coalitions, or even to pursue forms of differentiated integration that allow a subset of countries to move forward in specific areas.
While the Franco-German axis would probably weaken, it could be partially replaced by new alignments, perhaps centred on Germany and a group of smaller states committed to maintaining a more integrated European Union.
In the end, the most likely scenario is neither collapse nor continuity, but mutation. The EU would survive, but as a space in which multiple political projects coexist uneasily.
This would be a quintessentially European outcome.
Instead of the dramatic resolution of conflict, we would witness its diffusion across layers of procedure and negotiation. Unfortunately, it’s not clear whether such intensive management could sustain the political legitimacy the EU requires.
An RN victory in France would not bring the European project to an end. But it would make more visible what has long been true: that the project no longer possesses a clear vision of its own future, only a series of increasingly strained accommodations to the pressures of the present.
Photograph courtesy of Vox Espana. Published under a Creative Commons license.
