France’s Populist Surge Is a Cautionary Tale for America’s Right

By John Gustavsson

Sunday, December 28, 2025

 

As American conservatives grapple with the future of populism beyond Trump’s final term, France provides a sobering reminder: Populist anger can storm the gates of power, but only fiscal discipline can hold the fortress. In France, French authorities’ use of “lawfare” against Marine Le Pen has paradoxically boosted her National Rally (RN), sending it soaring in polls and making a takeover in 2027 increasingly plausible, much like how Alvin Bragg’s case strengthened Donald Trump.

 

French President Emmanuel Macron, reduced to appointing his fifth prime minister in two years, has watched his coalition crumble over unpopular attempts at entitlement reform and welfare tightening. In opposing these reforms, National Rally sadly mirrors so many other right-populist movements — including in America — who refuse to tackle entitlement spending, pretending instead that (well-needed) immigration reform is enough to get back on track.

 

Earlier this year, Le Pen, the Rally’s former leader, was convicted of embezzling EU funds and barred from running for office for five years, effective immediately, and was sentenced to four years in prison. The case is up for appeal in January.

 

As a Member of the European Parliament, Le Pen was entitled to hire accredited parliamentary assistants (APAs), i.e., policy advisers, and administrative staff paid by the European Parliament — a similar arrangement to congressional staff. Rules prohibit APAs from working on domestic policy or national campaigns, yet Le Pen’s staffers allegedly did just that.

 

Anyone who has worked in Brussels knows that this practice is widespread, even if technically against the rules, and Le Pen’s high-profile national ambitions naturally blurred the line between EU and French matters for her staff. Notably, the prosecution conceded she gained no personal financial benefit from the supposed “embezzlement.”

 

Much like Alvin Bragg’s convoluted case against Donald Trump, this lawfare has backfired: Convicting and barring Le Pen from office has done nothing to dim her or her party’s rising star.

 

Instead, it has provided room for another rising star: By forcing Le Pen to take a step back, her successor, 30-year-old Jordan Bardella, has been allowed to properly step into the limelight.

 

A bombshell poll released last month showed Bardella is currently set to beat all major contenders for the presidency in the election scheduled for 2027. Le Pen, who was the party’s presidential candidate in 2017 and 2022, lost both times after making it into the second round, as supporters from the other parties banded together to stop her ascension to the highest office.

 

Bardella, much like JD Vance, benefits both from his youthful charisma and from not having the associated baggage. Unlike most anti-immigration, nationalist parties in Europe that have sprung up in recent decades, National Rally has been around since 1972, and the party still represents the “old-school” European nationalism that is suspicious of decadent American culture and capitalism.

 

Under Bardella, National Rally is clearly changing, with the party adapting a more positive view of the United States. Bardella himself was set to speak at CPAC earlier this year, until what appeared to be a Nazi salute by Steve Bannon caused him to cancel.

 

While a long-time protégé of Marine Le Pen, Bardella has also distinguished himself by taking a more critical line against Russia, breaking with his predecessor’s position that Russia did not pose a threat to Western Europe. National Rally’s closeness to Russia has been a barrier for many voters who otherwise may support them.

 

Unfortunately, while modernizing its view on Russia and the United States, National Rally remains stuck in the past in other, crucial ways. Like Vance, Bardella has doubled down on irresponsible social security policies that would make the French fiscal crisis worse, not better.

 

There is no doubt that France has conducted an immigration policy for decades that may only be described as dangerously naïve and suicidal in its altruism, much like America did under Joe Biden. Unfortunately, National Rally appears to have bought the view that simply closing the border is sufficient to return France to its past glory.

 

The reality is that immigration is not the main reason why the French economy has stagnated. In fact, one key reason behind France’s liberal policy on immigration is that its population is aging, with birth rates similar to America’s, and its generous welfare state has left the country in an even more dire position vis-à-vis entitlements than the United States.

 

On average, public pension expenditures equal 14.8 percent of French GDP; more than all but two countries (Italy and Greece) in Europe, and more than twice that of the United States. With France now facing a debt-to-GDP ratio of 114 percent, runaway deficit spending, and with its credit rating downgraded, Emmanuel Macron has proposed modest cutbacks to the welfare state, including to retirement benefits.

 

Unlike what one might expect from a right-wing party, National Rally has fought these reforms tooth and nail: In 2023, Macron was able to raise France’s retirement age from 62 to 64, a reform that, as of this month, has been suspended after opposition from, among others, the Rally. Instead, National Rally has promised to allow more people to retire even earlier, at the age of 60. The party supports reducing the number of years a worker must contribute before claiming a pension, and raising the minimum old-age pensions. Furthermore, National Rally’s success in the 2024 snap election was instrumental in undoing Macron’s previous cuts to unemployment benefits.

 

One crucial reason why Europe has fallen behind the United States economically since the beginning of the last decade is that the EU over-regulation prevented it from taking advantage of the global tech boom that produced much of the growth in the United States, post-2010.

 

Under National Rally, this is unlikely to change, as the party is highly skeptical of foreign tech giants. Instead of attempting to attract investment from the likes of Google, RN wishes to pursue “digital sovereignty,” and its uncompromising policy even on skilled labor migration runs the risk of strangling the country’s struggling tech sector. This mirrors a tendency among some on the American populist right: While H-1B visas have undeniably been abused, a growing faction pushes for restrictions so sweeping that they threaten to shut out high-skilled talent American innovation needs.

 

While National Rally does support many pro-business policies, they, being traditional European nationalists, also fully embrace protectionism, failing to see that international competition is exactly the spur that the sclerotic French economy needs to boost productivity, cut waste, and force long-overdue reforms. After years of rising food prices, RN also still opposes the EU-Mercosur free-trade agreement that would provide Europe with a much-needed source of cheap food, citing the threat the agreement would pose to French farmers. This short-sighted, neo-mercantilist view on foreign competition is one that the party shares with many American right-populists.

 

Perhaps most tragically, in a country with the third-highest labor taxes in the OECD and the most strikes in the EU, National Rally, despite framing itself as the free-thinking anti-establishment party, refuses to propose the kind of structural, Thatcherite reforms that France so desperately needs.

 

Ultimately, the French elite’s lawfare against Le Pen backfired, elevating Jordan Bardella and handing National Rally its first real shot at power amid Macron’s collapse.

 

But this masks a deeper tragedy — and a vital lesson for America’s right. Clinging to protectionism and entitlement bloat, the Rally provides no escape from stagnation. France’s voters may empower populists in fury, only to wake to continued decline. U.S. conservatives must avoid this trap. Populist momentum must be channeled into genuine structural reforms, even if this requires tough conversations with voters — of the type that both National Rally and much of the GOP still refuse to have.

 

Currently, the same populists who style themselves as fearless truth-tellers — boldly exposing the dangers of unchecked immigration — grow conspicuously quiet when the subject turns to entitlement spending. This is true not just for France and the United States, but also for other European countries such as Italy and the Netherlands. For all their anti-elite rhetoric, they shield voters from the hardest fiscal truths, perpetuating the very irresponsibility they condemn in others. On fiscal issues, the purported truth-tellers adopt the establishment’s oldest tactic: To kick the can down the road while pretending the problem does not exist.

 

With Social Security trusts set to be depleted by 2033–34, France’s fiscal and political chaos today is a grim preview of where the United States may find itself tomorrow, if conservatives fail to build a movement uniting tough immigration enforcement with unapologetic, pro-growth fiscal conservatism.