National Rally’s rivals are targeting a growing contradiction at the heart of the party: Jordan Bardella’s pro-business turn and Marine Le Pen’s long-standing populist promises to protect purchasing power.
France’s National Rally has spent years trying to convince voters that it is ready to govern. But as the far-right party moves closer to power, one weakness is becoming harder to hide: its economic program is pulling in two different directions.
On one side stands Jordan Bardella, the party’s young president and its most polished public face. He has worked to reassure business leaders, soften fears about a National Rally government and present the party as fiscally responsible. His message is increasingly pro-business: lower taxes, fewer regulations, support for industry and a promise to review public finances before making expensive commitments.
On the other side remains Marine Le Pen, the movement’s dominant political figure and leader of its parliamentary group. Her appeal has long rested on a more populist economic offer: protecting workers, defending purchasing power, lowering the cost of energy and essential goods, and opposing reforms that many working-class voters see as attacks on social protection.
That tension is now giving National Rally’s opponents a clear line of attack. They argue that the party cannot simultaneously promise fiscal seriousness to investors and generous economic relief to voters hit by inflation. The result, critics say, is an economic platform that changes tone depending on the audience.
The contradiction is not new, but it has become more politically dangerous as the party’s chances of governing have grown. During the 2024 legislative campaign, Bardella courted business circles and scaled back or delayed some of the party’s more expensive promises, including its earlier pledge to fully reverse President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform. At the same time, National Rally continued to campaign on lowering value-added tax on energy and essential goods, one of Le Pen’s most recognizable proposals.
For rivals in the center, left and traditional right, the opening is obvious. They can portray Bardella as a free-market conservative trying to make National Rally acceptable to boardrooms, while casting Le Pen as the guardian of an older, more protectionist and welfare-oriented nationalism. The attack is designed to raise a simple question: which National Rally would govern France?
The party’s internal balancing act reflects a broader challenge facing European populist movements. To win working-class voters, they often promise protection from globalization, inflation and austerity. To govern, however, they must reassure financial markets, employers and European partners that they will not blow up public finances.
France makes that dilemma especially sharp. The country already carries high public debt, faces pressure over budget deficits and remains deeply divided over pensions, welfare and purchasing power. Any party seeking power must explain not only what it wants to spend, but how it would pay for it.
Le Pen has also recently shifted her own language, reviving criticism of “welfare dependency,” a term she had previously avoided in order not to alienate working-class voters. That move appeared to bring her closer to Bardella’s harder line on social spending, but it also underlined the party’s search for a coherent economic identity before the next presidential race.
The risk for National Rally is that economic ambiguity, once useful, becomes a liability. Vagueness helped the party broaden its coalition: workers could hear promises of protection, small business owners could hear promises of tax relief, and conservative voters could hear promises of discipline. But governing requires choices, and those choices could fracture the coalition the party has built.
For now, Bardella and Le Pen remain publicly aligned. Both understand that open division would damage a party that has worked carefully to project unity and competence. Yet their different instincts remain visible: Bardella wants to normalize National Rally as a credible governing party; Le Pen wants to preserve the anti-system, socially protective appeal that brought it mass support.
That is why the economic debate matters. Immigration and security may still dominate National Rally’s identity, but the question of money — taxes, pensions, welfare, debt and prices — could determine whether the party can turn popularity into power.
National Rally’s rivals believe they have found its weak spot. The challenge now is whether they can convince voters that the party’s economic contradictions are not just campaign noise, but a warning about how it would govern.
