Shortly before President-elect Donald Trump's first inauguration in January 2017, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Rassemblement National (RN), traveled to the United States. Trump’s victory had taken both politicians and the media by surprise. Le Pen arrived in New York hoping to join a right-wing relay team: after Brexit in June 2016, Trump had delivered another victory for right-wing populism. Le Pen wanted to add a third by winning the French presidential elections of May 2017.
But the meeting in Trump Tower never took place and four months later Le Pen lost the election. In retrospect, it’s tempting to see the trip as an exercise in double futility: Le Pen did not get her meeting with Trump, with no photo opportunities to show for her journey. In fact, the RN candidate’s futile wait in the lobby of Trump’s skyscraper brought her little but ridicule. The French presidential election—with Emmanuel Macron elected president rather than Le Pen—broke the populist winning streak, giving hope to advocates of liberal European unification. The extremely pro-European Macron won the election by declaring war on populists and promising to renew the European Union.
Seven years later, Trump's re-election marks another turning of the tide, with right-wing populists again on the rise. Macron's pro-Europeanism has weakened: The French president is a more experienced figure than he was in 2017, and a more sober one. He won re-election in 2022, and prevented RN participation in government in the summer of 2024. But the long-term trend seems to lie in Le Pen’s favor, after she harried and hunted Michel Barnier's minority government in the National Assembly, finally succeeding in toppling it in early December.
In 2017, “European sovereignty” was Macron’s battle cry, a plea for EU integration. But today the call has been appropriated by right-wing populists who seek a return to a Europe of loosely-connected nation states.
Seizing the Chance
Right-wing populist forces in Europe are enjoying a new wave of self-confidence, aware that they have made real progress in the last few years. Since 2016, the EU has staggered from crisis to crisis, with no significant deepening of integration, and a failure to implement the lessons of Brexit, Trump’s election wins, or the war in Ukraine (the lesson is: more European sovereignty!). By contrast, right-wing populist parties and groups have been creating international networks, patiently waiting for their moment.
That moment has now arrived: Trump’s second election victory has opened a populist “Overton window,” a key concept for the new transatlantic right. The idea, conceived in the 1990s by the political analyst Joseph Overton, is simple enough: The success of political ideas depends on their acceptance by the public. But public opinion is in flux, and can open and close like a window. Beginning in January 2025, the window will open again: With Trump once again the most powerful man in the world, right-wing populist intellectuals, networks, and parties in the West will hope to use the next four years to advance their ideas.
France is no exception. The outlines of a new right-wing movement can be seen in the US connections made by French think tanks and interest groups in recent years, a process which has recently intensified. Out of sight of the political and media establishment, this has begun to take real shape, with its leading thinkers now looking to foment open conflict. These figures have internalized the theories of Antonio Gramsci, who thought the democratic battle of ideas was not reducible to elections; for that reason, he attached great importance to political culture. From the perspective of right-wing groups, the public sphere has been dominated by a left-liberal agenda in recent years, but they are now "slightly out in front" in this pre-political space, as noted by the political scientist Thomas Greven in May.
Into the Public Eye
In November 2023, the first meeting of the Worldwide Freedom Initiative (WFI) was held at the Tour Montparnasse in Paris. The meeting’s roll-call of organizers and attendees serves to illustrate the ideas and strategies of the new transatlantic alliance. One of the hosts was John O'Sullivan, founder of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based ultra-conservative organization. O’Sullivan’s guests in Paris included figures from the French hard right, including Éric Zemmour, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, and Florian Philippot, as well as representatives of Republicans Overseas, the foreign branch of the US Republicans. These included two former Trump advisers, David Bossie and Corey Lewandowski, and the Republican Governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem. Among the guests from the EU was Balazs Orbán, a close (but unrelated) adviser to the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
As well as sparking public interest, events like these have prompted research. Numerous journalists have investigated the international dimension of right-wing populist networks: The hosts of the Danube Institute are part of what is known as the “Atlas Network,” which recruits conservative allies for culture wars around the world, using the slogan “coach, compete, celebrate.” In 2023, the network boasted around 600 partners in a hundred countries, including the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, both leading US think tanks. Among other sources, the cash to stage these meetings comes from the billion-dollars assets of the Koch Industries group. In early 2024, The Guardian published an article on the role of the Atlas Network, which intellectually informs the libertarian policies of Argentinian President Javier Milei, of the British Conservatives most recently under Prime Ministers Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, and Donald Trump. Last May activists published extensive research into the French branches of the network. Most recently, economics magazine Challenges focused on the international connections of the Budapest-based Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC).
Think Tanks and Promoting Young Talent
An important function of the Atlas Network is to impart the basics of think tank work, in particular how to influence public debates. In the early 2000s, these strategies were brought from Washington to Paris by a young journalist, Alexandre Pesey, who had gained insights into promoting young conservative talent during an internship at the American Leadership Institute. On his return to France in 2004, Pesey co-founded the Institut de formation politique (IFP), where he continues to be director. The IFP offers courses on media training, campaign strategies, and much else, and according to its own data, has trained over 3,200 people in its two decades of operation.
A glance at the French public sphere shows how effective the strategies of the IFP and similar institutions continue to be. Many young opinion makers who have studied there have built a noticeable presence on social media. The journalist Charlotte d’Ornellas is one: She works for the Journal du Dimanche (JDD), which has taken a sharply right-wing editorial line since being taken over by Vincent Bolloré, an arch-Catholic billionaire. Another IFP alumna, Thaïs d’Escufon, has a particularly active online presence as part of the so-called “tradwife” movement, which encourages young women to return to traditional gender roles. Similarly influential is Alice Cordier, director of the Nemesis Collective, a group which campaigns for women’s rights in public spaces, often by attacking Muslim immigrants and Islam more generally. Samuel Lafont, a spokesman for Zemmour’s Reconquête (R!) party, is another who learned his trade at the IFP.
A Point of Crystallization
In addition to the IFP’s alumni, the institution’s teaching staff also demonstrates the strategic importance given to it by politicians. The MEP Francois-Xavier Bellamy, the deputy chairman of the Républicains, the center-right party, has already been a guest at the IFP, as has Eric Ciotti, the party’s former chair who had to leave after pushing for a pact with Le Pen. The list of visiting faculty reads like a Who's Who of French right-wingers: Philippe de Villiers, Marion Maréchal, Zemmour, and the young RN leader Jordan Bardella, all of them well-known faces in right-wing and extreme-right French parties and movements, albeit ones which have often been at odds in the past.
This contentious past is what now prompts Pesey’s dreams of long-term unity between these parties and their ideas. In 2019, he called for a coming together of right-wing campaigns against “globalist” elites, left-wing “relativism,” mass immigration, and the sprawling state apparatus. A year later, at a conference in Rome attended by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orbán, Pesey warned of the “double danger” posed by globalization and Islam, putting forward his institute as a place where different currents and interests can coalesce. In this respect, he compares it to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which for decades now has been promoting connections between right-wing ideas in the United States and the rest of the world.
Investment in the Future
Sarah Knafo, a member of the European Parliament, offers a good example of the transatlantic exchange of right-wing ideas, and the influence it can have. On one level, Knafo’s background presents a classic trajectory of the French state elite: After studying at the elite Sciences Po university in Paris, she graduated from the Ecole nationale d’administration (ENA), a kind of finishing school for top French civil servants, based in Strasbourg. But in 2021, shortly after beginning a career at the Court of Auditors, Knafo shifted to politics, becoming an advisor and campaign strategist for Zemmour, while also teaching at the IFP. In 2024, she was elected to the European Parliament for Zemmour's party. In the short time since her election, clever self-presentation on social media has helped earn her a reputation as a rising star of the French right.
Knafo has also looked across the Atlantic for inspiration in her attacks on the current French government and the European Commission. This summer, she was among 15 “Lincoln Fellows” at the Californian Claremont Institute, a think tank advocating for limits on state power and a return to the principles of the United States’ founding fathers. The institute’s homepage features words of praise from JD Vance, the incoming US vice-president, and presents Knafo as a politician and an activist working against “propaganda in French schools.” It mentions that in 2022 she founded Vigilant Parents, an association campaigning against “left-wing radical influence,” which they claim attempts to influence children with “deconstructionist” ideologies and LGBTQ content.
Knafo was in New York for Trump’s re-election in November, on a return trip to the United States just weeks after a visit to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida residence. Her November trip included several appearances on social networks and on French media.
The Limits of Unity
Recent months have seen a new fluidity in the border zone between French party politics and second-tier political activism across the right-wing spectrum. On November 23, some 60 members of the Nemesis collective met at the Le Pen family home to make plans for a demonstration against violence against women, which they had registered on the same day in Paris. It appears that the IFP is succeeding in making itself compatible with politics and political parties, as well as placing its alumni and its content in the media and public debates. Years of work would appear to be paying off.
Pesey, the IFP director, has repeatedly expressed support for a second strategic goal, although this will prove far more difficult to achieve: The creation of a unified right-wing bloc, ranging from the bourgeois Républicains to political agitators like Zemmour, which would stand as an alliance in French parliamentary and presidential elections, However, for the moment this still seems a long way off.
This would suggest that, unlike in 2017, Le Pen is trying less hard to profit politically from Trump’s most recent election victory. While Knafo and other Zemmour allies have made much media capital from the Trump win, drawing parallels with the situation in France, Le Pen and her colleagues were noticeably more reserved.
As with Macron—who invited Trump to the reopening of Notre Dame cathedral in early December, after its destruction by fire several years ago—the situation for Le Pen is entirely different than it was seven years ago. Although the RN has long called for France to leave the EU, statements from party milieu have recently sounded a very different note. One typical response came from Bardella, the party leader. During the 2024 European Parliament election campaign, he was asked why the RN no longer sought to leave the EU, and replied with something to the effect of: Why abandon a game that we are obviously winning?
A Paradox: International Nationalists
Bardella's message is clear: For decades, the RN may have stood for reaction and revenge, but the party now stands for innovation and new beginnings, especially for young voters. Macron’s promises since 2017 have not been kept; the French president himself warned last April that the EU could die. Today, demands from Bardella and his party to return sovereignty from Brussels to national capitals seem less an anachronism and more like a logical conclusion drawn from political reality, given the EU's incapacity to make collective decisions.
The international networking that Marine Le Pen desperately sought for so long has thus become riskier for the RN. It threatens to dilute the party’s sharply national profile, exposing it to possible criticism: Meetings with international partners and sponsors might be seen as the same backroom politics that the RN accuses Macron and his “globalists” of. This is why—in comparison with Knafo, Zemmour, and their R! party—the RN is more cautious and defensive around institutions like CPAC, meetings like the WFI, and international networks like Atlas. French anti-Americanism also makes contacts with the United States more difficult for the RN: This sentiment has long been particularly pronounced in Le Pen’s party.
RN’s relationship with the German far-right populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is telling. After RN and AfD having sat together for years together in the European Parliament as part of the Identity & Democracy caucus, Le Pen and Bardella broke off with the Germans during the campaign for the European Parliament election in June 2024. The immediate cause were controversial comments about the SS by AfD “lead candidate” Maximilian Krah. RN’s strategy to appear more mainstream was apparent more important than keeping close links with Germany’s far-right populists. The AfD now belongs to the same group as R!’s single MEP, Knafo.
Another factor weighing against international networking is Trump’s own reluctance: Contrary to what many expected, he has shown little interest in building an international right-wing movement. The incoming president seems set to focus on his “America First” policy, unlike his former advisor Steve Bannon, who has made significant efforts to build his international strategy in France and elsewhere. But this may well present difficulties for right-wing populists in Europe in the coming four years: It is precisely their core electorate, workers with low qualifications and comparatively low labor market mobility, who could be hit hardest by Trump's policies.
The answer to the question of whether Trump’s return will strengthen European right-wing populists in the long term basically depends on whether an international nationalist movement can emerge. Ever-closer networking in the United States and in European countries may mean that right-wing movements and parties can create a robust ideological basis, standing against immigration and the power of the central state, pushing for a return to a historical and civilizational definition of the West. Were this to happen, it will undoubtedly have major long-term implications for transatlantic relations.
Jacob Ross is Research Fellow for France and Franco-German relations at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP).
