Marine Le Pen's loss to Emmanuel Macron in the French presidential election was the culmination of a larger victory for the populist candidate.
That is, Le Pen took a fringe group — the National Front — to the biggest political stage in the country and got 35 percent of the vote, putting fiery populism squarely in the mainstream for years to come, The Atlantic reported.
"Le Pen's most notable accomplishment is her dramatic expansion of the party’s base, broadening its appeal in a way her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, never could during his nearly 40 years leading the National Front, a process that involved quite literally throwing him out of the party and working to expel its other anti-Semitic elements," The Atlantic's Emily Schultheis wrote.
Next up: Parliamentary elections where polls suggest the National Front could win 15-20 seats, up from its current two, Axios reported.
And should the National Front stumble in its performance there, waiting in the wings is Le Pen's even more hardline niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the millennial darling of the nationalism movement in Europe and the U.S.
But in the meantime, Marine Le Pen has promised to overhaul and transform the National Front — including changing its name — "in order to make a new political force," Le Pen told supporters after her election loss.
Le Pen is "certainly not going away," Mabel Berezin, an expert on the European conservative movement at Cornell University, told The Atlantic. "And she will continue to try to make it the kind of conservative nationalist party [she envisioned] … I would think she would be able to contain the dissent and move forward."
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