Why France’s far right is dining with the country’s business elite

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Faced with a centre that cannot hold and a left locked in a bitter struggle between its radical and reformist wings, a far-right movement surges through the breach. 

Scenting the chance for an uneasy – but effective – collaboration, the country’s traditional business elite extends an olive branch – an invitation to lunch, perhaps. They take their seats around the table, pick up their knives, and begin to carve. 

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. On Monday, France’s far-right National Rally (Rassemblement national, or RN) president Jordan Bardella sat down for lunch with the executive committee of Medef, the country’s largest employer federation. 

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While the meeting itself was no secret, the lunch took place under a total media blackout – we don’t even know what was on the menu. 

What we do know is that the lunch follows another meeting earlier in April between the far-right group and major French business leaders, this one even more discreet. 

As revealed by French weekly Le Nouvel Obs, long-time party figurehead Marine Le Pen dined at Paris’s prestigious Drouant brasserie with some of the titans of French industry: the director-general of energy giant Engie, the CEO of oil major TotalEnergies, the head of the Accor hotel group, the chairman of Renault, representatives from Axa insurance, the son of right-wing media mogul Vincent Bolloré and, finally, France’s richest man, Bernard Arnault. 

While Medef’s president Patrick Martin has stressed that Monday’s meeting was just the first of a planned series of lunches with representatives from every corner of France’s political spectrum, the increasingly open contact between the far right and the world of big business marks a turning point – and the culmination of a years-long effort by the RN to present a more business-friendly face to potential allies in the corporate world. 

Ahead of Monday’s meeting, Le Pen and Bardella released a statement saying that the lunch would be a chance for both parties to discuss what they described as excessive regulations imposed on entrepreneurs that needed to be swept aside to make French businesses more competitive. 

“We believe it is essential that we work together to give businesses the flexibility and responsiveness they need to innovate, hire, invest, and expand into new markets,” the statement read. 

Tristan Boursier, associate researcher at Sciences Po University’s political research centre, said that the RN’s corporate charm offensive did not necessarily reflect a deeper shift within the party’s economic thinking. 

“For me, the RN has not changed its economic soul, it has learned to speak a different language,” he said. “Under Marine Le Pen, the party retained a strong statist, protectionist core – reflecting its working-class electoral base – while progressively shedding its most toxic positions, notably the exit from the euro. Bardella represents a further evolution – his rhetoric is more market-friendly, less hostile to business, and more appealing to urban, educated voters.” 

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Unlike fellow travellers such as Argentina’s self-declared anarcho-capitalist President Javier Milei, France’s far right has built much of its support over the years by rejecting the unfettered movement of capital across state borders that defined the historic turn towards globalisation.

Many of the party’s early gains under the younger Le Pen came in parts of the country’s north hollowed out by the off-shoring of heavy industry, and members of France’s increasingly fragile working and lower-middle classes make up a major part of its core voter base. 

Nor has the party shied away from supporting a strong state role in maintaining France’s expansive welfare state, instead calling for the implementation of a system of “préférence nationale” (national preference) that would give French citizens priority access ahead of foreign residents. 

But the rise of the 30-year-old Bardella – who will likely stand as the party’s candidate next year if Le Pen’s five-year ban from holding public office following an embezzlement conviction is upheld on appeal this summer – has allowed the party to maintain a kind of strategic ambiguity in its economic messaging.

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This strategy sees Le Pen championing the social turn championed by her late father, and Bardella preaching the importance of cutting the red tape he says is holding back the country’s re-industrialisation. 

“It would be a mistake to read this as an ideological conversion. The RN's economic normalisation is primarily electoral arithmetic,” Boursier said. “The party needs to reassure centrist voters without alienating its traditional base. The result is a platform that remains structurally incoherent – simultaneously promising lower taxes, maintained welfare provisions and protectionist measures – but politically functional.”

France’s business leaders have historically not been welcoming of these contradictions – especially after the RN ran in the snap 2024 parliamentary elections on a platform of increasing wages and undoing President Emmanuel Macron’s raising of the retirement age.

And while the party continues to benefit from the support of right-wing patrons such as the ultraconservative Catholic tech billionaire Pierre-Édouard Stérin and media mogul Bolloré, other entrepreneurs have been leery about showing the same public support for the far-right group. 

Boursier said that the increasing openness of France’s capitalist class to the RN was largely driven by opportunism rather than deeper ideological conviction. 

“French business elites are not falling in love with the RN, they are taking out an insurance policy,” he said. “The growing openness toward the party is best understood as pragmatic anticipation rather than ideological alignment. Faced with a party that polls consistently ahead for 2027, many business leaders are simply hedging their bets, much as segments of the French patronat accommodated various political transitions throughout the Fifth Republic.” 

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Whether or not the tension between these opposing currents within the RN can survive the white heat of a presidential campaign, the party’s outreach to the French business elite so far doesn’t seem to have put off its traditional base. 

Fundamentally, Boursier said, many of those casting their vote for the far-right party were not voting for a specific economic programme, but a shared narrative in which France’s economic ills were rooted in decades of mass immigration.

“What binds RN voters together is less a coherent economic vision than a racialised reading of social and economic decline,” he said.

Put simply, he said, the important thing was not the question of whether the state or the market played a greater role in responding to the country’s problems, but that voters could agree that those problems were caused by foreigners. 

“This is not a new formula – Jean-Marie Le Pen was already saying ‘8 million unemployed, 8 million immigrants’ decades ago,” Boursier said. “What has changed is not the message but its reach: that same causal story is now amplified daily across television, the press and social media, normalised to a degree her father could never have imagined.” 

“The real question for 2027 is not whether the RN can reconcile its competing economic instincts – it is whether it can govern a country it has spent decades telling its voters is being stolen from them.”