There is a saying in German – Totgesagte leben länger, roughly but not quite accurately translated into English as "Presumed dead but still kicking." To put it more precisely – kicking quite strongly. In contemporary western European politics, this is particularly true for the main exponent of the French populist radical right.
For the past twenty years, the Front National (FN, now Rassemblement National, RN) experienced a series of blows and major convulsions that seemed to put nail after nail into the coffin of its political project: the defection of the FN's number two, Bruno Megré, in 1998, which deprived the Front National of a number of its leading cadres who defected with Megré; the severe financial problems during the first decade of the new century, which forced the party to sell off its precious headquarters; Marine Le Pen's disastrous performance in the televised debate with Emmanuel Macron ahead of the second and decisive round of the presidential election of 2017, which exposed her to ridicule; scandals involving "fictive employees" supposedly working for MEPs – a reflection of the party's increasing financial difficulties reminiscent of earlier days; Marine Le Pen's less than amicable break with her father followed by the discarding of the party's traditional label, a move that disgusted a significant number of FN supporters; and, last but not least, the defection of Florian Philippot, her closest adviser and influential strategist.
As a result, in early 2018, Marine Le Pen's public image was "in free fall," as was the proportion of the French public sympathetic to her ideas Hardly surprising, by mid-2018, observers of the French political scene speculated that it was not entirely unlikely that the RN would disappear in the near future as a relevant force in French politics.
