PARIS — France’s business community is rushing to make inroads with the National Rally, the far-right party tipped to win the Elysée Palace in 2027.

Their goal is to establish a direct line with the likes of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, who have at times struggled to articulate a coherent economic vision for France, the eurozone’s second-biggest economy.

The lobbying effort represents a marked change of heart for France’s entrepreneurial elite, who for years have been deeply suspicious of a populist party they saw as economically illiterate rabble-rousers.

Give the National Rally’s robust showing in polls, France Inc. now feels it has little choice but to bend the ears of the anti-immigration party, pressing it to adopt more a market-friendly agenda. It’s a charm offensive that has played out both behind closed doors and at high-profile events like the Paris Air Show, the influential business lobby Medef’s conference on Roland Garros’ center court and at a lunch with the entrepreneurial association Ethic.

The business community’s strategy offers a strong sign of how far France’s political fault lines have shifted.

The National Rally is no longer a fringe player, so business leaders are now making a concerted effort to sound them out and, hopefully, influence their economic worldview, said a former government adviser now working in the private sector. And the party itself is keen to beef up its ties and bona fides with the business community.

“The last year has been a real tipping point,” said a senior manager at a French firm listed on the benchmark CAC40 stock index who, like others quoted in this piece, was granted anonymity to candidly discuss private discussions.

“Business leaders, industry lobbies suddenly thought they are on the threshold of power. Let’s meet them and perhaps convert them,” the manager said.

Some entrepreneurs have pinned their hopes on Bardella, the National Rally’s plan B candidate for the 2027 presidential election for if an appeal court fails to overturn Le Pen’s ban from standing in elections after being found guilty of embezzlement.

Bardella is seen as being more pro-business than Le Pen, even if his recent comments opening talks with the European Central Bank to buy French debt raised eyebrows.

Last week, for the first time, a poll showed Bardella would win both rounds of a presidential election against any other candidate.

Budgetary Jekyll and Hyde 

Bardella may be doing his best, in the words of the former government adviser, to “polish” the National Rally’s muddled economic platform, but the business community’s concerns have been exacerbated by the party’s actions during France’s ongoing budget negotiations.

At times, the National Rally has tried to play the role of conservative adult in the room during the messy legislative process by calling for spending cuts and lowering public debt, but it has also voted for billions in tax hikes and for lowering the retirement age. National Rally lawmakers on Thursday effectively helped pass a bill authored by the far left to nationalize steel giant ArcelorMittal by abstaining from the vote.

And before budget talks began, both Le Pen and Bardella were calling for new snap elections that were anathema to the business community.

“The National Rally is reckless,” said the chief executive of a French company listed on the CAC40. “What’s really important for us is stability.”

The zigzagging of the far right reflects a deep split within the party. Though the National Rally has gone to great lengths to tamp down any hint of a rift, Le Pen and Bardella clearly represent different camps.

Le Pen is the anti-immigration, protectionist champion of disaffected voters from France’s northern rust belt, while Bardella is the slick, polished, more economically liberal but equally anti-immigration option who appeals more to those on the French Riviera.

“As the National Rally tries to make these two lines coexist, their position on the economics is not very clear,” said Mathieu Gallard, a pollster at Ipsos.

The hope among some business leaders is that the National Rally is posturing ahead of the 2027 presidential election, but that once in power would take a less explosive course, following in the footsteps of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni or Greece’s Alexis Tsipras after he was elected on an anti-austerity platform in 2015.

“What he [Tsipras] had defended during the campaign was untenable, and very quickly, he had to do a sharp U-turn,” said the boss of another CAC40 company. 

The National Rally has proven similarly malleable at times, for example, dropping its support for exiting the eurozone after an election defeat in 2017.

Figures like Renaud Labaye, a National Rally heavyweight and close ally of Le Pen, offer some suggestion that a French president from the National Rally would follow the Meloni model.

“We need a balanced budget,” Labaye told POLITICO. “We want the lowest possible deficit because it’s good for the country and because our sovereignty is at stake.” 

Influential figures like François Durvye, a financier who is the right-hand man of far-right billionaire Pierre-Édouard Stérin, and Le Pen’s chief of staff, Ambroise de Rancourt, a former far-left activist who flipped to the far right last year, have been facilitating behind-closed-doors meetings with the business world.

According to the previously quoted senior manager at a CAC40 company, in some of those meetings, the National Rally tries to reassure the entrepreneurs that they would be economically reasonable in government. 

But business leaders who think they’ll be able to influence the far right if it wins the next presidential election are going to be in for a rough surprise if Bardella or Le Pen win in 2027, respected political commentator Alain Minc warned.

“They don’t grasp the sense of power that comes when 15 million people vote for you,” Minc said.

Pauline de Saint Remy and Sarah Paillou contributed reporting.