‘Not one vote for the left!” That call from Bruno Retailleau, chair of the mainstream conservative party Les Républicains (LR), helped a candidate allied with Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) to sweep to victory in a byelection run-off against a socialist in southwest France last month after the centre-right candidate was eliminated in the first round.

It was a clear sign that, despite frequent denials, the much-diminished heirs to Charles de Gaulle’s conservative movement are inching towards a controversial “union of the right” that could put Le Pen or her protege, Jordan Bardella, in the Élysée Palace in 2027.

Gone is the taboo on any collaboration with the extreme right propounded by Gaullist president Jacques Chirac when Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, first reached the run-off in the 2002 presidential election. Gone, too, is the “republican front” spanning from the centre-right through president Emmanuel Macron’s centrists to the radical left France Unbowed (LFI), which stopped the far right from sweeping the board in a snap parliamentary election just a year ago. Under that informal pact, parties of the “republican arc” stood down in favour of the best-placed candidate among them to defeat the RN in the second round.

That resulted in a three-way deadlocked parliament with weak, revolving-door governments that has cratered public trust in the mainstream parties and boosted the RN’s standing.

Every week brings new evidence that the firewall between the mainstream centre right and the extreme right is breaking down as Les Républicains struggle for survival against a surge in voter support for the nationalist, xenophobic and Eurosceptic RN. Recent

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