A few months ago, French National Front leader Marine Le Pen was the hope of the European nationalist right and the bogeyman of the European Union as she led in the polls ahead of the country’s presidential election.
Now, days before Sunday’s second round of the parliamentary elections, it all looks very different.
The National Front knew that the odds were against a Le Pen presidency, but also hoped that a good performance in the run-off vote on May 7 would pave the way for it to enter parliament in force.
Le Pen lost to centrist Emmanuel Macron on polling day, but hit a record for her far-right party: 10.6mn votes, or 33.9% of the total.
But things had already started to come apart four days before the May 7 vote, when Le Pen went head to head with Macron in a bad-tempered television debate.
Apparently badly-prepared, she had to put up with her rival correcting her several times on points of fact, including on the size of France’s annual contribution to the EU budget.
For many viewers, her harsh insults of Macron also left a sour taste – even though he gave as good as he got.
Le Pen’s poor performance in the debate also dismayed many in her party. The policy of leaving the euro single currency is a particularly sore point – it was the National Front’s most prominent economic pledge, but polls repeatedly showed that it was extremely unpopular.
That has fed into the internal recriminations: the main defender of leaving the euro, party vice-president Florian Philippot, has come under attack.
National Front general secretary Nicolas Bay has suggested that Philippot – a close ally of Le Pen in her efforts to moderate the party’s image – was engaging in “blackmail” by threatening to leave the party if it abandoned its stance on the currency issue.
Le Pen herself seemed unimpressed by Philippot’s decision to establish an “association” called The Patriots within the party in the aftermath of the presidential vote.
Meanwhile, one of the party’s just two outgoing members of parliament, Le Pen’s niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen, announced that she would not run for re-election, citing personal reasons.
The younger Le Pen, based in southern France, has widely been seen as embodying a more traditional right-wing line within the party.
She is identified with conservative Catholic values and has promoted an opening to politicians in the mainstream centre-right.
Marine Le Pen and Philippot, concentrating on working class voters in the north, have pushed a more centrist economic policy and railed against the “system” of centre-right and centre-left.
The party’s internal recriminations were crowned last Sunday with a deeply disappointing 13.2% of the vote in the first round of the parliamentary elections.
The party is leading in only 20 seats, and pollsters doubt that it will take more than five of them in next Sunday’s run-off votes.
It needs 15 to form an official parliamentary group.
Le Pen has sought to mobilise voters for the second round by saying that it’s essential for democracy to have a strong opposition.
But whatever happens on Sunday, the National Front will have to deal with its increasingly obvious internal differences as well as thorny policy issues such as the euro.