The Rassemblement National (RN) has become a permanent fixture on the French political landscape and a key player in the French Party System. Under Marine Le Pen’s leadership from 2011 onwards, the party has steadily increased its share of the vote, gaining traction electorally in three consecutive Presidential elections in 2012, 2017, and 2022. The party also broke through the so-called ‘glass ceiling’ in parliamentary elections in 2022, obtaining 89 seats in the French National Assembly, a tenfold increase compared to 2017. Two years later, it increased its number of seats to 125 at the parliamentary elections held in the summer of 2024. Much literature in recent years on the electoral rise of the RN has focused on the mainstreaming of the Far Right, often coined in French as the process of dédiabolisation, designed to reinforce its political legitimacy and broaden its electoral appeal. In this respect, one of the central planks of the RN’s ‘supply-side’ messaging has been to present itself as a defender of the French, national tradition, employing retrospective and nostalgic framing, rooted in connotations of national identity and historical continuity. Key to this strategy has been the RN’s strategic positioning regarding European integration. Since the party’s formation as the Front National (FN) in 1972, this has vacillated between Euro-ambivalence, and a ‘hard’ Eurosceptic narrative.

Drawing on a chronological approach, the paper explores how the RN has strategically positioned itself (in a bid to maximise its electoral support) on a range of issues related to European integration. It focuses on five key areas: EU membership; Membership of the Eurozone and the Single Market; Migration, the Freedom of Movement and Schengen; Common Foreign and Security Policy, Russia and Ukraine; and the future ideological direction of the EU. Drawing primarily on national and European RN election manifesto data and RN elite speeches, as well as biographical monographs written by the party’s senior elites, the paper demonstrates the centrality, the divisions and the complexity that the issue of European integration has posed (and continues to pose) for the RN as it seeks to optimise its electoral appeal and position itself as a party of government ahead of the Presidential and Legislative elections in 2027.

Previous works have shown that populist rule affects foreign policy and its underpinning institutions in important ways, often leading to the politicization of public administration. Yet, we know relatively little about the aftermath of such rule. Are transformations implemented by populists in power persistent or prone to change under successive mainstream governments? Where do we see a sufficient re-establishment of the mainstream status quo, where do populist politicization dynamics endure, and why? Considering the Civic Coalition government's re-democratisation efforts in post-2023 Poland, this article zooms in on the legacy of administrative politicisation across foreign policy institutions that occurred during eight years of right-wing populist rule. Administrative politicisation is understood here to refer to government measures towards increasing the political responsiveness of bureaucracies assessed in terms of recruitment criteria, administrative culture, role conceptions, and the centralisation of authority. Therefore, politicisation contributes to undermining the rule of law and the system of democratic checks and balances. Drawing on qualitative document analysis of various official texts and semi-structured interviews with foreign policy officials, the article demonstrates that while de-politicisation is sought in politically less costly areas (e.g., role conceptions, administrative culture), populist politicisation endures in more costly areas (e.g., recruitment criteria, the centralisation of authority). This implies that the legacy of administrative politicisation undertaken during populist rule may involve the normalisation of weakened democratic norms and standards with durable effects on sectoral governance.

Far-right parties across Europe frequently present themselves as “anti-elitist”, yet their political projects often rely on highly selective reconstructions of history, heritage, and civilisational continuity that implicitly position them as privileged interpreters of an allegedly authentic and superior past. This paper argues that such invocations of a “golden past” are not merely nostalgic narratives, but a form of discursive elite construction that reshapes who is authorised to speak for the nation and what narratives are deemed worthy of remembering.

This paper brings memory studies into dialogue with scholarship on far-right and European identity to develop the concept of symbolic “re-elitisation”. Rather than rejecting elitism altogether, these actors reconfigure it: legitimacy is claimed through mythologised and selected cultural, moral, and civilisational narratives. By presenting themselves as custodians of a threatened heritage, they construct a hierarchy in which they occupy a privileged position as interpreters and defenders of the “true” nation and Europe, while opponents, such as migrants, feminist social movements, and supranational institutions, such as the European Union, are cast as agents of historical rupture and decline.

To demonstrate this idea, this paper focuses on Rassemblement National (RN) under the leadership of Jordan Bardella, situating this case within broader European dynamics. Through qualitative discourse analysis of Bardella content on TikTok, this paper explores how short-form videos mobilise references to national decline, historical greatness, traditional gender norms, Christianity, and cultural homogeneity. TikTok’s platform logics — visual storytelling, personalisation, and public’s engagement — enable the compression of complex historical narratives into emotionally resonant fragments that circulate widely among younger and politically disengaged audiences.

While centred on a French case, the analysis highlights how RN’s memory politics often extends beyond the nation to invoke “Europe” as a civilisational space rooted in shared history, Christianity, and cultural continuity. In doing so, the party simultaneously contests the European Union as a political project while appropriating Europe as a historical and cultural identity.

By foregrounding the elitist logics embedded in far-right memory politics, this paper contributes to debates on far-right, social media communication, and the politics of history in the EU, showing how struggles over the past shape competing visions of Europe’s political future.

There has been an increase in the popularity of Eurosceptic parties around Europe. Populism has been taking a similar rising trajectory in many European countries, including Czechia. While populism and Euroscepticism in Europe have been intensively studied in recent years, there is relatively little known about how these two phenomena influence each other.
This paper uses an experimental research design to examine the following research question: Does an increase in populist attitudes lead to more Eurosceptic attitudes? The paper utilizes data from an original survey experiment conducted in Czechia in December 2025. The results of the analysis will help us get new insights about the possible causal connection between populism and Euroscepticism and help us understand whether and how populism is influencing public opinion toward the EU.