After decades as political pariahs, the far right in France may finally have a chance to form a national government following the first round of snap parliamentary elections.
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Following are historical highlights of a movement that has been dominated by the Le Pen family for more than half a century.
1972
Former soldier Jean-Marie Le Pen founds the National Front, a fringe far-right party comprised of veterans from the Algerian war and French collaborators from the Vichy regime
1974
Le Pen runs in the presidential election, but garners less than one per cent of the vote. Two years later, his home in Paris is attacked with a bomb. No culprit is ever found
1981
Le Pen is unable to secure enough backers to run for the presidential election, won by leftist Francois Mitterrand
1986
The party wins its first seats in the National Assembly
1987
Le Pen makes disparaging comments about gay men with AIDS, part of a lifelong tendency to spark outrage with racist, antisemitic and homophobic slurs that often land him in legal jeopardy but win support among a part of the electorate
1988
Le Pen wins 14.4 per cent of votes in the presidential election. It also begins to zero in on Islam and Muslim immigrants as one of its major political concerns
1995
The National Front wins three city halls in France's south, Toulon, Orange and Marignane, underlining its growing electoral support
2002
Le Pen runs for president and wins 16.86 per cent of votes, enough to put him into a second-round run-off against Jacques Chirac. Politicians from the right and left come together to prevent Le Pen from winning the second round. Chirac wins over 80 per cent of votes in the run-off
2008
A court hands Le Pen a three-month suspended prison sentence and a fine of 10,000 euros for saying the Nazi occupation of France was "not particularly inhumane"
2011
Le Pen's daughter Marine Le Pen becomes the new leader of the National Front after a period in which the party performs badly in polls and faces growing financial pressures
2012
Marine Le Pen makes a first, unsuccessful run for the presidency
2014
The National Front has a breakthrough election year, winning control of 11 town halls and also taking first place in European Parliament elections
2015
Jean Marie Le Pen is suspended from the party after describing the Holocaust as "a detail" of World War II. That same year, he is expelled by his daughter from the party
2017
Marine Le Pen runs for the presidency again, but loses to Emmanuel Macron. After that she increases efforts to make the party more palatable to a wider electorate, seeking to distance it from its racist and antisemitic past. In 2018, she changes the party's name to National Rally (RN)
2022
Jordan Bardella, a 28-year-old protege of Marine Le Pen, is chosen to be the new president of the RN
June 2024
Bardella leads the party in the European Parliament elections, handing out a drubbing to Macron's party and prompting the president to call a snap legislative vote. Bardella is the RN's prime ministerial candidate
Australian Associated Press
