Introduction

France clearly is one of the countries whose political landscape has been profoundly altered in the past two decades. Although organizational stability has never been a defining feature of the French party system, the new institutions of the Fifth Republic established in 1958 did progressively bring about a more stable pattern of ‘bipolar multipartism’ (Parodi 1989; Knapp 2002). Since the early 1980s, however, cultural conflicts related to the different conceptions of norms that should be binding in society, of the way community is conceived, and of the balance of power between the nation-state and the European Union have emerged. The appearance of these issues on the political agenda, and the rising prominence of an integration–demarcation line of conflict lie at the heart of the transformation of the French party system that took place in the 1980s and 1990s.

As a driving force of this transformation, and as one of the most successful right-wing populist parties, the French Front National represents something like the ‘prototype’ or the ‘avant-garde’ of a new party family. Earlier than in other countries, the extreme populist right achieved its electoral breakthrough in a number of second-order elections in the early 1980s. According to our theoretical framework, the early success of the Front National in comparative terms must be analyzed in the context of the country-specific political potentials and context structures.