Although the French presidential campaign for the 2027 elections has not yet fully kicked off, the Rassemblement National (RN) is already facing funding difficulties due to French banks’ refusal to grant it loans, forcing it to look elsewhere in Europe. This, part of a well-oiled machinery working against the right-wing populist party, then allows the adversaries of RN to lambast it for its alleged ties to foreign countries.
In France, the financing of political parties is based on a balance between strict regulation of private resources and public support. Donations from individuals are permitted but heavily capped (at a few thousand euros per year per person), which limits the influence of major donors and prevents excessive dependence on private funding; corporate donations, on the other hand, are prohibited. At the same time, the state provides substantial public subsidies, distributed primarily based on results in the first round of legislative elections: the more votes a party receives (subject to certain conditions, such as fielding a minimum number of candidates), the more funding it receives. Finally, during elections, parties and candidates may be reimbursed for a portion of their campaign expenses, provided they receive at least 5% of the votes cast, which encourages a certain level of representativeness while limiting purely opportunistic candidacies.
With each presidential election, the RN finds itself in the same paradoxical situation. As the leading opposition party, it knows it will receive public subsidies following the next election and that its campaign expenses will be reimbursed to a certain extent, since it is guaranteed to surpass the 5% threshold. But in the meantime, it must be able to finance the campaign. Currently, the party must raise up to €10.7 million, corresponding to the state’s reimbursement cap for a candidate advancing to the second round. But banks, for ideological reasons, refuse to advance the funds.
According to its treasurer Kevin Pfeffer, “several requests” have been submitted, but some institutions have already issued “negative responses.” This situation has persisted for years and has repeatedly placed the RN in a critical position, as the banks’ obstruction has forced it to seek financing from foreign banks. For Pfeffer, this is a fundamental problem. According to him,
banks are no longer playing the game of democracy.
Institutions such as Société Générale and La Banque Postale have thus announced that they no longer wish to finance any candidate, regardless of their party. Discussions are still ongoing with other banking institutions, but they remain hesitant. The financial risk is not the issue: strong results are expected and well-known for the RN—Jordan Bardella is projected to exceed 30% in the first round of the presidential election, guaranteeing him public subsidies. The issue is ideological. The party is solvent and has significantly reduced its debt, but it remains politically unpopular, and no bank wants to be labelled as the ‘RN’s financier.’
In 2022, the RN received a €10 million loan from a Hungarian bank—a fact that was subsequently used extensively against it. Fidesz’s defeat makes renewing such an agreement likely to be complicated. With a year to go before the presidential election, however, Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s party has no choice but to start looking abroad already. The only solution would be to reform the campaign finance system, but that is not currently on the agenda.
Hélène de Lauzun is the Paris correspondent for The European Conservative. She studied at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris. She taught French literature and civilization at Harvard and received a Ph.D. in History from the Sorbonne. She is the author of Histoire de l’Autriche (Perrin, 2021).
