The purpose is to examine the FN's relationship with power in relation to the seemingly paradoxical isolation of the French extreme Right at the margin of the national party system despite its electoral strength. While addressing a number of factors pertaining to the increasing rejection of Le Pen's party towards the fringe of the legitimate space for inter-party competition, the study will also point to the specific political opportunity structures that exist at local and regional level, which facilited the accommodation of the far right by the RPR/UDF cartel over the 1986-1998 period. As shall be discussed, France can be considered an intermediary case between, for instance, Austria and Belgium, and one of ‘variable geometry' at national and sub-national level. Such difference between national and local party politics is of particular relevance to most right-wing populist parties in Western Europe, which have often first emerged politically and electorally in critical elections at sub-national level, where the threshold for new peripheral actors' entry into the party system remains significantly lower. As was notably albeit not exclusively the case for the French Front national, these second-order elections helped right-wing populist actors acquire political legitimacy at lesser organisational cost in the initial stage of their development. In the light of the Austrian and Italian cases, there is also some evidence that the experience of politically accommodating the far right was first conducted at sub-national level before moving onto the national political agenda (Gallagher, 2000; Bale, 2003). Arguably this pattern would have been very likely replicated in the late 1980s in France, had the institutional constraints not deprived the extreme right from parliamentary presence and coalition potential. The above analysis of the FN's position within the party system will be complemented with an evaluation of the party's performances in municipal office in Toulon, Marignane, Orange and Vitrolles. In particular, we will suggest a possible characterisation of two divergent models of ‘ideological' and ‘pragmatic' municipal governance, whilst pointing at the many similarities in the significant impact of the traditional far right weltanschauung and development of political patronage on the process of agenda setting and the implementation of local social and cultural policies across the four localities under FN administration.
