On Sunday, 25 October, in Orléans, a city on the Loire that has been living off one young woman’s victory for nearly six centuries, Marine Le Pen stood before her party and promised France a “renaissance”. She also promised it would come soon. Her supporters cheered; the organisers counted 8,500 of them, chanting “Marine présidente!” It is her fourth run at the Élysée. As Virginia Pietromarchi reported for Al Jazeera, she begins it riding high in the polls, ahead of her rivals on the right, the left and in the centre, roughly six months before the vote.

The Maid’s city

The place was chosen with care. In 1429 Joan of Arc lifted the English siege of Orléans, and the French far right has long claimed her as its own. Le Pen called the coming race “a story to be written, a destiny to be fulfilled.”

A reflection, and only that: people who want power have always liked to borrow from the dead. The dead make good allies, because they never contradict anyone.

Outside the arena

The city that hosted her was not celebrating. Businesses had closed and public transport had stopped. A day earlier, during protests against the National Rally, about 3,000 police were deployed. According to Euronews, that Saturday counter-demonstration drew 13,000 people by the local council’s count and 26,000 by its organisers’. Le Pen answered them on X: “Some would have preferred you not to come.”

The unrest behind all this began in mid-September with high school students in a Paris suburb and spread across the country. On 17 October hundreds of thousands marched and shops were looted. The arrest figures differ. Al Jazeera puts them at more than 2,000 that day. Euronews gives a nationwide turnout of 410,000 to 800,000 people and 1,314 arrests. Smaller unrest followed the next weekend, and the government added curfews while young voters drifted away from Emmanuel Macron’s centrists.

Order as a promise

Le Pen made the disorder her opening theme. “Who can claim there is a rule of law when hordes come to ransack and burn our buildings,” she asked. “We are going to re-establish the rule of law.” She attacked the justice system under Macron as too lax. She promised “certainty” that cases would be prosecuted and sentences carried out, and offered a definition: “The rule of law is not the law against the state.” She called Macron incompetent and accused Jean-Luc Mélenchon of encouraging the violence. Mocking the idea that the country was fine, she said it would be wrong to think that “after ten years of Emmanuel Macron we are walking through a field of rose petals.”

What she offered was a change of course, which she called “not a revolutionary act but a normal breath of democratic life”. She backed “national priority” and “a double border: French and European”. She said France would not send its young people “to die in reckless or irresponsible military adventures, and even less in wars that are not ours.”

The protesters gave her a theme. She gave it back to them as a promise.

The heir and the protégé

Next to her stood Jordan Bardella, 31, her protégé. The congress re-elected him party president with 98.98 percent of the vote. He was the only candidate. “No one should be intimidated by their political opinions,” he told the crowd. The slogan on display was “Marine president – a Bardella government”. Le Pen pledged a government of “national unity” led by him. Bardella had once been tipped to run in her place if her conviction for misusing the funds of European parliamentary assistants kept her off the ballot. The weekend’s reporting does not say how that question was settled.

Behind the show of unity there are tensions. In September, Mediapart alleged that as a teenager Bardella had expressed anti-Semitic views in private messages. He denies it and is suing the journalists. He has also reportedly disagreed with Le Pen on economic policy and on whether to make her proposed ban on headscarves in public a central issue. In the National Assembly, Sébastien Chenu takes over from her as head of the party’s group.

The new faithful

The party says it now has about 112,000 members, up from fewer than 37,000 in 2022. Years of “dédiabolisation”, the effort to shed the stigma of the movement her father founded, have brought in voters from former left-wing and Communist areas. Jean-Marie Le Pen, convicted of hate speech, was expelled from the party in 2015. Last month the party quadrupled its seats in the Senate.

Manon Funeau, a 21-year-old business student, said the party’s values “vibrate within me.” Nadede, 56, who has voted for the National Rally since 2024, said France is “drifting off course” and that only Le Pen can fix it.

The programme no longer includes leaving the European Union. It now promises a referendum challenging the primacy of EU law on migration and an annual cut of €11bn ($12.3bn) to France’s contribution to the EU budget. The historian Baptiste Roger-Lacan says the programme “is still fraught with fiscal absurdity” and remains pro-Russian and anti-EU. That criticism carries weight in a country where ten-year borrowing costs have passed 5%.

“Everyone in France agrees with us,” Le Pen said from the stage. The day before, tens of thousands had marched through the same city to say they did not.