Framing Immigration and National Sovereignty in The French Far-Right: Marine Le Pen's Rhetoric and The Dédiabolisation Strategy

Over recent decades, Europe has been the site of a fervent consolidation of populist far- right parties. Much research has been produced on the etiology of emergence and consolidation in this party-political space. Hitherto, the majority of this scholarship has focused on two principal factors: political opportunity structures (e.g., the electoral system) and sociological undercurrents (e.g., dealignment and cleavages). In this thesis, I seek to lay the groundwork for a third explanandum of populist far-right success and failure: the discursive devices these leaders use to communicate with their core and potential constituencies. Namely, I aim to explore and evidence the strategic moderation and polarization of rhetoric and policy on the right of the party-political spectrum, leveraging the case of Marine Le Pen and the Rassemblement National (formerly the Front National) in France as a vehicle to explore so- called 'diabolisation' and 'dédiabolisation' on the populist right. Given the many factors at play in shaping such a strategy, from the content to the tone and gestures employed to the locations of the public appearances, I have chosen to restrict my analysis to the content of Marine Le Pen's speeches during her presidential campaigns of 2012, 2017, and 2022. Surprisingly, I find no evidence of Le Pen becoming less extreme over time (indeed, quite the opposite), casting some doubt on the credibility of the dédiabolisation hypothesis. More broadly, the results reveal a degree of thematic reshuffling in Le Pen's discourse as her stance on immigration and national sovereignty evolves over time. Ultimately, this thesis offers a unique window into the process by which a populist far-right leader fashions their discourse over time.