How Marine Le Pen Is Making a Comeback, One French Village at a Time

“I’M GOING TO DO EVERYTHING TO WIN,” Dorian Munoz, who leads the far-right National Rally’s youth outreach in the Var region of southern France, told me in a recent interview. He’s just 27, but he’s running for mayor in La Seyne-sur-Mer, one of the region’s only remaining left-leaning cities.

For months now, the National Rally—formerly the National Front—has been aggressively campaigning for the March 2020 municipal elections. It comes after the party’s success in last May’s European Parliament elections, in which it won 23 percent of the national vote, ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist En Marche. And in its strongholds—the northern mining basin, where unemployment is high, and along the Mediterranean coast, where the memory of the Algerian war still resonates—its numbers soared, in some areas exceeding 40 percent.

“Local politics is what we do best,” Munoz said. “It’s in the DNA of the party: We’re never