National, popular, or neither? Sovereignty in the rassemblement national’s contestation of European integration

Far-right parties have been responsible for much of the politicization of sovereignty at the European level. However, the far right’s contestation of sovereignty presents a mixed picture of evolving positions and changing meanings associated with the term sovereignty. To study the dynamics of the far right’s contestation of sovereignty, this chapter presents a diachronic analysis of how the French Rassemblement National defined sovereignty in party programmes produced between 1978 and 2019. It shows how internal party composition and knowledge of the EU, domestic political competition, and transnational factors pertaining to the evolution in the shape of the EU and the international political context, prompted the RN to redefine its approach to the relationship between sovereignty and the EU, and shift from supporting ‘European autonomy’ in the 1970s and early 1980s to opposing the EU on grounds of national and popular sovereignty from the end of the 1980s onwards.