What encourages voters to support populist right parties? What has made Marine Le Pen’s discourse so powerful, especially with regards to its female vote share? What policies do radical right parties generally look for at the European Union level? Could support for the radical left and the radical right overlap? In this episode, Nonna Mayer, a specialist in radical ideologies and populism, answers these and many other questions regarding the rise of right-wing populism in France and Europe at large.

Nonna Mayer is an emeritus researcher at France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). She is also a researcher at Sciences Po’s Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics, and was president of the French Association of Political Science between 2005 and 2016. She focuses on the rise of the radical right in Europe and France, issues of antisemitism and racism, and the intercultural interplay between minorities and majority, and amongst minority groups. 

Additional resources:

• Mayer, N. (2022). Undermining Democracy: Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour’s Populist Politics">Undermining Democracy: Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour’s Populist Politics. Institut Montaigne.   


• Durovic, A. & Mayer, N. (2022). Wind of change? The reconfiguration of gender gaps in the 2022 French presidential election. The reconfiguration of gender gaps in the 2022 French presidential election. Revue française de science politique (72), p. 463-484.  


• Amengay, A., Durovic, A. & Mayer, N. (2017). The impact of gender on the Marine Le Pen vote. Revue française de science politique (67), p. 1067-1087. 

Recorded on 15th September 2023

Conversations with Sergei GURIEV  is a podcast by Sciences Po. Hélène NAUDET supervised the production of this series, with the help of Blanca GONZALEZ MARTINEZ, Sciences Po Master student in Political Science.

The Sciences Po audio department produced and mixed it.

Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.