It is not unusual for Marine Le Pen to boast about her party's poll numbers when speaking to her followers. It is much rarer for her to be annoyed by them, to the point of putting it on the agenda of her parliamentary group meeting, as was the case on Tuesday, May 6. Her ire focused on a survey measuring voting intentions for France's 2027 presidential election, commissioned by a think tank affiliated with the conservative billionaire Pierre-Edouard Stérin. In the original poll, Le Pen's second-in-command, Jordan Bardella, was tested as the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party's candidate.

The survey by the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP), commissioned by the hard-right think tank Hexagone, was published on Monday, May 5, sparking a panic among the RN, as Le Monde reported. Before its publication, Le Pen's entourage had discovered that the poll's sponsor had chosen only one name to represent the RN to the survey's approximately 10,000 respondents: Bardella. Le Pen's team then actively pushed for Hexagone to conduct a supplemental poll, which tested Le Pen's candidacy.

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