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A number of social media posts claim that Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate in France’s 2027 presidential election, is promising a referendum on the country’s EU membership if she wins the keys to the Élysée Palace next year.
The posts, primarily in Spanish, provide no further detail, and that’s our first clue that the claims are false: Le Pen is not calling for a Frexit referendum if she becomes president.
It is true that the National Rally politician is a harsh critic of the EU and once championed the idea of France leaving the bloc.
She celebrated the Brexit result when the UK voted to leave the EU in 2016. She made leaving the bloc and giving up the euro two of her flagship proposals in her 2012 and 2017 presidential campaigns.
But she has since abandoned these proposals. During the 2022 election, she instead advocated radically reforming the EU from within, stripping Brussels of most of its power and transforming the bloc into a looser alliance of nations.
Le Pen’s change in position reflects a wider trend among far-right parties across Europe. Before the Brexit vote, far-right politicians in the Netherlands and Italy, among others, regularly pushed for their own referenda, but now those calls have generally quietened.
Nevertheless, Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right Party for Freedom, revived his call to reconsider the Netherlands’ EU membership on Wednesday, telling Dutch MPs that “Nexit” was necessary to stop migrants and asylum seekers from entering the country.
Even if Le Pen did become president and held a Frexit referendum, she’d be unlikely to win: a study by Pew Research earlier this year showed that support for the EU in France has risen from 38% in 2016 to 52% in 2026. Similar increases were recorded elsewhere in Europe, including in the UK.
A YouGov poll from late 2025, meanwhile, found that 49% of French respondents would vote to remain in the EU, compared with 27% who would vote to leave.
While a Frexit referendum is currently not on the cards, Le Pen, who’s currently leading in first-round polling with roughly 33 to 36%, has suggested putting other issues to a public vote if she wins the presidency next year. This may have fuelled some of the online rumours about an alleged EU referendum.
Her proposals include a referendum on combating so-called “Islamist ideologies”, including banning the wearing of the veil in public, and a vote on amending France’s constitution to restrict immigration.
The National Rally did not respond to a request for comment.