Jean-Marie Le Pen in the context of "2002 French presidential election"

Legislative elections were held in France on 9 and 16 June 2002, to elect the 12th National Assembly of the Fifth Republic, in a context of political crisis.

The Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin announced his political retirement after his elimination at the first round of the 2002 presidential elections. President Jacques Chirac was easily reelected, all the Republican parties having called to block far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.Chirac's conservative supporters created the Union for the Presidential Majority (Union pour la majorité présidentielle or UMP) to prepare for the legislative elections.

Radio Courtoisie (French pronunciation: [ʁadjo kuʁtwazi]; English: Radio Courtesy) is a French radio station and cultural associative union created in 1987 by Jean Ferré.

Radio Courtoisie defines itself as the "free radio of the real country [referring to the pays réel concept of Charles Maurras and the francophone world", declaring itself to be "open to all people of the political right, from François Bayrou to Jean-Marie Le Pen".

The far-right (French: Extrême droite) tradition in France finds its origins in the Third Republic with Boulangism and the Dreyfus affair. In the 1880s, General Georges Boulanger, called "General Revenge" (Général Revanche), championed demands for military revenge against Imperial Germany as retribution for the defeat and fall of the Second French Empire during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). This stance, known as revanchism, began to exert a strong influence on French nationalism. Soon thereafter, the Dreyfus affair provided one of the political division lines of France. French nationalism, which had been largely associated with left-wing and Republican ideologies before the Dreyfus affair, turned after that into a main trait of the right-wing and, moreover, of the far right. A new right emerged, and nationalism was reappropriated by the far-right who turned it into a form of ethnic nationalism, blended with anti-Semitism, xenophobia, anti-Protestantism and anti-Masonry. The Action française (AF), first founded as a journal and later a political organization, was the matrix of a new type of counter-revolutionary right-wing, which continues to exist today. During the interwar period, the Action française and its youth militia, the Camelots du Roi, were very active. Far-right leagues organized riots.

After World War II, the Organisation armée secrète (OAS) was created in Madrid in 1961 by French military personnel opposed to the independence of Algeria. Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the Front National (FN) party in 1972. At the 1986 legislative elections, the FN managed to obtain 35 seats, with 10% of the votes. Mark Frederiksen, a French Algeria activist, created in April 1966 a neo-Nazi group, the FANE (Fédération d'action nationaliste et européenne, Nationalist and European Federation of Action). However, in 1978, neo-Nazi members of the GNR-FANE broke again with the FN. During the 1980s, the National Front managed to gather, under Jean-Marie Le Pen's leadership, most rival far-right tendencies of France, following a succession of splits and alliances with other, minor parties, during the 1970s.

Lionel Robert Jospin (French: [ljɔnɛl ʁɔbɛʁ ʒɔspɛ̃]; born 12 July 1937) is a French politician who served as Prime Minister of France from 1997 to 2002.

Jospin was First Secretary of the Socialist Party from 1995 to 1997 and the party's candidate for President of France in the 1995 and 2002 elections. In 1995, he was narrowly defeated in the second round by Jacques Chirac. In 2002, he was eliminated in the first round after finishing behind both Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen, prompting him to announce his retirement from politics. In 2015, he was appointed to the Constitutional Council by National Assembly President Claude Bartolone.

The National Rally (French: Rassemblement national, [ʁasɑ̃bləmɑ̃ nɑsjɔnal], RN), known as the National Front from 1972 to 2018 (French: Front national, [fʁɔ̃ nɑsjɔnal], FN), is a French far-right political party, described as right-wing populist and nationalist. It is the single largest parliamentary opposition party in the National Assembly since 2022. It opposes immigration, advocating significant cuts to legal immigration, protection of "French identity", and stricter control of illegal immigration. The party advocates a "more balanced" and "independent" French foreign policy, opposing French military intervention in Africa while supporting France leaving NATO's integrated command. It also supports reform of the European Union (EU), economic interventionism, protectionism, and zero tolerance for breaches of law and order.

The party was founded in 1972 by the Ordre Nouveau to be the legitimate political vehicle for the far-right movement. Jean-Marie Le Pen was its founder and leader until his resignation in 2011. While its influence was marginal until 1984, the party's role as a nationalist electoral force has grown considerably. It has put forward a candidate at every presidential election but one since 1974. In the 2002 presidential election, Jean-Marie Le Pen advanced to the second round but finished a distant second in the runoff to Jacques Chirac. His daughter Marine Le Pen was elected to succeed him as party leader in 2012. Jordan Bardella assumed the leadership in 2022.

At age 69, Jacques Chirac faced his fourth campaign for the French Presidency in 2002. He was the first choice of fewer than one voter in five in the first round of voting of the presidential elections of April 2002. It had been expected that he would face incumbent prime minister Lionel Jospin on the second round of elections; instead, Chirac faced controversial far right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen of the law-and-order, anti-immigrant National Front, and won re-election by a landslide; most parties outside the National Front had called for opposing Le Pen, even if it meant voting for Chirac. Slogans such as "vote for the crook, not for the fascist" or "vote with a clothespin on your nose" appeared.

The left-wing Socialist Party being in thorough disarray following Jospin's defeat, Chirac reorganized politics on the right, establishing a new party — initially called the Union of the Presidential Majority, then the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP). The RPR had broken down – a number of members had formed Eurosceptic breakaways; while the Giscardian liberals of the Union of French Democracy (UDF) had moved sharply to the right. The UMP won the parliamentary elections that followed the presidential poll with ease.