After shallow electoral waters in 2007, the Front national (FN) has achieved its best electoral performance ever in the 2012 French presidential election. This paper looks at how the party has striven to adapt to the public demand for protection and redistribution in the context of France’s economic and growing unemployment. Under Marine Le Pen’s leadership, the FN’s economic policies have undergone significant change towards Kitschelt’s original model of ‘welfare-chauvinism’, which combines exclusionism, authoritarianism and statist redistributive economic policies. Based on a systematic longitudinal analysis of the FN policy preferences on the economic axis since the mid-1980s, this paper examines the magnitude and significance of this strategic programmatic shift by the FN, and to which extent the formulation of a renewed economic agenda has enabled the party to move towards a more beneficial position in the 2012 presidential race. Possible implications for both the nature of the radical right phenomenon and the competitive shape of the French party system are discussed.