On both sides of the Channel, a measurable share of queer voters is moving towards the parties most determined to unwind the rights they spent decades building. Why do so many LGBT+ people vote for the far-right?
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The polling was conducted during the first week of February, and the results landed on François Kraus’s desk sometime after that. Kraus leads the political polling unit at Ifop, France’s oldest survey institute, and has spent years studying the LGBT electorate and its behaviour. He is not given to alarm. The numbers he was reading, drawn from 1,137 LGBT+ respondents extracted from a national sample of just over 10,000 French adults, were produced for the magazine Têtu and will be published ahead of the 2027 presidential election. What they showed was this: Jordan Bardella, the thirty-year-old president of the Rassemblement national, was the leading candidate among LGBT+ French voters, polling at 27 per cent.
The polling was conducted during the first week of February, and the results landed on François Kraus’s desk sometime after that. Kraus runs the political polling unit at Ifop, France’s oldest survey institute, and he has spent years studying what the LGBT+ electorate does and why. He is not given to alarm. The numbers he was reading, drawn from 1,137 LGBT+ respondents extracted from a national sample of just over 10,000 French adults, were produced for the magazine Têtu and will be published ahead of the 2027 presidential election. What they showed was this: Jordan Bardella, the thirty-year-old president of the Rassemblement national, was the leading candidate among LGBT+ French voters, polling at 27 per cent.
The Rassemblement national opposes gender-affirming care for minors, has equivocated on equal marriage for years, and has campaigned consistently against the legal recognition of trans identity. The community it was leading is the one whose rights it has spent the better part of a decade working to limit. Kraus described what was happening with his usual carefulness. ‘The RN is now capitalising on an assumed right-wing vote,’ he said, ‘which considers rights as settled and is satisfied with the status quo.’
A year and a half ago, I wrote in these pages about the fascist drift in German-speaking Europe and argued that a new strain of homonationalism had taken root there: gay men in particular finding in far-right anti-immigration politics a kind of useful mirror, one that gave back their whiteness and their citizenship while asking nothing about the people being pushed out the other side. That argument covered Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. The surveys published this month in France, and the polling that emerged from Britain in the same period, suggest it describes something wider than a regional tendency.
The French figures are worth sitting with. Four years ago, Emmanuel Macron held 22 per cent of LGBT+ voting intentions. This was earned. He had delivered medically assisted procreation to lesbian couples, legislated in 2021 after years during which it had been promised and then quietly set aside, and he had signed a ban on conversion therapies, honouring a commitment François Hollande had made and then failed to keep. LGBT+ voters gave him their support in 2022. They will not give it to the people inheriting his political space.
Édouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal together poll at 17 per cent in the Ifop survey, a drop of five points from Macron’s 2022 figure. Attal’s personal standing is particularly revealing: he became France’s first openly gay head of government when Macron appointed him Prime Minister in January 2024, and he has publicly declared his support for legalising commercial surrogacy. He polls at 8 per cent among LGBT+ voters, three points behind Philippe. Kraus’s reading of this is blunt. ‘The shortness of breath is evident: LGBT+ voters no longer see Macronism as a bearer of societal progress.’ It appears that being gay is not, by itself, sufficient. Being gay and in the centre is not the same thing as offering something the centre-left electorate wants.
Into the space left by the retreating centre have moved, with equal speed, the radical left and the far right. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who leads La France Insoumise, has made the largest single gain in the survey: 25 per cent of LGBT+ voting intentions, up fifteen points from 2022, against 13 per cent in the broader population. Kraus attributes this to Mélenchon’s fluency with gender politics and the ease with which he reaches for the language of queer rights; the loyalty is, he notes, especially strong among women. The left as a whole, combining LFI, the Socialists and the Greens, holds 56 per cent of LGBT+ voting intentions. This is almost the precise mirror of the national figure: among all French voters, 56 per cent place themselves on the right. The community inverts the population almost perfectly. It remains, in the majority, where it has historically been.
The classic right, meanwhile, has more or less vanished from this electorate. Bruno Retailleau, the Les Républicains candidate, polls at 3 per cent among LGBT+ voters, down from the 15 per cent that Valérie Pécresse drew in 2022. Retailleau is a socially conservative Catholic whose politics sit closer to the positions the Church held before the Second Vatican Council than to those of the European mainstream. His voters appear to have moved, but not to the left. ‘The RN capitalises on an assumed right-wing vote,’ Kraus observes, ‘that takes rights for granted and declares security as the main reason for its RN support.’ These are people who have decided their rights are no longer in play, that the settled law is settled, and that what they want from politics is what they share with everyone else: order, safety, the control of borders. They have, in the most literal sense, moved on.
The problem with moving on is that the law can move with you, or it can wait. The Rassemblement national polled at around 30 per cent combined across the far-right bloc in 2022; Bardella alone now stands at 27 per cent, the bloc having consolidated and grown. Kraus notes something shifting in its internal character as well: ‘We observe a consolidation of this electorate, which votes by membership of the RN and no longer only by rejection of the other parties.’ A protest vote becomes a conviction vote. These are not the same thing, and the distinction matters more than it might appear.
The British data came from More in Common, a research organisation focused on political polarisation, which surveyed 8,921 adults between the 24th of November and the 16th of December 2025. Its headline finding, circulated widely in early March, was that Reform UK had become the most popular party among gay and bisexual men in Britain. Twenty-five per cent said they would vote for it.
Before reading anything into this, it is worth registering what it sits next to. Reform is the most popular party for straight men too, at 33 per cent. The party underperforms among gay and bisexual men relative to the broader population, which means it is overrepresented only in the sense that it comes first in their rankings. Coming first in a fragmented field is not the same as commanding majority support. Keir Starmer’s Labour won no group’s top spot: its best result was 22 per cent among straight men, followed closely by 21 per cent among lesbian and bisexual women. The Conservatives trailed almost everywhere.
For lesbian and bisexual women, the picture is markedly different from that of their male counterparts. The Greens, led by Zack Polanski and firmly positioned as the most pro-trans party on the ballot, polled at 37 per cent among this group; a figure more than three times their support among straight women, who backed Reform at 29 per cent. The gender split is, in its way, as striking as the partisan one. Women in the LGBT+ community are voting with something that looks very much like political solidarity; men are voting with something that, for some of them at least, looks like its absence.
The case for voting Reform if you are a gay or bisexual man requires a certain amount of active management. In July 2025, on LBC, Farage told the presenter Nick Ferrari that legalising equal marriage had been ‘wrong’. He had been ‘very surprised’ by David Cameron’s decision to bring the legislation forward without including it in a manifesto. The civil partnership arrangement, he said, had been ‘working equitably and fairly’. He would not now seek to overturn the law, and considered it ‘a settled issue’. Whether the legal foundation on which gay men’s marriages, adoptions and inheritance rights rest will remain as settled as Farage considers it is a question the polling does not ask, and probably cannot answer.
His other statements on the subject have not improved with time. In 2019, Farage argued that people living with HIV should be barred from entering the United Kingdom; the country was, he said, ‘incapable’ of treating them given the pressures of immigration. He had made a similar argument in 2014, framing it around NHS resources. The claim that people with a chronic illness should be kept out at the border because their treatment would cost money is not a technical observation about health policy. It is a view about which bodies are welcome. Gay men have a longer history with HIV than most, and a longer history with being told they are too expensive, too infectious, too dangerous to be accommodated.
That history includes Section 28. The legislation came into force on the 24th of May 1988 under Margaret Thatcher’s government, banning local authorities from ‘intentionally promoting homosexuality’ and remaining law in England and Wales until November 2003. It caused schools to shut down LGBT+ support groups, purge libraries, and leave teachers unable to acknowledge that some of their pupils’ lives existed. The British Social Attitudes Survey, published in 1987, the year before the Act, found 75 per cent of the public believed homosexuality was ‘always or mostly wrong’. The legislation arrived at and extended that moment. When Farage was asked about it recently, he offered this: Section 28 happened because Thatcher feared some of the very, very extreme left-wing elements within the teaching union’. Her premiership, otherwise, he said, had constituted ‘real advancement for gay people in society’. This reading of events, in which a law that silenced an entire generation of queer young people is explained away as a reaction to union politics, is a choice. It is the kind of choice that tells you something about the man making it.
Reform’s record as a party is of a piece with its leader’s. Its manifesto commits to overhauling the 2010 Equality Act, eliminating diversity and inclusion initiatives from public institutions, and banning what it calls ‘transgender ideology’ in primary and secondary schools. After last year’s local elections, the party announced that the ten councils it now controls would not fly the Pride flag. One Reform member was filmed describing the flag on a police car as ‘degenerate’. Research from 2024 found that 69 per cent of Reform voters oppose trans people being able to change their legal gender, and 35 per cent do not believe same-sex couples should be permitted to marry in the United Kingdom. These are the internal polling figures of the party’s own voters. A quarter of gay and bisexual men are prepared to vote for a party whose members hold those views. Twenty-five per cent.
There is an argument, made usually by people with a professional interest in not alarming their readers, that these figures represent protest rather than conviction: that gay and bisexual men backing Reform are expressing frustration with Labour and the Conservatives rather than a genuine desire to hand power to a party with those stated positions. This argument may account for part of what the polling is measuring. Ifop’s French data, however, offers a complication. Kraus’s observation that the RN’s LGBT+ support has shifted from rejection of other parties to positive identification with the RN itself suggests that, in France at least, the protest vote is hardening into something else. There is no equivalent longitudinal data for Britain yet. But the direction of travel in France should give pause to anyone inclined to assume that British numbers will be different.
The concept I keep returning to is homonationalism, which the theorist Jasbir Puar developed in the mid-2000s to describe the incorporation of white, assimilated gay identity into nationalist projects. The mechanism she identified was specific: the far right offers gay men in particular a deal, positioning itself as the defender of a liberal European sexual culture against the threat of Muslim immigration. In exchange, those gay men are asked to accept a politics that defines who counts as a legitimate resident, a legitimate citizen, a legitimate body. The solidarity of the marginalised is traded for the comfort of being told you are on the right side of the line. It is, as deals go, a bad one. But it is a deal people keep taking.
The French data offers one measure of how far this has gone and one measure of where the limit is. Fifty-six per cent of LGBT+ voters in France still identify as being on the left, directly inverting the national figure. The community remains anchored. Kraus describes it as ‘one of the solid anti-fascist nuclei’ of French society, and the numbers bear this out in aggregate. What the numbers also show is that the edges of this nucleus are eroding in a specific direction, among a specific demographic, for reasons that are neither random nor mysterious. Gay men who have achieved a certain stability, who have had their marriages and their legal protections for long enough that these things feel permanent, who now think of themselves as taxpayers with opinions about immigration rather than as people with a particular stake in how the state treats minorities: these are the voters Bardella and Farage are reaching. They are reaching them successfully.
Rights do not feel fragile until they are. The Pride flag will not fly at those ten Reform councils this summer. The councils have the authority, and they will use it. The men who helped vote those councils into power will likely have other things on their minds. Some will not make the connection; others will and will decide it is a price worth paying for whatever they got in return. This is how political abandonment works, usually: incrementally, with decent explanations at every stage, until the explanations run out and the thing itself becomes plain.
In France, the nucleus holds. In Britain, we do not yet have enough data to know how solid the equivalent structure is. What we have is a set of numbers, gathered between November and December 2025, telling us that a quarter of gay and bisexual British men intend to vote for a party whose leader called equal marriage wrong and whose members consider the symbol of their community degenerate. The polling cannot tell us what will happen next. It can tell us where things are. That is usually enough to be going on with.
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