Marine Le Pen has worked for years at polishing the rough edges of the far-right National Rally, the party her rabble-rousing father Jean-Marie founded a half-century ago as the National Front, seeking the breakthrough that would finally secure the French presidency. For all her efforts, after eight attempts – Le Pen père’s five presidential bids and his daughter’s three – the far right now finds itself within striking distance of the Élysée Palace.
For five long years, Marine Le Pen has been plotting her revenge. Poised once again to vie for France’s top job in an April 24 presidential run-off against the incumbent Emmanuel Macron, a rematch of their 2017 clash, she won’t be content to lose this one.
With this campaign, the 53-year-old Le Pen put the finishing touches on her long-standing plan, softening her discourse and her image. Far from the potshots she was happy to fire off on the presidential campaign trail back in 2012, the “mother of cats” – as she now likes to describe herself – is given to posing with her kitties for the media and for her 2.6 million Twitter followers. Gone is the provocative old sniping. The new and improved Le Pen insists that Islam is “compatible with the French Republic”. And the 2022 version of her National Rally – rebranded in 2018 to underscore the makeover – no longer pledges to pull France out of the euro currency or even the European Union.
To be clear, the long road to convincing French voters that the far right is a palatable option – “de-demonisation” is the term – began as far back as 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen won a shock place in the run-off and set rivals scrambling, often counter-productively, to keep the party from power.
>> On This Day in 2002: Doomed Socialist favourite laughs off threat of Le Pen in presidential final
But in 2022, a sulphurous newcomer appeared on the political scene and accelerated the process. Hardline pundit-turned-politician Éric Zemmour, for his part, didn’t bother polishing his remarks or obscuring any demons. Le Pen looked all the more viable, even banal, in comparison. Her results speak for themselves: in the first round on April 10, Le Pen added two points to her 2017 score, tallying 23.15 percent of the vote this time to advance to another final.
And yet under the blond and smiling surface, it’s all still there – a far-right political line knocking at the palace gates, poised to take the helm of a nuclear power and Europe’s second-largest economy.
All the scars of the family business
Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen was born on August 5, 1968, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, west of Paris. Nicknamed Marine, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s youngest child – the third of three girls after Marie-Caroline and Yann – was steeped in politics from infancy. The elder Le Pen founded the National Front the year she turned four.
In her 2006 autobiography “À Contre Flots” (Against the Tide), Marine Le Pen recounts the literally explosive way politics entered her life when, at the age of 8, she and her family escaped a bombing attack on their Paris apartment – an event she remembers as one of the “most momentous of her childhood”.
The trials and tribulations didn’t stop there for the youngest daughter of France’s most notorious politician. For the young Le Pen, the limelight was harsh: Her parents’ messy divorce in the headlines, erotic photos of her mother in Playboy, the insults that rained down when a 15-year-old Marine hit the campaign trail with her father ahead of municipal elections in 1983. All that adversity might discourage some from politics. Not Marine Le Pen. At 18, she signed up as a member of her father’s National Front.
Not exactly a model student, Marine Le Pen had to sit her baccalauréat high school graduation exam again after scoring 4 out of 20 in philosophy. She chose law school in Paris, where she was by all accounts a “die-hard party animal” before graduating with a master’s in law. She followed that up with a post-graduate degree in criminal law in 1991. Beyond the father-daughter pair’s physical likeness – Marine’s mother nicknamed her “the clone”, to which Marine would add “with hair” – the youngest Le Pen inherited her father’s taste for dispensing rhetoric. Unsurprisingly then, the cheeky student with the cutting wit embraced the legal profession, plying her trade at the criminal high court in Paris. In an ironic twist, the novice attorney – who volunteered as a public defender on call – found herself representing undocumented migrants in the role.
‘Who on earth is she?’
Meanwhile, the 24-year-old was paving the road to a political future. In 1993 legislative elections, Le Pen waged an unsuccessful bid for a seat representing a district in the French capital. In 1998, she won election as a regional councillor in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais area of northern France. That same year, Le Pen’s private life was a flurry of activity, too; she gave birth to her first child followed by a set of twins less than 11 months later.
Far-right party politics, too, were far from sedate. A schism in the National Front saw Jean-Marie Le Pen rival Bruno Mégret, who had been pleading for years to shape the party with an eye to winning real power, was expelled from the party – leading a coterie of allies to quit and follow Mégret to a new rival outfit.
Le Pen père thumbed his nose at critics on all fronts – not least those who questioned his daughter’s role in the party, rankled by the junior Le Pen’s “modernist” stances on subjects like abortion and religion. Two years later, she would take over as chief of Génération Le Pen, an association rebranded under her stewardship to a plural Générations Le Pen in a sign of the political marketing manoeuvres to come. The group’s objective was to attract fresh voters to the National Front.
Little known to the general public, the next-generation Le Pen started to come out from her father’s shadow on May 5, 2002. That night, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s long-shot bid for the Élysée Palace fell far short as voters of all stripes gave Jacques Chirac a landslide win to keep the far right from power. After the results dropped, Marine Le Pen appeared for the first time on an election night television broadcast as a stand-in called upon to replace a National Front heavyweight at the last minute. Her performance did not go unnoticed as she teased and aggravated her political opponents. “Who on earth is she?” cried Jean-Luc Mélenchon on France 3 television that night, years before the leftist’s own schism from the Socialist Party. “No hate, no intolerance,” she retorted, with a mocking smile, as some in the audience jeered her.
Family betrayals
Step by step, the political animal continued her long climb to the top. In the north of France, the once-proud rust belt sapped of its industry and jobs, Le Pen found fertile terrain to sow her ideas. She was elected to the European Parliament in 2004 and re-elected in 2009. In 2011, at a National Front party congress in Tours, Jean-Marie Le Pen passed the torch to his daughter after she won a leadership vote handily. She threw her hat in the presidential election ring for the first time in 2012, recouping the party’s 2007 losses to score 17.9 percent in the first round but falling short of the run-off. The legislative elections that followed were waged by a coalition of united far-right movements she pulled together and dubbed the Marine Blue Rally.
Relations with her party’s founder, meanwhile, were very publicly souring. Initially, Jean-Marie Le Pen had been permitted to stay on, politely, given the title President of Honour. But the old man – notorious for describing Nazi gas chambers as a “detail” of history and for defending Philippe Pétain, France’s collaborationist World War II leader – was not content to be honourably discreet as Marine Le Pen sought to rid the party of its demons in the public imagination. In the end, the elder Le Pen’s racist and revisionist salvoes from retirement were the last straw. Marine Le Pen permanently excluded him from the party in 2015. In this family business, betrayal is a two-way street.
Unfettered in 2017, Marine Le Pen waged her second bid for the French presidency, putting the National Front in the run-off for the first time since her father’s 2002 upset before losing to Macron in the final (33.9 percent to his 66.1).
>> How Zemmour’s storm in a teacup hijacked French campaign – and helped Le Pen
Determined to have another go at the Élysée Palace, Le Pen threw her hat in the ring for a third time in 2022, keen to better her 2017 performance. But party turmoil returned. First, a few choice defectors jumped ship with a splash, showily signing on with Zemmour’s rival bid. Then her own niece, Marion Maréchal, too, joined Zemmour, introduced like a prize catch at one of his political rallies. When longtime Le Pen ally Nicolas Bay also left for the competition, the psychodrama was complete; Bay was accused of conducting espionage for the rival far-right camp.
And yet Marine, seemingly unsinkable, held on. As the election neared, her numbers rose and tactical voting brought some of Zemmour’s one-time supporters back onside to carry her to the second round. If she wins the presidency on her third try – as no lesser lights than François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac have in the past – Le Pen would become the first woman ever elected president in France. She would also bring the far right to power in the country for the first time in the modern political era.
This article has been translated from the original in French.
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