Marine Le Pen: The far-right leader who has shaken up French politics

The journey took 13 years, but it was worth it.

With a close-up and non-sharp image, Marine Le Pen presents a feminine face Far-right in France and managed to give a new veneer to the often racist and anti-Semitic discourse that made the man known by that name National FrontWhose reins he took over in 2011.

Now, more than a decade after his arrival, the party leadership has changed National team (RN, for its acronym in French), Marine Le Pen has managed to make it the most voted party in France.

but by excommunication at the door of the Matignon castle, the seat of the French government which his “Dauphin” could occupy, Jordan BerdellaNot only has time passed, but a clear, populist strategy to make the party more acceptable to the French has also passed.

A strategy that has been successful and which has achieved that a peripheral party, Founded in 1972 by his father Jean-Marie and other Nazi collaborators and Holocaust deniersand due to which it remained represented in the National Assembly for years “Siege” of voters.is today regarded by more than a third of voters as another option that should not be ashamed of.

On this trip, Marine did not hesitate to “kill the father” – as the French press symbolically described his change of course -, to break with the old direction and aspire to the highest.

Twice he has managed to advance to the second round of the French presidential elections.In 2017 and 2022, where on their posters, with the slogan “Marine President”, the surname Le Pen does not even seem to erase the association with the past.

On neither occasion did they achieve their target against a very well-prepared team. Emmanuel Macronmaster of debate and data. But he became even closer, much closer than he did to his father in 2002, when he competed Jacques Chirac presidency and received just under 17% of the vote.

Jean-Marie’s entry into the second round of the presidential election caused an uproar in France. Today this is the norm and The far right is at the doorstep of power.

She was the winner in Recent European elections Where they received 31.37% of the vote, more than double the next party. In the first round of the legislative elections the result was even better: 33.15% of the vote.

“Marine Le Pen made it her mission to change the image of the National Front: to discredit (dédiabolise in French) the party in public perception. She surrounded herself with a group of leaders who don’t look like her Vichy collaborator, staunch colonialist and neo-fascist who led the party in the early days,” he explained to BBC Mundo james shieldsAn expert in French politics at Aston University in the United Kingdom, he managed to advance to the second round in 2017.

But how far did his ideological stance extend beyond the image change?

“The frame of reference changed and it became a more pro-republican group with a clearly more liberal tone. But at its core, the ideology and proposals did not change. ‘National priority’ has been maintained as a key proposal, which aims to favour French people over foreigners in the distribution of jobs, housing and social services. (…). “It is in this discriminatory principle where the greatest programmatic continuity over the last 40 years lies,” said the author of “The extreme right in France: from Pétain to Le Pen”.

Until Marine Le Pen came to the helm of the party in 2011, the National Front was inextricably linked with the personality of her father: A veteran of previous French colonial wars, he was prone to provocations and denounced on several occasions for his anti-Semitic remarks.

“I’m not saying that the gas chambers didn’t exist. I just didn’t see them. I haven’t studied the issue specifically. But I think it’s a detail of the history of World War II,” he said in a 1987 interview.

From then on, Jean Marie repeatedly returned to mentioning the “expansion” of the gas chambers.

By 2015, he had paid the price for this with expulsion from the party and separation from his daughter, who has not shared any public image with him since then.

The charge of anti-Semitism was one of the main weapons used by his political rivals. A weak point that was difficult to defend against.

,Marine Le Pen has tried hard to distance herself from her father’s legacy. Shields says, “It strives to project a new inclusive image, denying any form of anti-Semitism or racist sentiment and continually reaching out to new generations of the French Jewish community and those of North African descent.”

The conversation went further. On some social issues, Marine Le Pen also tried to qualify her party’s traditionalist image: softened its stance on abortion and distanced itself from the massive protests against gay marriage in 2013. In fact, Le Pen has surrounded herself with openly gay people among her colleagues, who also occupy RN benches in the National Assembly.

“He managed to take and vampirize that speech, imprinted in the genes of Republican ideology, but put it at the service of a single combat: Fight against radical Islam and fundamentalismsaid the author of “The New FN, The Old Habits of Populism.”

However, despite the evolution of the party’s discourse in recent years, Radical nationalism was passed down from father to daughter and remains one of the hallmarks of the national group even today,

Her immigration policy and prioritization of housing and employment for the French are extreme right-wing, but the woman leading the renewed National Rally projects a moderate and friendly image of populism.

For example, Le Pen often appears on social media with her cats.a passion that he made public in the last presidential elections and which has contributed to softening his image. Apparently, according to “Le Parisien”, he has also given several children to other representatives in the Assembly, where a waiting list was even created to adopt them.

When political scientist Chloë Morin asked a group of Lille voters in 2021 what their image of her was, cats came up. Eventually, she wondered, Who wouldn’t trust a cat lady?

She may seem more moderate, but the policies she advocates are no less radical than before on immigration, nationality and Islam. Emmanuel Macron has described her program as racist on several occasions.

His political awakening happened very early, in 1976, when he was only 8 years old. and managed to escape the attack on his father which severely damaged the Le Pen family’s apartment in the centre of Paris.

In his autobiography he said he was with his two elder sisters and described the scene in hair-raising detail: “We were on our knees, shaking, holding hands… Then we heard our father shout: ‘Girls, girls, are you alive?'”,

Little Marine’s classmates were told not to approach him, she says: “A circle was drawn around us: don’t go near Le Pens.”

At the age of 16 his mother, Pierrette, ran away with his father’s biographer.For one teenage Marine, it was a painful moment that brought him closer to his father.

,I vomited every day for a month and a half. I was unable to fill my stomach” he wrote in his 2011 autobiography.

Those years of training gave him the tough look that characterizes him. The smile he flashes at photographers rarely lasts.

“After everything he endured in his youth, he created a shell for himself”His friend Steve Briois, who remains a staunch ally as mayor of Hénin-Beaumont in northern France, an RN fiefdom, told the BBC.

Graduated from one of the best law schools in Paris in the early 90s, He worked as a public defender for people who couldn’t afford a lawyer, sometimes for irregular migrants. When asked about this description years later, Le Pen said she saw no contradiction: “They are human beings, they have rights, you don’t blame them for the immigration policy.”

“I admire how he kept his cool and was able to maintain normal professional relationships despite his father’s infamy,” lawyer Basil Eder told the BBC.

His career as a lawyer did not prosper, partly due to the ostracism he faced from other lawyers because of his father’s views.

Thus, in 1998 he left the legal profession to occupy a senior position in the legal department of the National Front.

In 2004 he won a seat in the European elections, where he remained for 13 years.

From Brussels and following her father’s defeat in the 2007 elections, where he received only 10% of the vote, Marine Le Pen took over the reins of the party.

Despite his efforts to revamp and improve leader training, The financing of the far right remains a toxic issue in France,

Le Pen turned to Russia for a loan of €11 million the same year Vladimir Putin invaded eastern Ukraine. She even supported the Kremlin-organised vote on the annexation of Crimea, which much of the international community regarded as a farce.

Le Pen focused on perceived threats to French life: “Islamisation”, globalisation, the European Union and the euro. In the 2012 presidential election he came in a credible third place.

By 2017, the National Front was led by young professionals running YouTube channels and attracting support across France. The party had won local, European and regional elections and had Jewish and Muslim supporters.

After the Brexit fiasco, Le Pen has abandoned her idea of ​​calling a referendum on France’s membership in the EUHowever his party places itself in the orbit of Euroscepticism and prioritises national sovereignty.

He wants to reinstate border controls on imports and people, in violation of EU and Schengen rules, and unilaterally cut France’s contribution to the community budget. He wants to automatically expel immigrants who are in irregular status, or make it impossible to regularize those who are already in France.

Now, with her disciple at the gates of Matignon and with a model very similar to her at the head of Italy – despite the differences that separate her from Giorgia Meloni – who has helped to normalize the image of the extreme right, Marine Le Pen is at her best.

The wait was worth it.

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