One of the best known faces of the current French political world. The far-right Marine Le Pen has been making her way to the Elysee Palace for decades. A career that has been marked by the turbulent image of her father, with which the leader of the Agrupación Nacional party has done everything possible to break. With one last strategy: soften her image to seek to defeat President Emmanuel Macron in a new second round on April 24.
When the facade of her building was blown up, Marine Le Pen was eight years old. 20 kg of explosives had been placed on the stairs of the building while her entire family slept. The attack was directed at her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right National Front (FN) party.
Despite the fact that everyone came out unharmed, the memory of the huge hole that formed in the wall and the fear that ran through her entire body would remain embedded in the memory of the woman who is contesting presidential elections today for the third time.
Despite the fear, that night in 1976 would give him two certainties: the difficulty of dedicating himself to politics and his desire to belong to it. “It took me this night of horror to discover that my father was involved in politics,” he says in his autobiography.
More than forty years later, many of the factors surrounding the attack remain uncertain. But for Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen, her birth name was a first evidence of the aversion generated by the radical figure of her father in French society. One that has marked her long political career, but with which she, at the same time, has sought to break.
The controversial image of his father mediated his childhood, marked his first steps in politics and still weighs on him today when he reaches, again, a second round in the presidential elections. Where he will seek to beat his old rival, current President Emmanuel Macron, after a campaign in which he has tried to soften his image.
From the dais to the benches
Before devoting herself entirely to politics, Marine Le Pen studied law. She enrolled at the Parisian University of Panthéon-Assas. In this institution she obtained a law degree and she also did a master’s degree in criminal law.
A profession that he practiced for six years but that he abandoned to begin his long political career.
It was a predictable jump. From a very young age, she let herself be enchanted by that world that she met accompanying her father to rallies and campaign events. She was born in 1968 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, west of Paris, into a Catholic family where politics was the order of the day.
“Politics was imposed on me. When you are the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, by definition, you have to be questioned, defend him, suffer what he can say or what can be said about him,” Le Pen assured for West France.
Thus, it was no surprise to anyone when at 18, the youngest of three daughters, she joined the National Front. Already in her ranks, she combined her two vocations when she served as director of legal affairs.
Next to her father and within the party that he led for 40 years, the young Marine Le Pen would begin to form her own voice. One with which she has made her way into French politics.
Politics, his great ambition
His debut in popular elections ended in defeat. In 1993 he stood for legislative elections seeking to win the Parisian constituency. She obtained about 11% of the votes, but was defeated by Bernard Pons, from the Rally for the Republic party.
However, Le Pen had revenge. Her first big break came in 1998 when she became regional councilor for the Nord Pas-de-Calais, now known as the Hauts-de-France region. Six years later she was chosen by Île-de-France.
Also in 2004 he arrived at the European Parliament where he was present for thirteen years.
Parallel to his political career, he led his father’s presidential campaign in 2007, an election in which he came in fourth place with 10% of the vote.
A few years later and with the worn leadership of his father, Le Pen took over the head of the party in 2011. He arrived with one goal in mind: “demonize” the National Front.
Under his command, the party changed its slogan. He went from “Euroscepticism” to “French nationalism”. Le Pen also sought to put an end to the anti-Semitist “tint” that certain actions of his father had earned him. However, he did not abandon his radical tone on many issues, including immigration.
But the route he would begin to navigate would be criticized by the party’s toughest wing. They called his figure “weak” and claimed that he had abandoned many of the most important precepts of the FN.
Despite detractors, he got the best result of his party when he first ran for president in 2012. He got 18% of the vote. A figure that despite being unprecedented was not enough to go to a second round.
But Le Pen would not need ambition. He took advantage of the growth of anti-Islamic sentiment in France stemming from the 2015 Paris attacks. He blamed the Hollande government and promised to end terrorism, saying he would work for and by the “French”.
Thus, on his return to the presidential fair, he managed to go to the second round. She faced current President Emmanuel Macron, who defeated her with 66.1% of the vote.
His campaign would not be far from controversy. Shortly after the election she was placed under criminal investigation for embezzlement during her tenure as MEP.
In 2018, a European Union court ruled that he had improperly allocated €300,000 from the bloc. Despite his appeal he had to pay them a year later.
Misunderstanding and discord: the turbulent relationship with his father
The closeness between father and daughter grew during the most critical moments of her adolescence. When he was 17 years old he faced the divorce of his parents. His mother, Pierrette Lalanne, left the family home. As Le Pen wrote, it was the “most appalling, cruel and crushing of heartaches: my mother did not love me.”
The separation had a media hype as a result of the strong statements of his father, who refused to pay alimony to his ex-wife, and who said: “if you need money, you can do housework”.
Some statements to which her mother responded by posing for the magazine ‘PlayBoy’, on a cover titled: “Mrs. Le Pen does housework.”
The episode led to Le Pen’s complete estrangement from her mother for more than a decade.
But the story with his father was different. Their relationship gradually deteriorated. Despite her shared taste for politics, the discrepancies between their two ways of conceiving it were fracturing her bond.
A first disagreement came with Le Pen’s desire to give the party a new face, something that according to his father “did not lead to anything”.
But the differences became irreconcilable when Jean-Marie Le Pen claimed that the gas chambers were just a “detail” in the history of World War II.
Some statements that led him to be expelled from his own party and that led Marine Le Pen to walk away in a way that she herself classified as “irreconcilable”.
Since then, politics has sought to break at all costs with the image of his father. With a turning point: in 2008 he changed the name of the party founded by his father to Agrupación Nacional. He wanted to usher in a new era.
Despite this, many point out that the party’s ideology remains the same. With a shared base: the two assure that France’s problems lie in immigration.
In his private life he also sought to mark distances. Le Pen, twice divorced, is the mother of three children whom she has sought to remove, at all costs, from the spotlight of French politics.
The second ’round’
“I would like to be 15, but I understand that it would be unreasonable,” says Le Pen when asked about her love for cats, which came to light during the time of the pandemic. Although for some, that closeness with the felines would not be alien to his campaign either.
“Marine Le Pen: the power of cats, purchasing power and VAT”, headlined the newspaper ‘L’Opinion’, on April 14, in an article in which it assured that the photos of the candidate responded to a campaign “powerful lever”, after the images of the felines have become one of the most viewed on the networks.
It is not strange after the leader of the National Group has sought to soften her image for this second face-to-face with Emmanuel Macron.
It seems that she has succeeded: only one in two voters now considers her “disturbing” and 46% consider that she “understands people’s problems well”. However, she has aroused the ire of thousands of young people who came out to protest after the results of the first round in different parts of France.
Despite this, during the campaign, Le Pen tried to be more moderate and closer to the people, seeking to break the labels of 2017 when they called her “unprepared” and “aggressive”.
A more measured face that also emerged by having the polemicist Éric Zemmour as a contender, who radicalized the proposals of the extreme right.
Le Pen also abandoned some of its precepts, such as the elimination of the euro and France’s exit from the European Union.
Others, however, he has had to forcefully discard, such as his proximity to Russia.
His ties to the Kremlin were obvious. Le Pen even went so far as to fawn over Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Some statements that threatened to affect her in the first round. Thus, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine he has had to adjust his speech in front of Moscow.
A softened image, but that does not ignore some of its most controversial flags: stop migration, fight against “Islamist ideology”, ban the veil in public space and reserve aid only for “the French”.
This time, the emphasis on purchasing power is added to the list of its most prized proposals. This is a topic that especially touches a large part of the French. This has become one of her strategies to attack her opponent, Emmanuel Macron, and with which she hopes to continue finding followers that will lead her to become the first president of the Gallic country.
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