If she had won the elections, she would have made history by becoming the first female president of France and the first far-right head of state of the Fifth Republic
The third was not the winner. Marine Le Pen, candidate for Regrouping National, dreamed of taking the keys to the Elysée Palace, but President Emmanuel Macron once again crossed her path, as happened in 2017. If she had won the elections, she would have done history by becoming the first female president of France and the first far-right head of state of the Fifth Republic.
A lawyer by profession, Le Pen, 53, is a deputy of the National Assembly and a leader of the French extreme right. She has been a departmental councilor, regional councilor and MEP. The American magazine Time considered her in 2014 one of the hundred most influential personalities in the world.
She has been a presidential candidate three times. In 2012, she was eliminated in the first round with 17.9% of the vote. In 2017, she went to the second round and was defeated (33.9%-66.1%) by Macron.
Politics runs through his veins. His father is Jean-Marie Le Pen, the historic leader of the French extreme right, founder of the National Front and a five-time presidential candidate. Since she was little she accompanied him to rallies and party meetings. Politics and family intimacy often intermingled in the Le Pen home.
Marine, whose real name is Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen, knows political violence firsthand. In 1976 when Marine was 8 years old, the Le Pen survived a violent bomb attack on the Paris apartment building in which they resided that was directed against the patriarch. The attack was claimed by an anti-fascist committee. It was, according to extreme right-wing politics, one of the events that marked her the most in her childhood.
Pierrette, her mother, left home in 1984 with the journalist Jean Marcilly, her husband’s biographer. Marine sided with her father. After her divorce, Pierrette took revenge in 1987 on her ex-husband by posing half-naked in Playboy magazine, which created a huge scandal at the time.
Although Marine Le Pen has presented herself in these elections to voters as “the people’s candidate”, in reality, she has always been a posh girl who inherited the party from her father as if it were a family business and grew up in a mansion in the park from Montretout, in the affluent neighborhood of Saint-Cloud, on the outskirts of Paris. «My daughter is a bourgeois. Marine never suffered materially. She has had a comfortable life », Le Pen Sr. explained to Renaud Dély, author of the biography« The real Marine Le Pen »(Plon publishing house).
Marine is a Le Pen with a kinder face than her father, considered by many “the devil of the Republic” for his extremist and anti-Semitic ideas. Since she took the reins of the National Front in 2011, Marine Le Pen has carried out a process of “de-demonizing” the party to make it more presentable to the electorate and present herself as a credible alternative to Macron.
He kicked out the most radical elements of the party. And he dared the unthinkable: to exclude his own father from the party he founded in October 1972, after he caused a great controversy by saying in 2015 that the gas chambers used by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews were “a detail of the history”.
In this process of washing the image of the party, Marine renamed the formation with the name of National Regrouping, which scares the French electoral less than the feared National Front. He swept anti-Semitism under the rug and softened his electoral program to attract more voters. He now even vindicates the figure of former President Charles De Gaulle, whom his father and the National Front reviled.
The irruption in the national police of the far-right Eric Zemmour, more extremist than her, has contributed to further soften his image. Beside Zemmour, Le Pen seems more moderate, although Regrouping National remains a far-right party if one reads her programme.
“The France we love. Marine president », prayed the poster of this electoral campaign. Despite the absence of her paternal surname on the electoral posters, the far-right leader is “proud” of being a Le Pen, which she considers “synonymous with courage and perseverance.”
When asked what her main character trait is, Marine Le Pen replies that she is tenacious. And her main flaw: impatience. According to Renaud Dély, the president suffers from continuous mood swings, gets angry easily and has a bad temper like her father. Her mother, Pierrette, claims that Marine is “a clone of her father.”
Divorced twice and mother of three children – Jehanne and the twins Louis and Mathilde -, whom she keeps away from the press and the spotlight. Her last known partner is Louis Aliot, mayor of Perpignan and member of her party, from whom she separated in 2019. Single again, she shares a house with Ingrid, a childhood friend whom she considers a her sister, and six cats.
The far-right leader has said that, if one day she leaves politics, she would like to dedicate herself to raising cats, for which this “mother of cats” has a real passion.
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