France’s far-right chief Marine Le Pen, who Tuesday clung on to her dream of a fourth run at the presidency despite an embezzlement verdict, has spent years preparing the family party for power.
“My skin’s quite tough. If someone tries to kill me, they’d better have a well-sharpened blade. I think I have a certain resilience,” she said last week.
A tough talker with a blonde bob haircut, the 57-year-old firebrand was brought up in a deeply political household.
Born in 1968, Le Pen was just four years old when her father Jean-Marie co-founded the National Front (FN), France’s main postwar far-right movement.
She was six when her father — a veteran of the war in Algeria that led to the former French colony’s independence — ran for the first of five times for president.
He made the second round in 2002, before losing to Jacques Chirac.
Le Pen in 2011 took over leadership of the FN from her father, accepting its legacy but seeking to render it more palatable to the public, after the leadership of a man who was convicted for racist and antisemitic remarks.
She expelled her father — who once called the gas chambers of the Holocaust a mere “detail” of history — from the party in 2015, helping to temper its toxic image. In 2018 she renamed it the National Rally (RN).
After coming third in the 2012 presidential polls, she made the run-off in 2017 and 2022 but was beaten both times by Emmanuel Macron.
In snap polls in 2024, the RN emerged as the largest single party in the lower house of parliament, though well short of a majority.
“There was long a kind of moral taboo around voting for the FN,” she said during a televised interview last week. “This moral taboo has largely fallen away.”
High court appeal
Critics accuse her Eurosceptic party of still being inherently racist, and say it took too long to distance itself from Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
But by playing on people’s day-to-day concerns about immigration, security and the cost of living, the RN is seen as having its best chance to win the country’s top job next year.
Opinion polls have in recent months largely placed it in the lead in the first of the two-round election in April and May next year.
Le Pen’s conviction in March last year over a fake jobs scam at the European Parliament had posed a potentially insurmountable hurdle to her long-sought end goal, after it banned her from running for office for five years.
The Paris appeals court on Tuesday upheld the guilty verdict against Le Pen, but handed her a shorter electoral ban that has by now expired, clearing the way for her to run for president.
It also sentenced her to one year wearing an electronic tag, which could have complicated her campaigning as she would have needed permissions to travel.
Le Pen appeared on French television hours after the verdict saying she would appeal to the country’s highest court and compete in the polls, as the appeal would put her sentence on hold.
“There is no longer any scenario in which I would be unable to stand for election,” she insisted.
Third grandchild
Le Pen developed a tough shell after a tumultuous childhood.
When she was eight, a bomb ripped through the Paris apartment building where the family lived, slightly injuring six people but sparing the Le Pens.
The attack, for which no one ever claimed responsibility, left a lasting mark.
“From that point on, being a Le Pen daughter meant entering a fundamentally unjust world, where I would constantly have to watch my step,” she wrote in a 2006 autobiography.
Eight years later, her mother Pierrette walked out on her husband and three daughters, sensationally resurfacing shortly afterwards posing nude in Playboy magazine.
She and her elder sisters Marie-Caroline and Yann did not speak to their mother for years afterwards.
A trained lawyer and now twice divorced mother of three, Marine Le Pen keeps her private life out of the spotlight.
She, however, said last week she would “soon” have a third grandchild.
She has sought to soften her image with social media posts of her cats, last year turning up to meet the prime minister carrying a kitten in a carrier box.
Her father’s death last year aged 96 plunged the politician into grief.
She said expelling him from the party was “one of the most difficult” decisions of her life.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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