Marine Le Pen, once seen as the great hope for the French and European right-wing, has sat on the sidelines for far too long. But, her party’s lead in the snap polls called by French President Emmanuel Macron signals that it could be her time to shine.
With Joan Bardella, a partnership being dubbed as France’s far-right double act, she is finally aiming to wrest power from the left-wing which has dominated France for decades as she made major gains in the snap elections called by French President Emmanuel Macron.
The far-right National Rally (RN) party of Marine Le Pen won a resounding victory in the first round of the polls Sunday, with Macron’s centrists trailing in third behind a left-wing coalition.
Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) was once known as the National Front and was founded by her father, former soldier Jean-Marie Le Pen. It was a fringe far-right party composed of veterans from the Algerian war and French collaborators from the Vichy regime.
Jean Marie Le Pen came very close to winning the elections in 2002 and won 16.86% of votes, enough to put him into a second-round run-off against Jacques Chirac.
The strong showing sent shockwaves through France and there is widespread disgust that such a far-right party could do so well.
Politicians from the right and left came together to prevent Le Pen from winning the second round. Chirac won over 80% of votes in the run-off.
Jean Marie Le Pen struggled and in his final days it seemed like the days of the French far-right were numbered. His daughter Marine Le Pen became the new leader of the National Front in 2011, after a period in which the party performed badly in polls and faced growing financial pressures.
She also ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2012.
Over the past decade, Marine Le Pen decided that her party needed to distance itself from the ideas of its founder, her father Jean Marie and journalist Pierre Bousquet, a member of the French division of the Waffen-SS during the second world war.
The Waffen-SS was the armed wing of the Nazi Party’s SS organisation, operating during World War II and known for its combat units and involvement in war crimes and atrocities.
Marine Le Pen even suspended her father from the Jean Marie Le Pen party after he described the Holocaust as “a detail” of World War Two. She then went on to expel him, a necessary step to rehaul the image of the party seen as anti-immigrant, racial and anti-semitic.
Marine Le Pen ran for the presidency again in 2017, but lost to Emmanuel Macron.
After that she doubled her efforts to make the party more palatable to a wider electorate and gave its lawmakers a more professional veneer, with media training and a slick social media presence.
In 2018, she changed the party’s name to National Rally (RN).
She and her closest allies aimed to rebuild the party by expanding her policy expertise on issues like defence and the economy, while also developing a new group of local-level politicians, known as “Generation Marine.”
She chose Jordan Bardella, a 28-year-old protege of her, to be the new president of the RN.
Bardella led the party in the European Parliament elections, handing out a drubbing to Macron’s party and prompting the president to call a snap legislative vote. Bardella is the RN’s prime ministerial candidate.
Marine Le Pen, a former lawyer, with Bardella campaigned this time about the cost of living amid inflation and used the discontent the French citizens currently have about declining public services.
Even though they have tried to shed RN off traces of its antisemitic, racist past, they are still contesting on issues that include cutting immigration, ending automatic citizenship for newborns and giving French citizens priority in social housing and welfare programs.
(with inputs from Reuters and Financial Times)
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