Marine Le Pen

Marine Le Pen (born August 5, 1968, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France) is a French politician who succeeded her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, as leader of the National Front (later National Rally) party in 2011. She was that party’s candidate in the 2017 and 2022 French presidential elections. In 2022 she stepped down as leader of the National Rally.

Childhood and early life in politics

Le Pen was the youngest of three daughters. Her childhood was coloured by the political career of her father, who espoused a range of controversial views and in 1976 was the target of a bomb attack that heavily damaged the family’s apartment building. This and other, less-violent rebukes of her father’s views would inform Le Pen’s own politics. She earned a law degree from the University of Panthéon-Assas (University of Paris II) in 1991 and remained there to complete an advanced degree in criminal law in 1992. That year she was certified to practice law, and she worked as an attorney in Paris from 1992 to 1998.

In 1998 she joined the administrative apparatus of the National Front, which had been founded by her father in 1972 and was the main right-wing opposition to France’s mainstream conservative parties. She served as the director of the party’s legal affairs until 2003, when she became the National Front’s vice president. The following year she made a successful run for a seat in the European Parliament, where she joined her father in that body’s nonaligned bloc. Over the following years, her profile within the National Front rose, and she managed her father’s presidential campaign in 2007. She served in a number of regional and municipal posts in the government of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, and she led the National Front to a strong showing there in regional elections in 2009.

Leadership of the National Front/National Rally

As Le Pen emerged from her father’s shadow to become a national figure in her own right, she distanced herself from some of his and the party’s more extreme views. While she embraced the National Front’s established anti-immigration stance, she rebranded the party’s traditional Euroskepticism as French nationalism, and she was a vocal critic of the anti-Semitism that had marginalized the party in the past. Possessed with a telegenic charm and keen political instincts forged at her father’s side, she easily won the election to succeed him as National Front leader in 2011.

In May 2011 Le Pen was selected to represent the National Front in the 2012 presidential election against incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist candidate François Hollande. In April 2012 Le Pen finished a strong third in the first round of that election, earning more than 18 percent of the vote. While this result did not earn Le Pen a place in the second round, it did represent the best-ever showing for the National Front in a presidential election, topping even her father’s 2002 numbers when he advanced to a runoff with Jacques Chirac.

Le Pen continued to temper the National Front’s image, and her personal popularity reflected the increasing acceptance of the party as a viable alternative to France’s two main parties. As the French economy struggled, Hollande’s Socialists fell from favour, and Le Pen and the National Front appealed to a sector of the electorate that was beginning to see the European Union (EU) as an obstacle rather than a benefit. In local elections in March 2014, the National Front and politicians aligned with it were victorious in more than a dozen mayoral races. Le Pen capitalized on an antiestablishment streak that was growing in France, and the elections for the European Parliament in May 2014 demonstrated just how widespread that sentiment was. For the first time in the National Front’s history, it placed first in a national election, capturing more than one-fourth of the vote and thrusting Le Pen into the international spotlight as the most prominent spokesperson for Euroskepticism.

Controversial statements by Jean-Marie Le Pen fueled a public feud with Marine, and in August 2015 the elder Le Pen was expelled from the party that he had led for nearly 40 years. On November 13, 2015, a deadly terrorist attack in Paris left 130 people dead and more than 350 wounded, and Marine Le Pen was quick to blame Hollande and France’s immigration policy. Growing anti-Islamic sentiment boosted the National Front’s performance in regional elections in December 2015, and Le Pen finished first in the initial round of voting for the regional presidency of Nord-Pas-de-Calais (now part of the Hauts-de-France région). The third-place Socialists withdrew their candidate in the hope of thwarting a National Front victory, however, and Le Pen finished second to the centre-right Republican candidate in the second round.

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Le Pen hailed the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom in June 2016 and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in November 2016 as proof of the growing acceptance of her principles. Trump had campaigned on a broadly antiestablishment, anti-immigration, and anti-Islamic platform, and his success among middle class and rural voters seemed to bode well for Le Pen ahead of France’s 2017 presidential election. On April 23, 2017, Le Pen finished second to Emmanuel Macron, a pro-EU centrist who had served as finance minister under Hollande, in the first round of presidential balloting.

Just days before the second round, hackers released tens of thousands of internal emails from Macron’s campaign in what was described as a “massive and coordinated” effort to disrupt the election. Cybersecurity firms linked the attack to the same Russian government-affiliated group that had been responsible for the hacking of the American Democratic Party prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. French media blackout rules in the hours before the opening of polls effectively banned reporting on the incident, however, and Le Pen failed to derive any substantial benefit from the leaks. Just over 75 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in the second round, France’s lowest turnout in a presidential election in nearly half a century. In addition, some four million voters—nearly 9 percent of those who went to the polls—chose to cast blank or intentionally spoiled ballots as a protest against both candidates. Of the remaining eligible ballots, Le Pen captured about 34 percent of the vote, nearly double her father’s total against Jacques Chirac in the second round of the 2002 election.

Although she finished a distant second to Macron, a defiant Le Pen declared that the National Front had become the official opposition party to a Macron-led government. That statement proved to be far from true when legislative elections were held in June 2017. The National Front captured just eight seats, significantly fewer than the party had been projected to win. Le Pen herself won a parliamentary seat for the first time, representing Hénin-Beaumont. The victory meant that Le Pen had to resign from the European Parliament seat that she had held since 2004. Just two weeks after stepping down, she was placed under criminal investigation by French authorities for misuse of funds during her time as an MEP. The European Anti-Fraud Office, an EU body charged with investigating economic crimes and corruption involving EU funds, alleged that Le Pen had misspent some €5 million ($5.4 million) on National Front party business.

In June 2018 Le Pen announced that the National Front would change its name to Rassemblement National (National Rally), in an apparent effort to distance the party from its overtly neofascist and anti-Semitic past. Later that month an EU court ruled that Le Pen had improperly allocated some €300,000 in EU funds and ordered her to repay the sum. Le Pen appealed the decision, but in May 2019 the European Court of Justice dismissed her appeal and ordered her to pay court costs. The National Rally topped the field in EU parliamentary elections in 2019, and opinion polling indicated that the party was likely to carry that momentum into French regional elections in 2021. However, the National Rally performed far below expectations in the first round of balloting, and the elections were characterized by extremely low voter turnout.

Nevertheless, Le Pen was polling strongly ahead of the 2022 presidential election, especially after the implosion of the campaign of Eric Zemmour, a far-right polemicist whose views on immigration were more extreme than her own. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Zemmour, who had previously expressed admiration for Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin, declined to say that France should welcome Ukrainian refugees—a position that even Le Pen had embraced. When French voters went to the polls in April 2022, they did so in record low numbers. The first round of the presidential election was a virtual repeat of the 2017 contest, as Macron and Le Pen finished in the top two spots and advanced to the second round. In the runoff, Macron once again triumphed by a significant margin; although Le Pen conceded the loss to Macron, she was quick to paint the result as “a victory” for her party. Le Pen captured more than 40 percent of the vote, a significant improvement on her 2017 performance and by far the strongest finish of any National Front/National Rally presidential candidate in the party’s history. Le Pen formally stepped down as leader of the National Rally in November 2022 in order to dedicate her time to the party’s parliamentary group. She was succeeded by Jordan Bardella, her 27-year-old protégé, who was tasked with increasing the party’s appeal among younger voters.