French election: could Marine Le Pen pull off a shock victory?

Marine Le Pen is closing in on Emmanuel Macron as the race to become France’s next president tightens ahead of Sunday’s first-round vote.

A month ago, the leader of the far-right National Rally party was trailing Macron by ten points. But weeks of strong polling suggest she is now the “clear favourite” to challenge the president for the keys to the Élysée Palace in a second-round run-off, the BBC said.

“I never stopped being confident,” she told Le Figaro earlier this week as campaigning entered its final days. “I am ready, personally and politically.”

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Years in opposition

When she became president of what was then called the National Front in 2011, Le Pen prioritised “changing the racist and anti-Semitic image” that had been allowed to form under the leadership of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, said CNN. But this has “taken time” and determination”, triggering a “bitter family feud”.

Tensions came to a head in 2013 when her father repeated his claim that the Nazi gas chambers had been “but a detail of history”, CNN reported. Le Pen publicly distanced herself from her father and, in 2015, expelled him from the party he founded in 1972.

In her campaign against Macron, she has also taken other steps to soften her image, posing for pictures “hugging horses and pet kittens”, The Guardian reported. She has also sought to “play up” her “single-mother status” and “play down” her “once unabashed enthusiasm for Putin”, the Financial Times said.

But voters should be “under no illusions” regarding Le Pen. Her plans, the paper said, includes “repudiating the primacy of EU law, establishing a ‘national preference’ for hiring French workers over foreigners and banning Muslim headscarves in all public places”.

Her ambitions are clear, The Guardian said. Unlike her disgraced father, who was “content to be a protest vote”, Le Pen wants “power and political office”,

Chances of winning

According to Politico’s Poll of Polls, Le Pen looks set to win 22% of the vote in the first round, having narrowed the gap between her and Macron who is on 27%. Polling for the expected 24 April run-off vote also shows Le Pen has slashed the incumbent’s lead.

It is “noticeable that the media are less hostile to her this election”, said Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator. The former political outsider “has worked hard to cultivate a presidential air” since Macron’s 2017 victory and now looks like she could “actually win”.

Political background

Le Pen learned of her father’s notoriety when she was eight years old and was woken by a bomb attack on her family’s apartment in Paris. As a child, she felt her “family surname was a burden”, The Guardian said, but she “constantly stood up for her father”.

When French newspaper Libération revealed in 1985 that her father had engaged in torture during the Algerian War of Independence he advised that she take the day off school. But the young Le Pen “refused and went in defending him”, the paper added.

She studied law and was a member of the Bar of Paris until 1998, when she joined the legal department of the National Front. She was quickly promoted through the ranks, serving as vice-president, a member of the European Parliament and then a member of parliament in France.

This is her third campaign for the presidency. She finished third behind François Hollande and incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012, before coming second when Macron won the presidency five years later.

What about outside of politics?

Le Pen married Franck Chauffroy, a business executive who worked for the National Front, in 1995. They had three children before their divorce in 2000.

In 2002, she married Eric Lorio, the former national secretary of the National Front. They divorced in 2006. Between 2009 and 2019, she was in a relationship with Louis Aliot, who was the National Front general secretary from 2005 to 2010.