Marine Le Pen: Who is the leader of France's far right? (2025)

For the past decade, Marine Le Pen has been the unavoidable personality in French political life.

The conservative, nationalist ideology she inherited from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the party she now leads under the name National Rally (NR), is everywhere now.

Political life in France, as the philosopher Juliette Grange told Middle East Eye in 2021, is “completely influenced by the arguments of the far right”.

While the traditional parties now “speak like the [RN]”, the “[RN] now speaks like the traditional parties”.

“The FN [National Front] no longer needs to campaign; the other parties do it for it. This is a sign of a clear victory for cultural hegemony,” Nicolas Lebourg, an expert on the far right,said in 2017, speaking about the party that has become the RN.

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This achievement is in large part due to Marine Le Pen and the way she has successfully normalised the party, distancing it from its sulphurous past and its most visible racist manifestations.

But beyond changes in appearance and rhetoric, the RN remains a far-right party whose platform is dominated by xenophobic policies, mainly the fight against immigration and anything - particularly Islam - deemed as a threat to its exclusivist idea of French identity.

Le Pen’s party has in the last month caused a political earthquake in France, convincingly winning European Parliament elections in June then, three weeks later, coming out on top in the first round of the legislative polls.

The RN now has an unprecedented chance of forming a government under its current president, Jordan Bardella. This means that Marine Le Pen, now aged 55, could become the first far-right president of France as early as 2027.

How did Marine Le Pen enter politics?

Marine Le Pen was born on 5 August 1968 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, one of the most affluent residential areas in France, adjacent to the capital Paris.

She is the youngest daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the far-right NationalFrontparty (FN) in 1972 with two former members of the Waffen-SS. Marine is the aunt of far-right MEP Marion Marechal.

Marine said that, in childhood, she was the “victim” of a daily “injustice”: she was judged by her name and the image of her father.

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“If I got involved in politics alongside my father, it was firstly following the attacks to which my family was the victim. In any case, this is how I became aware of politics and subsequently chose my side and never changed,” she said.

One event was particularly significant. In November 1976, a bomb attack targeted her family apartment in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. The 20kg explosive, one of the heaviest bombs known to Paris since World War Two, destroyed part of the five-story building and injured six neighbours. The attack has never been claimed but may have been a revenge deed linked to an inheritance case, according to a private investigation.

In 1991, Marine obtained a master of advanced studies in criminal law from the University of Paris Pantheon-Assas and, in 1992, she registered at the Paris Bar association.She worked as a lawyer for six years.

How did Marine Le Pen rise to power?

In 1998, at the age of 30, she left the bar association to join the legal service of the National Front, which she led until 2003.

She ran for the first time in an election during the 1993 legislative polls and acquired her first political mandate in 1998 as a regional councillor of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, in northern France.

The legislative elections of June 2002, in which she sprang a surprise by managing to qualify for the second round - just as her father did in the presidential elections - marked the “beginning of her political career”. “If she lost the election in terms of votes, she won on another level, that of notoriety,” historian Valerie Igounet said.

She was subsequently elected as a regional councillor of Nord-Pas-de-Calais (for the second time in 2004), Ile-de-France (2004-2010) and Hauts-de-France (2016-2021), as a Member of the European Parliament (2004-2009 and 2009-2017) and as a municipal councillor of the city of Henin-Beaumont (2008-2011).

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In June 2017, she was elected member of the National Assembly for Pas-de-Calais’s 11th constituency, presiding over the 88-member-strongNR group in the lower house of the Parliament. She was re-elected on 30 June 2024.

Marine Le Pen took over the leadership of her father’s party in 2011 and has run for president three times so far: in 2012, when she came third with 17.9 percent of the vote behind the centre-left François Hollande and centre-right Nicolas Sarkozy; in 2017, when she finished second in the first round with 21.3 percent of the vote and lost to centrist Emmanuel Macron in the second round; and in 2022, when she scored 23.2 percent in the first round and lost again to Macron in the second with 41.5 percent of the votes.

In 2021, she stepped down from her role as president of the RN to focus on the presidential campaign, handing over the reins to Jordan Bardella, who took over in 2022 and is still just 28 years old.

How did Marine Le Pen normalise the image of her party?

Since her first, remarkable media appearance on 5 May 2002, on the evening of the second round of the presidential election run by her father, Marine Le Pen has proved herself a skilled communicator, “endowed with telegenic qualities” that have seen her fame rise and rise.

She looked to use these skills to improve the image of the National Front, a process that has been called “de-demonisation”. To that aim, she excluded executives considered too radical and distanced herself and the party from her father’s most controversial positions and statements, including his Holocaust denial.

'Our country comes first, our families come first, our people come first'

- Marine Le Pen

In 2015, Jean-Marie, honorary president of the FN, was excluded from the party after he reiterated comments about the Nazi gas chambers being a “detail in the history of the Second World War”.

A new leaf was turned over in June 2018, when members renamed the party, replacing the military-connoted term “Front” with the softer “Rally”.

Marine Le Pen continued her efforts to iron out the xenophobic layers of her political project and in the 2022 presidential election focused her campaign on purchasing power, a topic close to the concerns of the French people and more consensual. This further contributed to the “normalisation” of the party.

This “de-demonisation” strategy has played a major role in her party’s victories. To this day, Marine Le Pen is always careful not to scare away voters and to appeal to the largest number of people.

She therefore frequently intervenes to soften and “correct” interpretations of her statements and proposals - or those of members - when they cause uproar. She insists that her “movement defends all French people, whatever their religion or origin”.

How does Marine Le Pen view immigration?

However, despite the cosmetic changes, the party continues to advocate for a strict nationalist agenda, including on identity issues, and a sharp cut to immigration.

Even if she replaced the “France to French people” and “national preference” called for by her father with the smoother “national priority”, the content remains the same: keeping housing, jobs and the benefits of the provisions of the welfare state for French nationals.

“Our country comes first, our families come first, our people come first,” she insisted in the run-up to the 2022 presidential election. “I want to make all French citizens privileged in their own country,” she added, in an electoral meeting in February that year.

Her presidential platform proposed to fight what she called “a migratory submersion” by including “national priority” in the Constitution in order “to prevent supranational jurisdictions from forcing France to follow policies contrary to the will of the French people”.

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“Foreigners who come to work in our country must provide for their needs: they will no longer have access to national solidarity benefits,” she said.

For that, she claimed to have “a turnkey project”, including “the abolition of jus soli (the right of anyone born in the territory of a state to nationality or citizenship), the end of the automatic acquisition of French nationality and the expulsion of delinquents and criminals”.

Shewarnedthat if a foreign state refuses to take back its nationals, it will face “a firmness to which, for 50 years, no French leader has dared to resort”.

The message is primarily aimed at the Maghreb countries, where the largest migratory flows come from and which she intends to punish by blocking both money transfers from France and visas.

Shepromised to act with the same firmness against crime and delinquency, especially in working-class neighbourhoods (with a high concentration of immigrants), which she described as “cities of lawlessness”.

In addition to immigration, another obsession of the Le Pens - both father and daughter - is dual nationality.

In 2011, Marine Le Pen sent a letter to MPs asking them to ban dual nationality. This provision appeared in the FN programmes of 2012 and 2017 and was believed to concern primarily French civilians of African origin.

In 2022, before the presidential election, the measure was no longer recommended, as part of the strategy of de-demonisation. Instead, in January 2024, the RN group at the National Assembly proposed a “law that will prohibit access to jobs in the administration, public companies and legal entities responsible for a public service mission to people who have the nationality of another state”.

In August 2021, Le Pen launched a petition against the arrival in France of Afghan civilians after the capture of Kabul by the Taliban. A year later, she considered it “natural” to welcome Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s invasion, “out of regional solidarity”, because they are “European war refugees”.

What does Marine Le Pen think about Islam?

Even if Marine Le Pen, who defines herself as a “non-practising Catholic”, has tried to appear tolerant of France’s large Muslim minority - posing, for example, with a young veiled girl for a selfie ahead of the presidential vote in 2022 - she has made comments and proposals deemed Islamophobic by many.

“We do not want to live under the yoke of the threat of Islamic fundamentalism,” she said at her party’s conference in a speech to launch her campaign for the last presidential race.

She once compared Muslims praying in the streets outside overcrowded mosques in France to the Nazi occupation of the country during the Second World War, repeatedly condemned the hijab, which “no women attached to their dignity could accept”, prayer rooms in workplaces, the construction of mosques and pork-free options in school lunches.

In January 2021, Le Pen presented her project to fight against “Islamist ideologies”, which she deemed “totalitarian” and “everywhere”, and which she intends to ban from all spheres of society.

The project aims to prohibit the “practice, demonstration and public dissemination”, in the media, schools and in the entertainment industry, of “Islamist ideologies”.

'It's an Islamist uniform. It is as such that I will ban the veil in public spaces'

- Marine Le Pen

She has advocated for declaring the “Islamist ideology” an “enemy of France” in order to pass exceptional legislation on it.

If Marine Le Pen insists she is not targeting Islam or Muslims, but “Islamism”, the rhetorical distinction hardly stands up to analysis, as exemplified by her intention to forbid the Islamic scarf in the public sphere.

“It’s an Islamist uniform,” she said about the hijab ahead of the last presidential election. “It is as such that I will ban the veil in public spaces.”

Her project includes a sanction for women wearing the hijab or other ostentatious “Islamist” signs. After advocating the same fate to the Jewish kippa in 2012, she later backtracked on the issue.

Her stance on Islamism permeates her foreign policy: while she has been a critic of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, regarded as a defender of political Islam, and condemned France’s relations with countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which she said “help fund and arm Islamist fundamentalists”, she has advocated for closer ties with the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, which she said “fight fundamentalism”.

After revelations about its links to the UAE, her party admitted it had been seeking funds from the Middle East in preparation for the 2017 presidential elections.

Where does Marine Le Pen stand on Israel and Palestine?

“Marine Le Pen wanted to rid the FN of what is the main obstacle for her: the image of antisemitism, which associates the FN with the trauma linked to the Second World War and deportation. Her fight is immigration and radical Islamism,” Nonna Meyer explained to Middle East Eye in 2022.

As a consequence, Le Pen has become a staunch and unconditional supporter of the state of Israel and its policies in the occupied Palestinian territories. This stance has been clear since the 7 October Hamas-led attack on Israel and the subsequent war on Gaza.

Le Pen called the Palestinian armed group’s attack a “pogrom” committed “by a terrorist group that is displaying brutal bestiality”, while repeating that “Israel has the right to defend itself” and to “eradicate what she sees as an epitome of Islamist fundamentalism”.

As the left-wing party France Unbowed (LFI) adopted a clear pro-Palestinian stance, calling Israel’s war on Gaza after the attack a “genocide”, which brought to its members accusations of antisemitism, Le Pen stepped into the breach to present her party as a safeguard for Israel-supporting Jews.

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Last May, she made one more step in her effort to seduce the French Jewish community by meeting Israeli Minister for the Diaspora Amichai Chikli at a gathering of European far-right leaders in Madrid ahead of the EU parliamentary elections.

The encounter broke with Israel’s official boycott of the far-right party. For years, the country’s official representatives had been instructed to avoid any meetings with members of Le Pen’s party, mainly because of its history of antisemitism and Holocaust denial and in accordance with the policy of France’s official Jewish representative body on the subject.

Chikli, himself a member of a far-right government, later said that it would be “excellent for Israel” if Le Pen were the president of France.

The minister, who said that Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu shared his opinion, justified his statement by referring to Le Pen’s “firm stance against Hamas and in favour of Israel’s right to eradicate Hamas, her support for Israel on the ICC issue”, as well as her fight against antisemitism.

The previous week, Chikli publicly praised a speech given by Le Pen’s protege Bardella in which he declared that despite France’s support for the two-state solution over the years, “this position ha[d] become obsolete in light of Hamas’ atrocities on 7 October”.

“Recognising a Palestinian state as we speak would be recognising terrorism,” he said.

Marine Le Pen: Who is the leader of France's far right? (2025)
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