“ Her mother once posed for ‘Playboy’ dressed only in an apron. Marine felt like fleeing ‘to the North Pole’ with shame
TO GET A SENSE of just how easily Marine Le Pen could shift the way France thinks about the far-right National Front you could do worse than turn to the pages of that unlikely political oracle Paris Match.
In an interview with the woman who hopes to be elected tomorrow to succeed her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, as party leader, we get a glimpse of the secrets behind her “impeccable look”. The piece reveals where she likes to shop (“the paved back streets of Nice”), what sort of suit she prefers (bright, tailored, Italian) and her casual campaign outfit of choice (jeans, a black jacket and high-heeled boots).
A photograph shows a relaxed and smiling Le Pen at her desk, an iPhone in one hand. The “new face of the extreme right” tells us about about her diet, her two divorces, the ample difficulties in balancing family life with a political career and the guilt she feels at being away from her three children. “She wants to prevent foreigners coming to France,” the reporter explains. “But this summer, during her holidays in Spain, she took in a little abandoned cat,” which she vaccinated, brought back to France and named Penelope.
We may have grown accustomed to media interest in the fashion choices of female politicians and to candidates’ willingness to indulge it, but for the National Front to have been absorbed as seamlessly as this into the conventions of celebrity politics implies that a major shift has taken place, even before the party members choose a new leader tomorrow.
This, after all, is an organisation roundly loathed by many French people, shunned by the mainstream left and right, and vilified by its critics as racist, anti-Semitic and neo-fascist. Its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, the man who called the gas chambers "a detail" in the history of the second World War, rarely is given a platform on mainstream television. It's safe to assume Paris Matchnever asks him how he manages to keep his weight down.
If his daughter proves the pollsters right and wins the National Front leadership contest against party vice-president Bruno Gollnisch tomorrow, it will mark the culmination of a rapid ascent for a politician who emerged as a public figure just eight years ago. That was when her father achieved the National Front’s greatest triumph by pushing the socialist leader Lionel Jospin into third place in the presidential election and forcing a run-off against the incumbent, Jacques Chirac.
The party’s fortunes have waned since that shock to the political system. At the last presidential poll, in 2007, its first-round vote fell from 17 per cent to 11 per cent. The party is in financial trouble too and has been trying to raise funds by selling its head office near Paris, without success.
Yet the National Front senses that another breakthrough awaits. It performed much better than expected in regional elections last year, as many of the voters President Nicolas Sarkozy had managed to entice back to the centre right in 2007 became disillusioned and returned to Le Pen’s party. Sarkozy’s attempts to reclaim National Front themes by taking a hard line on crime and immigration has given the far right a bounce instead of helping him to recover. Then there’s the Marine effect. A recent poll showed that the tall, telegenic 42-year-old was viewed positively by 27 per cent of French voters, a score her father never reached. This just 18 months before the presidential election is due to be held.
The youngest of three daughters, Marion (her real name) Le Pen spent much of her early life trying to escape her family's notoriety. She first became aware of her father's politics at the age of eight, she writes in her autobiography, À Contre Flots(Against the Current), when she survived a bomb attack on the family home in 1976. Her childhood was quite normal in other respects. The family home was a "very bohemian place" where people would come and go, and the rules were lax. In school and at university, however, left-leaning teachers would ostracise her, she writes. When she became a lawyer, no firm wanted the name Le Pen on the door. "Things were never insignificant. Never easy. We were always the daughters of Le Pen, and people would make us feel guilty, always," she writes.
In 1984 her parents divorced after her mother, Pierrette, moved to the United States with her father's biographer. The politician describes it as probably one of the most painful events of her life. When Pierrette sought maintenance, Le Pen remarked: "If she has no money, she can always do some housekeeping." The former Mrs Le Pen responded by posing for Playboydressed only in an apron. Marine Le Pen felt like fleeing "to the North Pole" with shame.
Politics eventually exerted its gravitational pull, and she has become one of the most prominent public faces of her father’s party in recent years. The intriguing question now is how much would change if she became leader. Her election literature suggests there would be few alterations to policy.
The points of divergence between father and daughter on the National Front’s core topics of immigration, crime and the European Union are subtle to non-existent. She believes, for example, that immigration should be reduced dramatically and deportations increased; that France should leave the eurozone; that its citizens should be given priority for social housing; that the death penalty should be reintroduced for serious crimes; and that minarets should be banned.
Yet there are two ways she departs radically from her father, and both reflect her desire to widen the National Front’s support base beyond its two main constituencies: southern middle-class conservatives estranged from Sarkozy’s UMP and working-class voters in the former industrial zones of the northeast.
The first is a new emphasis on economic and social issues, and the construction of a populist narrative that borrows heavily from the lexicon of the left. She decries “ultraliberalism”, outsourcing and the excesses of globalisation, defends strict secularism and argues for the retention of retirement at 60. The hiring of undocumented workers is “a new form of slavery”. (Le Pen has defended many immigrants in court and sees no contradiction, saying, “I don’t think immigrants are responsible for their situation.”) Her strategy has been working. The party’s recovery in last year’s regional elections was most apparent in her base of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, a traditional left-wing heartland.
The second shift is the imagery. Bright, articulate and skilful in debates, Marine Le Pen speaks to a younger, more moderate and more liberal type of voter than her father does.
Her strongest internal opposition comes from the National Front’s ultra-Catholics, who are uneasy with the prospect of being led by a young, twice-divorced supporter of abortion rights and have rallied to her opponent, the affable 60-year-old Gollnisch.
And although she is not averse to provocation (she recently compared Muslims praying on the streets of French cities to the Nazi occupiers), the politics of the 1940s or France’s colonial wars are her 81-year-old father’s preoccupations, not hers. “I’m a woman of my time,” she often remarks. She has spoken of the need to “de-demonise” the party and break with the racists and neo-fascists, whose association with the party “has always acted as a brake on our progression”.
Whatever the outcome of the contest this weekend, the new leader will take over at a critical moment. A presidential election is 18 months away, and Sarkozy's party is fretting about the abandonment of the unpopular president by the soft far-right voters who were so important to him in 2007. A TNS Sofres poll for Le Mondethis week found that 43 per cent of UMP supporters are ready for what has been a long-time taboo: an alliance with the National Front. The Marine effect was clear: if she were to become leader, 16 per cent of UMP voters would feel closer to the far-right party.
Expect a bout of strategic soul-searching at the Élysée Palace. And a sales bounce at Paris Match.
