FRANCE'S NEXT PRESIDENT?
The making of France's Marine Le Pen
The nationalist leader's career is still shaped by her family's controversial past
Marine Le Pen has placed herself among the front-runners to be France’s next president by ditching the anti-Semitic rhetoric that her father used to build up her party. Yet Jean-Marie’s youngest daughter spent most of her life steeped in far-right ideology as the National Front grew on the fringes of French politics in the 1970s and 1980s. The 48-year-old candidate may have swapped her father’s racism for promises to protect “patriots” from globalization, but her political identity remains entwined with the party’s troubled origins. These seven dates show how the candidate was shaped by her father’s career. Marine stayed on with her father at Montretout as her parents’ bitter, public divorce played out across the front pages of the press — her mother even posed naked in the French edition of Playboy magazine at one point. Le Pen says the trauma created a special bond with her sisters, who’ve supported her on the campaign trail. “She became much tougher after her mother left, and be...
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