Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the former young star of France’s far-right Front National, is to speak at a high-profile US gathering of conservatives and Republicans outside Washington this week, addressing the event shortly after the US vice-president, Mike Pence.



Maréchal-Le Pen – who is more religious and socially conservative than her aunt, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen – has been invited to speak an hour after Pence at the event, the day before Donald Trump appears on the same stage.

The 27-year-old, who a year ago announced she was temporarily withdrawing from politics, will be the second headliner to appear on the first full day of speeches at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, along with Republican lawmakers, conservative media figures and veterans.

The Brexit champion and former Ukip leader Nigel Farage will also attend after receiving a warm welcome last year, when he praised Trump’s “quite remarkable” election victory.

Maréchal-Le Pen, a former member of the French parliament, is the granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who co-founded the Front National.

The anti-European, anti-immigration party hit a historic high last year when Marine Le Pen won over 10m votes in the final round of the French presidential election, where she was beaten by the centrist Emmanuel Macron. Marine Le Pen had led a public relations effort to sanitise the party’s past association with antisemitism, racism and xenophobia.

Maréchal-Le Pen has been hailed as a rising star by the former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon. She entered the French parliament in 2012 aged 22 – the youngest MP since the revolution elected on a ticket of opposition to immigration in the south.

Aged two, Maréchal-Le Pen became the poster child of the far right, cuddled by her grandfather in election flyers promising “security” for all.

A Catholic hardliner who was a key figure in France’s anti-same-sex marriage demonstrations in 2013, she is not associated with her aunt’s social drive aimed at attracting disaffected leftwing voters in de-industrialised areas. Economically she adheres less to her aunt’s state interventionism and more to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s brand of free-market, free-enterprise capitalism. She is against state-funded abortion and takes a hard line on Islam in France. She is extremely popular with the far-right party’s base and believes the party must not soften its image.

Maréchal-Le Pen is seen as a possible future leader and vote-winner for the French far right, but in a party dominated by a rigid family hierarchy centred on the Le Pen family mansion where she grew up, she has not been seen as being in a position to make a power grab from her aunt.

The Washington speech will mark her first return to politics since she withdrew last year and announced that she would not stand again for parliament.

After Marine Le Pen was beaten by Macron in the French presidential election last May, Maréchal-Le Pen said she would step back from politics “for personal and political reasons”.



She was said to have focused on learning English over the past year. A far-right media outlet run by one of her closest former advisers suggested her Washington speech would focus on the links between conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Marine Le Pen, who is a member of parliament, has been in difficulty since the presidential election. The party did not win enough parliamentary seats to form its own grouping in the national assembly, its chief strategist, Florian Philippot, quit and the party is the subject of an investigation into allegations it illegally claimed millions of euros from the European parliament to pay for France-based staff.

Marine Le Pen will hold a party congress next month to define the Front National’s future in the run-up to European elections, and perhaps change its name.

