Far-right leader takes highest score party has registered in presidential vote, but will be the underdog in 7 May run-off

The far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s place in the second-round of the French presidential election cements her Front National party’s steady rise and growing presence on the country’s political landscape.



Le Pen took 21.53% of the first round vote – the highest score her party has ever registered in a French presidential election – finishing second behind Emmanuel Macron. However, while her father Jean-Marie Le Pen sparked a political earthquake 15 years ago by reaching the final round, this time there was little surprise.

Marine Le Pen heads to the rust belt to celebrate French election success Read more

Polls had predicted for months that her popularity was growing among an electorate that was disillusioned and angry at the political class and keen to send the harshest political message that it was time for change.

“This result is historic,” she told supporters on Sunday night. “It puts on me a huge responsibility to defend the French nation, its unity, its security, its culture, its prosperity and its independence. The main thing at stake in this election is the rampant globalisation that is endangering our civilisation.”

But Le Pen enters the next two weeks of final-round campaigning as the underdog. All polls suggest that tactical voters from left and right will join together against her – as they did in the regional elections of 2015 – and make her chances of winning on 7 May slim.



The French voting system, in which a second round takes place two weeks after the first, does not usually favour her anti-immigration and anti-European Union party. Polling by Cevipof has shown that more than half of French people think she is a danger to democracy – and the majority do not want her to win the presidential election. But she is nonetheless expected to improve on her first round score and greatly narrow the gap with the winner, far more than her father did in 2002 when he took 18% to Jacques Chirac’s 82% in the final vote.

Who is Marine Le Pen? Party: Front National. Far-right

Age: 48 Career: Lawyer by training; 1998 regional councillor; 2004 MEP; 2011 president of FN; 2012 presidential candidate (18% in first round) In brief: Imperious, theatrical, ruthlessly determined; France first Policies: Priority for French nationals in jobs, housing, welfare; extra tax on foreign workers and imports; proportional representation in parliament; negotiate with EU for return of “full sovereignty” including the franc; in-out referendum on EU membership; cut immigration to 10,000 a year; restrict nationality rights; hire 15,000 police; create 40,000 more prison places Want to know more? Read a full profile

The central message of Marine Le Pen’s campaign was the staple of the Front National party since it was co-founded by her father in 1972: keeping France for the French. She promised to give priority to French people over non-nationals in jobs, housing and welfare, and would hold a referendum to cement this policy into the constitution. She said she would demand extra tax from companies that employed any kind of foreign worker.

In the final days of the campaign, she returned firmly to the main concern of her electorate: immigration. She went further than she had done before by promising to immediately suspend all legal immigration in order to reassess what she called the “uncontrollable situation” of foreigners coming into France.

Le Pen also railed against what she called “Islamic fundamentalism”, promising to clamp down on certain types of preaching and organisations. She promised a ban on religious symbols, including the Muslim headscarf, from all public places. “A multicultural society is a multiconflict society,” she said in a speech in Paris. “I want every French person, no matter where they are in France, to maintain their liberty and their rights that Islamic fundamentalists want to deny them.” Her supporters shouted “this is our country!” at her rallies.

On Monday morning she went on the attack against Macron, telling reporters: “I’m on the ground to meet the French people to draw their attention to important subjects, including Islamist terrorism, to which the least we can say Mr Macron is weak on. “Mr Macron has no project to protect the French people in the face of Islamist dangers,” she said, adding that the runoff with Macron was a referendum on “uncontrolled globalisation”.

Le Pen set out to style the election as a battle of “patriots” on her side against “globalists” such as the independent centrist Macron on the other. She said only she understood the “forgotten” peripheral France, hit by unemployment and fears for the future, neglected by the privileged elites of cosmopolitan cities.



The Guardian view on France’s election: a win for Macron and hope | Editorial Read more

Thursday’s attack in which a police officer was shot dead on Paris’s Champs-Elysées gave Le Pen a last chance to press home her security agenda. “The nightmare is beginning again,” she said, promising to deport foreigners on a watchlist of suspected Islamist radicals.



A short campaign film showed children sleeping in bed at night and implied Le Pen was the only person who could protect them against terrorism. “It’s 3am, the phone rings at the Elysée, there’s a grave and imminent threat to France. Who would you want to pick up the phone?”

Donald Trump said Le Pen was the strongest French candidate and she was boosted among her party faithful by Britain’s Brexit vote last year. She said she would hold an in-out referendum soon after taking office, after negotiations to change France’s position in the EU. She said she would immediately pull out of Europe’s Schengen borderless zone. She promised a return to “national monetary sovereignty” even though her plans to leave the euro were once seen as hindering her party’s progression among older and retired people on the right.

Le Pen began her campaign much earlier than the other candidates, free of any party primaries, but it seemed to be flagging towards the end and she dipped in polls.

Marine Le Pen: the estranged daughter tied to a very public life | profile Read more

She was asked on a radio programme this month about a major wartime roundup of Jews in Paris. She said France as a nation was not responsible, only “those who were in power at the time”, sparking fury from Jewish organisations. Le Pen argued that modern France should not be locked in a permanent repentance and that the “real” France was General de Gaulle’s Resistance not the “illegal” Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime.

She went further than her Holocaust-denying father had ever done in slamming the Vichy regime as illegal but the comments backfired and threatened to damage her efforts to “detoxify” the party’s image. “Her mistake was to think that she could make a comment about the second world war,” said one French political observer. “Anything about the war will always drag the party back to Jean-Marie Le Pen and his negative image.”

She also faced allegations of illegal party funding through fake jobs paid for by EU parliament funds and campaign funding irregularities in France.

She claimed she was the “victim” of a system ganging up against her and appeared at first to be unscathed. But as the campaign drew on, it was harder to avoid the quips of other candidates. After she refused to attend questioning by judges in the case, she was attacked by the anti-capitalist candidate Philippe Poutou in a TV debate. He said the working class were not lucky enough to have the “immunity” from the law that she was seeking.

She also faced protests at some rallies: Corsican nationalists on the island of Corsica and leftwing demonstrators in Paris.

The presidential race is not the only key election for Le Pen. Crucial for the party are the parliamentary elections in June. The Front National has only two out of 577 MPs and need at least 15 MPs to form a political group in parliament, but they believe this is now within reach.