Rise of the 'Devil's daughter': Marine Le Pen's seduced a quarter of France's voters by presenting herself as the acceptable face of the Far Right. In fact, she's every bit as extreme as her Holocaust-denying father. . .

Marine Le Pen now leads the most popular political party in France



One in four voters now supports the right-wing Front National



Le Pen, 45, has told supporters they should now prepare for government

Marine Le Pen, 45, is the only female leader of a far-right political party in Europe

Marine Le Pen (blonde hair, blue eyes) was once described by her father, the Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen, as an ‘ideal physical specimen for this part of France’.



He didn’t actually say, in so many words, that she matched an Aryan archetype, but everyone knew what he meant.



Last Sunday, at the Elysee Lounge, a typically Parisian club, Madame Le Pen, in a low-cut little black number and stilettos, certainly attracted more than a few admiring glances.



The time was just past midnight and, champagne flute in hand, she was draped across a leather sofa, her long, tanned legs splayed out in front of her.



She had every reason to celebrate. The Front National, under her leadership, had just triumphed in the European elections.



One in four French voters, or 25 per cent of the electorate, voted for the FN, once synonymous with shaven-headed thugs and Third Reich nostalgia.



The result makes it the most popular party in France at the moment, and Madame Le Pen one of the most powerful — some might say, most dangerous — women in the country. At 45, she stands alone as the only female leader of a far-Right party in Europe.

Le Pen insists she has ‘de-demonised’ (her word) the party in the same way that Nick Griffin repeatedly claims to have cleansed the British National Party of racist thugs. No one believes him in Britain. Not everyone believes Madame Le Pen in France. The BNP no longer has any representatives in the European Parliament. But the Front National gained an unprecedented 24 MEPs.



The Elysee Lounge was not chosen by accident for the ‘victory’ party; it is situated just yards from the Elysee Palace, the presidential residence Madame Le Pen now eagerly coverts. ‘The result was historic,’ she told the Mail, in between sips of champagne. ‘Now we are preparing for government.’



The vagaries of the French electoral system (which enables mainstream parties to gang up in the second-round to exclude a force like the Front National) means that such an outcome is still unlikely.



Marine Le Pen, right, was described as the 'ideal physical specimen for this part of France' by her father Jean Marie, left

But, then, who could have predicted that Marine Le Pen, daughter of the man who formed the Front National back in the Seventies, would have pulled off such a sweeping victory on the European stage after taking over the helm from him just three years ago?



Events in France were part of a wider trend. Across the continent, millions voted for a raft of anti-immigration, Eurosceptic and far-Right politicians. But nowhere did this occur in greater numbers than in France and in Britain where the UK Independence Party (UKIP) also triggered a ‘political earthquake’.



There are some obvious parallels. Marine Le Pen’s Front National and Nigel Farage’s Ukip received roughly the same share of the popular vote, 25 and 27.49 per cent respectively. Both parties won outright, beating mainstream conservative and socialist opposition. Both have the same number of MEPs.



But it would be mistake to draw further comparisons.



The election results reflected a surge to the Right in Britain, not to the Far-Right.



Had that been the case, Nick Griffin and his cronies would be on the next Eurostar to Strasbourg. In fact, the BNP is facing political oblivion; wiped out in Europe, it has only two remaining councillors.



Marine Le Pen, in other words, has succeeded where Griffin spectacularly failed by convincing the French public at large that support for the Front National is nothing to be ashamed of.



Even in the traditionally liberal Ile-de-France, the constituency with Paris at its centre, the FN won a 17.4 per cent share of the vote. Indeed, FN voters I spoke to over the past few days were happy to publicly stand up and be counted. No one minded giving their name — a litmus test, since years ago they would have insisted on anonymity.



The far-right National Front secured the votes of 25 percent of the French electorate

Le Pen’s strategy has been simple but effective. Like Sarah Palin, a driving force behind the Tea Party movement in the U.S., she has played on her image as an outsider, derided by the establishment but in touch with the concerns of ordinary people.



She has three children and has been through two divorces. Although she now has a partner, she has spoken in the past about the problems of being a single mother.



Welfare and social benefits, she says, should be limited to French nationals. But the anti-semitic rhetoric of the past has gone, at least in public. Instead, Le Pen opposes the ‘Islamisation of France’ in terms of a threat to France’s core secular values.



Around seven million Muslims live in France, the largest number in Western Europe, prompting Le Pen to compare Muslims praying in the streets outside overflowing mosques to the Nazi occupation.



‘Marine dares to say what many people are thinking,’ said Stephanie Beaulie, an accountant in her 40s, who is typical of many Le Pen has won over. ‘She stands up for the country.’



On many economic issues, however, Le Pen is to the Left of the governing French socialist party. She has backed state-run energy, health, education, transport and even financial services.



She has also championed retirement at 60, regarded as an almost inalienable right in France, which, in the wake of Euro-induced austerity, has come under pressure from Brussels and European partners to curb the crippling costs of public sector pensions.



The far-right political party has managed to exploit the misfortunes of French President Francois Hollande, left

On TV, Le Pen is eloquent and charismatic, disarming some potential critics. At one press conference recently, a young man from the television channel Canal Plus kissed her on both cheeks.



The resurgence of the Front National under Marine Le Pen has coincided with a perfect storm of political scandals and economic stagnation. The country is blighted by spiralling unemployment and more days lost through strikes than in any other European country.



Meanwhile, the Socialist government is hamstrung by the flagging presidency of Francois Hollande, no better symbolised than in his personal humiliation when he was photographed arriving on a scooter for secret nocturnal trysts with his mistress.



Seemingly, there is no real alternative to Hollande as the mainstream Right was discredited by former president Nicholas Sarkozy, who is facing a criminal inquiry into allegations that Colonel Gaddafi, the late Libyan despot, funded his rise to power.



The French have a word for the gloom that envelops them when they know their country has lost its way: ‘morosité’. Their current ‘morosité’ has been ruthlessly exploited.



Her critics have questioned her populist credentials. They point to the Le Pen family home in the west Paris suburb of Saint Cloud, a £5 million mansion situated on a private estate behind 20ft iron gates.



‘You cannot enter without a permit,’ the ‘gardien’ or security guard at the entrance warns us. ‘Go or I will call the police.’



Several members of the Le Pen dynasty live at Chateau de Montretout. The mansion was bequeathed to Jean-Marie Le Pen by a wealthy benefactor back in the Seventies.



Marine has converted the large stable block into a home for her three children, Jehanne, 15, named after Joan of Arc (down to the medieval spelling), twins Louis and Mathilde, 13, and her partner,



Louis Aliot, 44, a law professor from Toulouse, who is vice president of the Front National.



She also has a holiday home in her father’s heartland, the Breton fishing village of La Trinite-sur-Mer, where he grew up.



There is even Marine Le Pen Champagne (her father is the co-owner of a wine merchant business) complete with her photograph on the label. This was the champagne she and her supporters were drinking at the Elysee Lounge at the weekend.



Indeed, Marine Le Pen is very much her father’s daughter, a man who described the Holocaust as a mere ‘detail’ in history and has questioned whether the Nazi occupation of France was really as inhumane as some suggested.



Marine Le Pen, pictured, has told supporters that they should now prepare for government

When France lost the World Cup final in 2006, he complained that the team fielded too many players ‘of colour’. He has a string of convictions for inciting racial hatred. Indeed, Jean-Marie Le Pen still represents the ‘rebranded’ Front National in the European Parliament.



For her part, Marine Le Pen insists her father is ‘misunderstood’. She was part of his campaign team during 2002 presidential elections when she defended him to the hilt as she has done throughout her life.



‘Try as I might,’ she said, ‘I can’t find any point of difference with my father’s programme. I am 100 per cent Le Pen through and through.’



Such pronouncements have earned Marine Le Pen nicknames such as ‘The Clone’ and ‘The Devil’s Daughter’. Nigel Farage has ruled out any prospect of an alliance in the European Parliament between Ukip and the Front National, claiming the party is still riven with ‘anti-semitism and general prejudice’.



The events that shaped the woman Marine Le Pen today are well known in France, less so outside the country. When, a few years ago, she was asked to identify something from her childhood that formed her, she replied: ‘20kg of dynamite.’



In 1976, aged eight, a bomb tore through the front of the family’s apartment building in Paris while she, her parents and two older sisters were asleep. They escaped unhurt. But as the daughter of a greatly reviled politician, she grew up in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation.



More trauma was to come when she was 16 and her mother, Pierrette, ran off with a reporter from Le Figaro newspaper who was writing a biography of Jean-Marie Le Pen.



Her parent’s bitter divorce was played out in the papers, and the French edition of Playboy.



The first Madame Le Pen — then aged 52 — was pictured on the cover, and several inside pages, holding a broom and wearing only a maid’s apron to ridicule her husband who had, apparently, refused to pay Pierrette alimony, telling her instead that she could do ‘maid’s work to supplement her income’.



The scandal turned the Le Pens into a national laughing stock and left Jean-Marie to bring up his daughters alone. For the next 15 years, Marine and her mother didn’t speak. As a result, she grew ‘much closer to her father’, according to her biographer Jean Marc-Simon.



Marine Le Pen has said that her Holocaust denying father has been 'misunderstood'

At 18, she joined the Front National (indeed, all the Le Pen girls became active in the party).

After attending one of France’s top law schools, Marine Le Pen pursued a short career as a lawyer until 1998, when she ceased practising and became the head of the FN’s legal department.



Her devotion to the party has been blamed for her own inability to enjoy stable long-term relationships. Both her ex-husbands were in the Front National. Her first marriage to Frank Chauffroy, the father of her three children, ended in divorce in 1999.



Her second, to FN national secretary Eric Iorio, was also short lived. She has been with her current partner for the past four years.



The toll of her all-consuming commitment to the Front National was laid bare in one of her ‘policy books’ for the party. It is addressed to her children. ‘To Jehanne, Louis and Mathilde, who will one day understand the time I cannot spend with them.’



That sacrifice, in their mother’s eyes at least, has now been justified. From the North to the South, down through France’s former industrial heartlands, past the Normandy beaches, the political landscape has turned navy blue, the colour of the Front National. In Achain, a village in the north-east Moselle region, 34 out of 39 votes went to the FN. In Brachay, also in the north-east, the village cast 28 votes — 22 for the FN.



At the party’s headquarters in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, cheers were followed by a rendition of La Marseillaise. Then they chanted ‘Marine, Marine’.



Down the road, at the Chez Ton Ton cafe, the walls are covered in Marine Le Pen posters with slogans such as ‘Vague Bleu Marine’ or ‘Blue Wave’. Madam Le Pen and her apparatchiks come here for a spot of lunch and a glass of wine two or three times a week. Almost all the customers support the FN. Interestingly, though, immigration was not their central main concern.



‘Everyone is fed up with all the other parties,’ said Jacques Dubois, 68, a smartly dressed, softly spoken retired civil servant. ‘They are incompetent and dishonest. So, yes, I am very much in favour of Marine Le Pen and the Front National.’



But we should not forget a vote for this sleek blonde is also a vote for her father. As Marine herself freely admits: ‘He is the man of my life because he shaped me; he transmitted to me his values.’

