Le Pen’s Front National party had refused to say whether the politician planned to meet Trump during a visit to New York

Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right Front National, has been seen drinking coffee in the basement of Trump Tower in New York after her party had refused to say whether or not she was meeting Donald Trump.

Le Pen, who polls show could make it to the final round of the French presidential election in May, broke off from a busy campaign schedule to fly unannounced to New York for what her party said was a “private visit”. Party officials refused to comment on whether or not she might meet Trump.

Sam Levine (@srl) Marine Le Pen in Trump Tower pic.twitter.com/YC3PU7eVcb

Le Pen was spotted with Louis Aliot, who is one of her party vice-presidents as well as her partner. They were having coffee with two others in the basement of Trump Tower at around 11am on Thursday. Asked by White House pool reporters whether she was there to meet Trump and whether she was there in a professional or personal capacity, she declined to answer.

Later, another of her companians, Guido “George” Lombardi, an Italian businessman who is reportedly a neighbor of Trump in Trump Tower and has described himself as a former representative of Italy’s Lega Nord party, told the press Le Pen was there for “a perfectly privately encounter that she had with some friends of ours ... She just happened to be here because I happen to live here.”

He added: “We did not reach out to the Trump campaign. We did not reach out to Mr Trump, even though he’s a friend of mine.”

But he confirmed that Le Pen had been using the trip to meet potential fundraisers. She still needs to raise several million euros for her campaign, and has been looking for foreign banks who might be willing to lend to her, including US banks.

Sean Spicer, a Trump spokesman, said Le Pen was not meeting with the president-elect, adding that Trump Tower was “open to the public”, a CNN reporter posted on Twitter.

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Le Pen’s far-right Front National was the only big French political party to support Trump during the US campaign and she shares several of Trump’s views, namely on immigration and economic protectionism, as well as warm links to Putin’s Russia. In a Paris speech congratulating Trump on his election in November, she said his victory showed the “political and media elite” could be put in its place and – alongside the UK’s vote to leave the European Union – heralded the dawn of a new order.

Last week, Le Pen told a group of US and American reporters from the Anglo-American Press Association of Paris, including the Guardian, that she had no direct relationship with chief strategist Steve Bannon or any member of the incoming Trump administration, saying only that her party had “historic international connections with people in the Republican party”, adding: “I think those relations will deepen when I’m elected.”

Asked if she planned to copy Trump policies, such as a floated Muslim registry, she said: “I don’t model my policies on Donald Trump’s. I’m not answerable to Donald Trump’s internal US policies. I’ve only said that I approved his election because it seemed that his foreign policy proposals were favourable to France. That’s the only thing that interests me.” She said Trump’s line on international affairs was in the French interest, citing his opposition to international free-trade agreements and his opposition to interventionism in conflict zones.

During the US election campaign, Le Pen had not spoken of any personal affinity with Trump, speaking more of her dislike of Hillary Clinton.

Bannon, the former CEO of the rightwing US news and opinion site Breitbart, who is now Trump’s chief strategy adviser, told the French website radio-londres.fr last year that Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s 26-year-old niece and party MP, was a rising star, and predicted France’s 2017 elections would be “historic”.

Maréchal-Le Pen responded by saying she would be delighted to work with Breitbart if it opened a Paris bureau. “All alternative media are generally positive,” she told Agence France-Presse. “Donald Trump is the demonstration of that ... They’re among the useful tools.”

All French polls currently show that Le Pen could reach the final run-off of the French presidential election in May. Her party is now a key electoral force and its anti-immigration stance has set the tone for the wider political debate.

But the same polls suggest that Le Pen cannot win because her party has no potential political allies to do deals with and because French voters of all persuasions would gang up in a storm of tactical voting to keep her out of the Elysée palace – in the same way they did in regional elections last year.

One of Le Pen’s main challenges is persuading sceptical French voters she is a credible politician capable of governing and taking a place on the international stage. Any possible Trump photo opportunity would be valuable for her campaign’s public relations.

The leader of Lombardi’s Lega Nord party is closely aligned with Le Pen. Its leader, the anti-EU and anti-migrant Matteo Salvini, personally met with Trump last April at a rally in Pennsylvania during the presidential campaign.

Lombardi has said that he served as a kind of fixer for Trump on behalf of rightwing candidates and politicians who wanted to meet the president-elect, including Le Pen and members of Austria’s far-right Freedom party.

“When there is a high-level request, I pass it on. It may be to Eric [Trump], it may be to someone else. It may be to Donald himself. It depends on who, and what, it is,” he told Politico last month.

Guglielmo Picchi, an MP for the Lega Nord who serves as a foreign affairs adviser,

distanced himself from Lombardi, saying the businessman, who was an ally of the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, did not currently have any formal affiliation with the party.