“I SAW her!” squeals a teenaged girl. “I got a photo!” shrieks her friend. As Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front (FN), steps from her dark-windowed car on to the streets of this quiet rural town in the Picardy plains, she is treated as a minor rock star. In an arresting change from the past, nobody seems embarrassed to show enthusiasm for a populist, far-right party or its carefully groomed leader.

Retired couples and mothers with pushchairs shove forward; smartphones are thrust into the air to capture the moment. Even before Ms Le Pen arrives on a bright market day, a crowd gathers on the pavement in the hope of catching a glimpse of her. “Perhaps she’ll be the one to save France,” says a middle-aged woman with chilling sincerity.

Ms Le Pen’s celebrity welcome in the tiny northern French town of Doullens is a mark of how far she has transformed a once-toxic fringe movement, stained by neo-Nazi links and anti-Semitism, into an almost respectable party aspiring to govern. Five years ago voters who felt drawn to her father, Jean-Marie, a gruff former paratrooper who founded the party in 1972, still kept their approval half-hidden until election day. Today, they display no such reserve towards his daughter.

On the campaign trail ahead of departmental elections later this month, the crowd in the Doullens market is thick and Ms Le Pen’s progress through it snail-like. After dropping in on Les Deux Ailes hunting shop, its rifles displayed in the window like fine patisseries, Ms Le Pen stops in the street market for selfies, kisses children and stoops to greet those in wheelchairs. This is a politician who is on the up, and knows it. “We are on a path towards…power!” she declares, with a broad grin.

Polls suggest that the FN will come top in the first round of voting in the elections on March 22nd, grabbing at least 30% of the vote. This would beat its previous best score of 25%, in last year’s elections for the European Parliament. The Front may not go on to win many local assemblies, as voters from centre-left and centre-right will gang up against it in the second round. But to the FN this is not a concern. It is fielding 7,648 candidates, in 95% of constituencies, up from a third in 2011, as part of a longer game: to secure hundreds of seats, even if in opposition, in order to build up an army of elected officials across the country who can help prepare Ms Le Pen for the presidential election in 2017. Until recently, it had been unthinkable even to consider her possible victory in the contest that will take place two years from now. It was remarkable enough to note that polls were giving Ms Le Pen a good chance of making it into the second round, by eliminating one or other of the mainstream presidential candidates from the left or the right. That would be a replay of her father’s feat in 2002, when he evicted the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, going on to lose to Jacques Chirac, of the Gaullist right, in the run-off. Now, none other than Manuel Valls, the Socialist prime minister, has urged the French to wake up to the possibility of her victory. “I am afraid for my country,” he declared darkly on French radio on March 8th, warning voters that she could win the presidency in 2017. The prospect of a President Le Pen remains remote. Almost all polls suggest she would be beaten in the second round. Yet her emergence as a credible threat to mainstream politicians is upsetting the old French political order as she treads a confident path from protest to power. It may be an exaggeration to claim, as she does on electoral posters, that the FN is “the first party of France”. But it is true that the old domination by the two main parties of left and right has given way to a three-party system, in which she increasingly dictates the terms of debate. It was telling that Mr Valls devoted most of his radio interview to attacking her. Nicolas Sarkozy, the opposition leader, often does the same. How far has Ms Le Pen really changed the National Front? The short answer is that disinfection is a work in progress. Certainly, the jack-booted imagery and obsession with France’s defeat in a colonial war in Algeria, which were hallmarks of her father’s style, have gone. She has called the Holocaust the “peak of barbarism”; that makes a change from her father, who notoriously described the Nazi gas-chambers as a “point of detail” in the history of the second world war. In many other European countries, anti-system parties of left and right have achieved spectacular success by stressing how different they are from the old order. By contrast, Ms Le Pen’s immediate priority is to portray herself as respectable rather than outrageous. Her two parliamentary deputies, one of whom is her niece Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, attend debates and sit dutifully on committees. She has had 12 mayors running town halls since 2014, doing such humdrum jobs as drawing up budgets, attending ceremonies and cutting ribbons.

On paper, her manifesto is more often daft than morally objectionable. Ms Le Pen promises to increase import tax, restore the franc, raise wages and pensions, and lower the retirement age to 60. She wants to curb drastically, but not stop, immigration, as well as to renegotiate European treaties in order to restore border controls. The nastier stuff includes a desire to build closer ties to Vladimir Putin’s Russia; to make sure the French state serves its own citizens better than foreigners; and to bring back the death penalty.

Euroscepticism among the young

The party cannot shed its dark history altogether. That is one reason why the UK Independence Party, the British standard-bearer of anti-European populism, has refused to sit in the same group as the FN in the European Parliament. Xenophobic insinuations, hinting at things not openly said, still have a place in the party’s appeal and style.

Ms Le Pen is careful, for instance, to denounce Islamism—the aspiration to wield power in the name of Islam, and in defiance of French secularism—not the Muslim faith as such. But voters can read this as code if they choose. She remains a magnet for unsavoury types. Last month a candidate in the south-west was struck off the party list for posting anti-Semitic comments on Facebook. Periodically, Ms Le Pen fires such offenders for racism. But she does not always pick the right friends. Her party took a loan of €9m ($10m) from a Russian bank with links to the Kremlin. In a separate case, the European Parliament has called for an anti-fraud investigation into the possible use of public parliamentary staff by the FN.

The problem for mainstream parties is that such mini-scandals do not appear to dent Ms Le Pen’s popularity. At a time of continuing high unemployment and low growth, the Front’s deft use of the politics of victimisation, combined with widespread disillusion with traditional parties and the unkept promises of the elite, counts more. “The FN vote is a sanction of the political class,” says Christelle Hiver, deputy mayor of Doullens, where unemployment at 20% is twice the national average and immigration close to zero. “Politics has been devalued, and that makes people turn to the extremes.” Ms Le Pen has increasingly drawn voters from the left, especially in formerly Communist-held towns in the industrial north. She has been improving her score among women and (in line with a Europe-wide trend, see article) among the young. At last year’s European election, hers was the most popular party among working-class voters.

A quiet but deep disappointment with the present state of things can be felt in Doullens, as stallholders pack up unsold flowers and baguettes at the end of market day. “We need someone like her,” says one retired man. “She stands up for us.” The more that the left and right obsess about the National Front, the better it seems to do. For her part, Ms Le Pen laughs at the “collective hysteria” about her, the small operator taking on the establishment. “While they are fighting against the FN,” declares Ms Le Pen with glee, “we are fighting for the French.”