The economic crisis in the European Union has worked to her advantage as well. As a French nationalist and an anti-E.U. voice, she has called for France to drop the euro and return to the franc.

The real secret to her success, however, may be in her adroit scrambling of traditional leftist and rightist positions. Signaling a clear break from her father and the right in general, she has come out with a detailed critique of capitalism and a position promoting the state as the protector of ordinary people. “For a long time, the National Front upheld the idea that the state always does things more expensively and less well than the private sector,” she told me. “But I’m convinced that’s not true. The reason is the inevitable quest for profitability, which is inherent in the private sector. There are certain domains which are so vital to the well-being of citizens that they must at all costs be kept out of the private sector and the law of supply and demand.” The government, therefore, should be entrusted with health care, education, transportation, banking and energy.

When I pointed out that in the U.S. she would sound like a left-wing politician, she shot back, “Yes, but Obama is way to the right of us,” and opined that proper government oversight would have averted the American financial crisis.

Le Pen’s mix of far-right nationalism and frankly leftist economics is related to the platforms of other fringe parties in Europe that have surged recently, and some critics see the combination as darkly reminiscent. “This appeared in the 1920s and 1930s,” says Patrick Lozès, president of the Council Representing the Associations of the Black People of France (CRAN), who has recently engaged in a public spat with Le Pen. “Those who a few decades ago saw the Jews as the enemy now use Muslims, saying, ‘They are among us, but they will never be like us, will never share our values.’ ”

Some French intellectuals on the left have been watching Le Pen with a combination of awe and trepidation. “She has totally reoriented the party toward low-skilled, low-income people,” says Laurent Bouvet, a professor of political science at the University of Nice who studies France’s far right. Traditionally, he noted, blue-collar workers in public-sector jobs voted for the socialists, while blue-collar workers in industries might vote for the right, often the National Front. “But all of these people fear the change that comes with opening up the economy. And she is providing an answer to their fear.”

In other words, Le Pen’s economic stance is drawing interest from the left as well as the right. And she is doing something similar on immigration. Where the far right formerly adopted a clash-of-civilizations approach — Christianity versus Islam — Le Pen has donned the cloak of secularism as a value system that is under threat. “She is saying that the problem is not that they are Muslims but that they want to impose their values on our country,” Bouvet says. “That is a big innovation. She pretends to defend gays, Jews, women. The National Front never defended Jews before. They were anti-Semitic — how could they? Now she says to Jews, ‘You have to be careful about Muslims, and I am here to defend you.’ And she says she is here to defend women and gays, in the name of freedom, secularism and the republic. This is really, really new. It’s not a shift to the left but to a third dimension for French politics.”

Le Pen took over the reins of the party just as mass upheavals destabilized the Middle East. “It’s kind of an Orwellian scenario,” says Jean-Pierre Lehmann, professor of international political economy at the IMD business school in Lausanne, Switzerland. “You have the youngest population in the world on one side of the Mediterranean and the oldest population on the other side. And now you have mayhem in the Muslim countries, which will continue, so that there will be more pressure on people who want to escape. And Europeans will see their lifestyle in danger. Le Pen’s party plays on fear, and this situation is easily exploitable.”