SHE may have a chic hairdo, and the modern look of a working mother. But there is still something of her father in the imposing frame, gravelly voice and flair for provocation. Is Marine Le Pen on her way to disrupting French politics, as her 82-year-old father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has done? Early results of the far-right National Front's leadership election to succeed the former paratrooper showed that Ms Le Pen, backed by her father for the job, has beaten her rival, Bruno Gollnisch, by a comfortable margin. The National Front's new leader, who will be officially declared winner at the party's congress on January 16th, is starting to unnerve mainstream politicians.

For nearly four decades Mr Le Pen, who once called the Holocaust a “detail” of history, has helped shape French politics. In 2002, to widespread consternation, he beat the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, into the French presidential election run-off against Jacques Chirac. His brooding presence has pushed the mainstream right into ever more hardline policies on immigration and security. Ahead of the 2007 presidential-election campaign, Nicolas Sarkozy echoed one of Mr Le Pen's catchphrases, declaring that: “If anybody doesn't like France, they should leave”. Even today, 22% of voters say that they agree with the National Front's ideas.

A decade ago, there were doubts that Ms Le Pen could ever fill her father's shoes in the macho, traditionalist world of far-right politics. Over the years, though, she has shown a steely pugnacity, mixed with disarming charm. To the frustration of Mr Gollnisch, who gets a fraction of the media attention, she is a frequent television talk-show guest. On a prime-time programme in December she upstaged the presenters, who were brimming with barely concealed contempt for her, with a poised and courteous performance.

Ms Le Pen's talent has been to move the far-right away from its thuggish neo-Nazi fixation to more respectable concerns about integration and what she calls “Islamisation”. By casting herself as a defender of French laïcité, or secularism, she is a harder target for mainstream politicians to attack. At a rally in Lyon in December, she caused outrage by comparing French Muslims praying in the streets to the Nazi occupation. As liberal opinion wrung its hands, her profile only grew. One Socialist figure, Benoît Hamon, said he agreed that it was a problem to have prayers in the streets. A poll suggested that 39% of the French approved of Ms Le Pen's comment.

Such views, which she presents as common sense to voters disillusioned with the political elite, have scored Ms Le Pen some electoral success, particularly in working-class bits of northern France battered by joblessness and turned off by Mr Sarkozy as well as by the far left. In the 2007 legislative elections, she was the only National Front candidate to make it through to a second-round run-off. In the first round of the 2010 regional elections, she secured almost as many votes as Mr Sarkozy's candidate, Valéry Létard, in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais. In a December poll she scored a 33% approval rating, up six points on the previous month and higher than her father.

In darker moments politicians from the ruling UMP party worry that next year's presidential election could turn into a 2002 in reverse: the unpopular Mr Sarkozy beaten by the National Front into the second-round run-off. That remains far-fetched, although one UMP deputy recently called on the party to consider local electoral alliances with the National Front to ward off such an outcome. Mr Sarkozy has explicitly ruled this out. But now Ms Le Pen is to take over, the president's past trick of deploying hardline talk about immigration and security to rob the National Front of votes could become harder to pull off.