Marion Maréchal-Le Pen. By EPA. | EPA/Yoan Valat The next Le Pen: 25-year-old ‘true darling’ Marion Maréchal-Le Pen is next in line to lead the French far-right National Front, to the relief of founder and patriarch Jean-Marie.

Marine Le Pen may have won the latest showdown with her father over his assertion that the Nazi gas chambers were a mere “detail of history,” shunning him publicly to tighten her grip on France’s far-right National Front (FN) party.

But as their feud eases, another winner has emerged who may well challenge Marine for her party’s soul: Her niece Marion-Maréchal Le Pen, a confident and photogenic 25-year-old politician known to insiders as the true darling of her grandfather, the party’s founder Jean-Marie.

Born into politics — a 1992 campaign poster shows her as a toddler in her grandfather’s arms — the tart-tongued Marion-Maréchal has gained star status in the family’s power base in southern France by embodying a harder, even more socially conservative version of the National Front party line that’s closer to Jean-Marie’s views than those of her aunt.

“Marion has the same ideas as her grandfather, minus the historical baggage,” said Maxime Cellier, chief of staff to the FN mayor of Cogolin in the Var Department in southern France. “He coddles her, he advises her, he puts her on the stage.”

Marion is the daughter of Marine’s sister, Yann Le Pen, and Roger Auque, a journalist and diplomat who acknowledged that he was Marion’s biological father in a posthumous memoir. The younger Le Pen was raised partly by her mother’s then-husband, Samuel Marechal, a businessman and FN member whom she considers her father. She quit her law studies to embrace politics in her early twenties.

Now Marion, who in 2012 became the youngest member of the French Parliament since World War II at age 22, is poised to rise higher.

In a final gesture before he was called to order by Marine over his latest outré comments, Jean-Marie Le Pen gave Marion his blessing to replace him as a candidate for the presidency of the Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region of southern France, or PACA, in December’s regional elections.

Marion's personal approval score registered at 40 percent in an April 17 poll by Odoxa for Le Parisien newspaper -- an increase of 12 percentage points over the past three months. Two thirds of right-wing voters said they had a positive opinion of her and she scored more favorably than her aunt in terms of "friendliness" with lower scores on "aggressiveness" and "racism".

If she wins, Marion would cement her position as a competing heir to the Le Pen brand, with a powerful public platform and presence in its traditional geographic stronghold who could seek the party’s national leadership crown before her aunt has called it quits.

Marion, whose aides declined requests for an interview, has already shown a skill for biting rhetoric in parliament. A recent verbal attack on socialist prime minister Manuel Valls — she accused him of treating the FN with “moronic contempt” — prompted the minister’s hand to tremble uncontrollably as he stood to answer his young accuser on the floor of the National Assembly. Their video exchange quickly went viral.

So officials wince at the idea — for now remote — of a public clash between Marion and her aunt, whose battering-ram style of argument can be equally unsettling.

“There will definitely be a major ‘Marion’ effect if she wins in the PACA,” added Cellier. “Marion embodies a different strain of the FN. I don’t think there is a rift, but they [Marion and Marine] should probably appear in public together to avoid that idea spreading.”

Party insiders deny the notion of a rivalry between Marine, 46, and her younger niece. Marine gives orders and Marion carries them out, they say.

When Marine summoned her father to a disciplinary hearing over his comments, which included the idea that France should court Russia to protect the “white world,” Jean-Marie’s young protégés — including Marion-Marechal — quickly fell in line behind the current party president, Marine.

In an interview with far-right magazine Valeurs Actuelles, Marion-Marechal called Jean-Marie’s latest broadside a “useless provocation.”

That echoed statements from Marine Le Pen’s closest advisers, who include an openly gay breakaway of the center-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire party and a graduate from the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration school of public administration. All reject Jean-Marie Le Pen as dated, meddlesome and primed for self-destruction.

“Jean-Marie Le Pen acts with a deliberate intent to harm,” said one senior party official who asked not to be named. “There is a real strategic conflict: she [Marine] thinks the party should open itself to new members and prepare itself to govern France. He doesn’t agree with that, and that’s too bad for him.”

However, officials acknowledge that reprimanding Jean-Marie Le Pen,who is now 86 and remains an important financial backer for the FN via his sister party, Cotelec, will not make him—or the throwback version of his FN now best embodied by Marion — go away.

Few expect open war between Marine and Marion. But another senior party source said the younger Le Pen was already channeling resentment against one of her aunt’s closest advisers and the architect of her euro-exit strategy: vice president of the FN Florian Philippot.

“Nobody can predict the party’s future, but for now the real rivalry is between Marion and Philippot,” said the source close to Marion, who asked not to be named. “Marine was wrong to let him [Philippot] gain so much influence, to push his idea on the euro. That’s the problem.”

The elder Le Pen is vocal about his disdain for Philippot. After their public blowout, Jean-Marie accused his daughter, who has broadened the FN’s appeal to depressed northern France by making it a champion of the welfare state, of “leading the party to suicide” — a remark which the source said was directed as much at Marine as at Philippot and his entourage.

As an antidote for Philippot’s influence, the patriarch has anointed Marion, a southerner who criticizes France’s “culture of dependency” and sells herself as a defender of the country’s ‘Christian identity’. But there is even some friction between the elder Le Pen and his nièce préferée. While he wants her to run as a figurehead candidate for the FN for the PACA presidency, he hopes she will run on a ticket with his old party colleague, Bruno Gollnisch, and let him actually take the post — an idea to which Marion-Marechal has so far said thanks but no thanks.

For political scientist Thomas Guénolé, Marion is the direct ideological heir to her grandfather’s ‘lepénisme’, which he sums up as a mish-mash of prejudices ranging from homophobia to xenophobia. “Marion-Maréchal Le Pen, ideologically, is the continuation of ‘lepénism’, just without the anti-Semitism,” he wrote in an email.

At times the fault lines between Marion and Marine, who rarely appear in public together and look mutually wary in joint photographs, have become apparent.

While Marine denounced France’s 2013 adoption of homosexual marriage, she discreetly avoided mass rallies by the pro-family movement.

Marion all but became that movement's emblem, leading several marches and standing up in parliament to denounce what she said was police violence against demonstrators. The stand bolstered her appeal with a fan base made up largely of traditionalist young Catholic men, who compare Marion alternately to Joan of Arc and Brigitte Bardot, the iconic French film star who, as it happens, has been fined five times for inciting racial hatred.

After a series of attacks by Islamist militants that killed 17 people in January, Marine was locked out of a national unity march in Paris and instead joined a rally in the FN-run town of Beaucaire in southern France.

By contrast, Marion, whose home constituency is a short car-ride away from Beaucaire, chose to stay home, an official said.

When Marine Le Pen announced on television that she favored reinstating the death penalty in France, outlawed by socialist president Francois Mitterrand in 1981, her niece said the same day that she was against it, prompting Marine to reprimand her during a heated exchange, French media reported in 2012.

And while Marion and Marine adamantly deny any tension, one anecdote reported by the magazine l’Express last year gave a rare glimpse into the family's complex dynamics.

One of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Doberman-Pinscher dogs, l’Express said, had killed one of his daughter’s Bengali cats. The incident sped up her decision to move out of the family residence at Montretout, near Paris, where the elder Le Pen no longer lives but still kept his kennel.

In Marine’s place at Montretout came Marion and her husband Matthieu Decosse, an events organizer and National Front member with whom she had recently had a baby girl, named Olympe.

National Front officials declined to comment on the cat fight, which the family has not denied. Marine Le Pen has said she had been planning to move out of Montretout for some time, anyhow.

Yet the incident’s denouement summed up the way Jean-Marie Le Pen sees the party he founded in 1972: with Marion occupying the favored family seat and Marine out of sight.