Marine Le Pen, 45, took over the Front National (FN) her father founded in 2011 and today hopes a strong showing in European elections will turn the party into the most powerful anti-EU and immigration force on the continent.
Her rabble-rousing one-eyed father once predicted a bright future for Marine, the youngest of his three daughters, by describing her as “a big, healthy, blonde girl, an ideal physical specimen”.
Her detractors later nicknamed her “the clone” or “la peste blonde” – the blonde plague – a play on words with the Black Death and “la peste brune” – a reference to the occupying Nazi troops and their brown shirts.
But today, she claims to have detoxified the FN, taken the “extreme” out of extreme-Right and succeeded in forcing her anti-European, anti-euro and anti-immigration agenda onto the French and EU political mainstream.
