Marion Maréchal-Le Pen: the young face of France's far right
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Version 0 of 1. When Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, France’s youngest MP, stood up in the National Assembly last month and accused the prime minister of behaving like a moron, the usually unflappable Manuel Valls was so shaken that his left hand began trembling uncontrollably and the video went viral. Maréchal-Le Pen, the 25-year-old star of the far-right Front National, went on to rouse her cheering party faithful at a rally, telling them to turn out massively for local elections in order to finish Valls off with a heart attack. Maréchal-Le Pen’s ferocity shocked her opponents. But the young politician, who started out so shy that she once burst into tears at a journalist’s mundane question on policy has, in less than three years, become one of the most high-profile and hardline figures in the party. This week she emerged as the clear winner in the family feud that had threatened to engulf the far right. Even more rightwing and socially conservative than her aunt, Marine Le Pen, who heads the party, she is closer in many of her beliefs to her grandfather, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who co-founded the Front National in 1972 and led it to become the most successful far-right party in western Europe. After Jean-Marie Le Pen’s recent inflammatory remarks belittling the Holocaust and lauding France’s Nazi-collaborationist past, it is the smiling and photogenic Maréchal-Le Pen who will be chosen by the party on Friday to replace her 86-year-old grandfather to run as head of the crucial Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur in regional elections later this year. Jean-Marie Le Pen, meanwhile, was hospitalised on Thursday for what he said was a “small heart problem”. Laughing from his bed, he assured journalists he was fine and “the beast is strong”. Maréchal-Le Pen, who grew up cosseted among the close-knit clan in Jean-Marie Le Pen’s grandiose suburban manor house – where she still lives with her husband, baby daughter and various relatives – holds an increasingly important role in the Le Pen family soap opera. Her admirers – who include almost every staffer in the party, and pretty much all Front National voters – say she is charismatic, intelligent, a skilled orator and a die-hard defender of far-right French ideals. Her political opponents say she is haughty, snobbish, dangerous and that her far-right rhetoric against immigration stigmatises Islam and wider French society. “She is the youngest MP in parliament and yet she seems to have this disdain towards the rest of us as if she belongs to a superior race,” François-Michel Lambert, Green MP for Bouches du Rhône, told the Guardian. “I see her in restaurants around parliament and she’s surrounded by a team of young advisors who treat her as if she’s a kind of Joan of Arc figure, the chosen one.” He said there was a fascination with Maréchal-Le Pen as if she was a “guru or a mystic”. “If I went into politics, it’s because I grew up in a political atmosphere,” Maréchal-Le Pen once told the Guardian on the campaign trail in her southern constituency in the Vaucluse. Aged two, she became, quite literally, the poster child of the far right, cuddled by her grandfather in election flyers promising “security” for all. Her mother, Yann Le Pen, who was once a Front National events organiser, is the second of Le Pen’s three daughters, who were themselves wheeled out for decades to symbolise the true French nation. Samuel Maréchal, who later married Yann Le Pen and raised Marion, was the former head of the Front National youth movement. “Aunt Marine” was so close to them that she reportedly played a role as a kind of surrogate parent in Marion’s early months. When, in 2013, the news weekly L’Express revealed that Maréchal-Le Pen’s biological father was a journalist-turned-diplomat and former Lebanon hostage – something Maréchal-Le Pen had always known – she sued over invasion of privacy and this week won her case. Like her bolder aunt Marine, the timid Maréchal-Le Pen complained that she suffered greatly from taunts at school that her grandad was a “fascist”. To shield her, she was moved to a hardline Catholic convent school to be given time to toughen up and later dropped the Le Pen from her name. But she joined the party aged 17 and had proudly restored her full name when, aged 22, and still a law student, she became the youngest MP since the French revolution, on a ticket against immigration and insecurity in the south. Since then, Maréchal-Le Pen has stood out for adopting socially conservative stances that are more extreme than her aunt, Marine. She was a key figure in France’s anti-gay marriage demonstrations of 2013, leading one Paris cortege at which the British National Party’s then leader, Nick Griffin, was also present, while her aunt deliberately stayed away. She later publicly opposed the arrival in Marine Le Pen’s entourage of a defector from the traditional right who had founded a centre-right gay thinktank and campaign group, GayLib. She has opposed the French state providing free abortions, saying some women should pay for them. Related: Marion Maréchal-Le Pen: the new face of the French right Earlier this year, she retweeted a controversial video by a Front National MEP warning of the dangers of different types of Islam, while Marine Le Pen, trying to “detoxify” the party’s image, had ordered the video not to be promoted. Economically, she adheres less to her aunt’s state interventionism, and more to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s brand of free-market, free-enterprise capitalism. But, coming from a younger generation that doesn’t share her grandfather’s obsession with history, the second world war and the colonial empire, she has clearly opposed anti-semitism and Holocaust denial. Cécile Alduy, co-author of a recent study, Marine Le Pen’s Words: Decoding the New National Front Discourse, said: “With Marion, you have a paradoxical character. While she projects an image of a young woman who is modern, friendly, nice and smiling, her discourse is much more conservative than that of even Marine Le Pen, very strong, sometimes aggressive. She uses the words and dress code of her generation, the tone of young people, is very casual in the way she addresses others and looks very modern, but what she promotes is a very conservative, traditional agenda – in terms of morals, against women’s rights, restricting rights to abortion, very conservative about gay marriage. She’s probably going to be marketed by the Front National as a new young face that’s looking forward to the future of France, though when you look at what she’s promising, it is to go back to economics, legislation and morality that is from before the 1980s, at least.” Gaëtan Dussausaye, head of the Front National youth movement, who was impressed by Maréchal-Le Pen from her early appearances at Paris youth meetings, told the Guardian: “Parliament is a very good tribune for her. She’s someone who is very straightforward, who is very open with people in the movement, accessible, always stopping to chat, taking her time. She’s a breath of fresh air.” Much has been made of a possible underlying rivalry with her aunt, Marine. Jean-Yves Camus, political scientist and expert on the Front National, said: “When you have ambition and visibility there will be rivalry, but there are family ties binding them. Clearly it’s not open war. The age difference is key – she’s very young, she’s not going to, aged 25, launch a manoeuvre to chase out her aunt and take over the party.” This week Maréchal-Le Pen said she was no one’s puppet. During her Vaucluse parliamentary election campaign, when most speculated she was running half-heartedly running just to please grandpapa, she told the Guardian: “I’m here for the long term.” Florian Philippot – Marine Le Pen’s ambitious advisor The Le Pen family rift has highlighted the influence of Florian Philippot, Marine Le Pen’s young, ambitious advisor – a Front National MEP and party deputy leader with an atypical profile. Philippot, 33, is a technocrat who studied at the country’s top business school and France’s elite graduate school for the civil service – unheard of in a far-right party of “outsiders” that likes to attack the elite. He is gay and was outed by Closer magazine last year, sparking outrage across the political spectrum at the invasion of his privacy. He denied it was difficult to be gay in a party whose founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, had called homosexuality “a biological and social anomaly”, saying the party did not distinguish between patriots. Philippot, less popular than Maréchal-Le Pen among party faithful, is a key architect of Marine Le Pen’s drive to “detoxify” and party’s image and pursue an economic line of state protectionism. |