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Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen ( French: [maʁin lə pɛn]; born 5 August 1968) is a French lawyer and politician who ran for the French presidency in 2012, 2017, and 2022. A member of the National Rally (RN; previously the National Front, FN), she served as its president from 2011 to 2021.
- National Rally (since 1986)
12 hours ago · A Le Pen premiership, if deftly handled, could boost her chance of becoming President later on. (She already saw her vote share jump from 34% in the 2017 presidential contest to 41% in the 2022 ...
Apr 24, 2022 · Marine Le Pen has conceded defeat in the second round of the French presidential election, even as she celebrated her “historic score” in the vote. "A great wind of freedom could have blown...
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Apr 24, 2022 · April 24, 2022. PARIS — Emmanuel Macron won a second term as president of France, triumphing on Sunday over Marine Le Pen, his far-right challenger, after a campaign where his promise of ...
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Marine Le Pen is a French politician. She was the leader of the far-right National Rally party from 2011 to 2022, and she was that party’s candidate in the 2017 and 2022 French presidential elections.
When did Marine Le Pen become the leader of the National Front party?
In 2011 Marine Le Pen was elected to succeed her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, as leader of the National Front (later renamed National Rally) party. She was replaced in 2022 by Jordan Bardella, the party’s acting president, who won an internal election to become the National Rally’s leader.
Why was Marine Le Pen investigated by the European Anti-Fraud Office in 2004?
In 2004 Marine Le Pen was placed under criminal investigation by French authorities for misusing funds during her time as a member of the European Parliament. The European Anti-Fraud Office, an EU body, alleged that Le Pen had misspent some €5 million ($5.4 million) on National Front party business.
Where did Marine Le Pen finish in the 2022 French presidential election?
Le Pen was the youngest of three daughters. Her childhood was coloured by the political career of her father, who espoused a range of controversial views and in 1976 was the target of a bomb attack that heavily damaged the family’s apartment building. This and other, less-violent rebukes of her father’s views would inform Le Pen’s own politics. She earned a law degree from the University of Panthéon-Assas (University of Paris II) in 1991 and remained there to complete an advanced degree in criminal law in 1992. That year she was certified to practice law, and she worked as an attorney in Paris from 1992 to 1998.
In 1998 she joined the administrative apparatus of the National Front, which had been founded by her father in 1972 and was the main right-wing opposition to France’s mainstream conservative parties. She served as the director of the party’s legal affairs until 2003, when she became the National Front’s vice president. The following year she made a successful run for a seat in the European Parliament, where she joined her father in that body’s nonaligned bloc. Over the following years, her profile within the National Front rose, and she managed her father’s presidential campaign in 2007. She served in a number of regional and municipal posts in the government of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, and she led the National Front to a strong showing there in regional elections in 2009.
As Le Pen emerged from her father’s shadow to become a national figure in her own right, she distanced herself from some of his and the party’s more extreme views. While she embraced the National Front’s established anti-immigration stance, she rebranded the party’s traditional Euroskepticism as French nationalism, and she was a vocal critic of the anti-Semitism that had marginalized the party in the past. Possessed with a telegenic charm and keen political instincts forged at her father’s side, she easily won the election to succeed him as National Front leader in 2011.
In May 2011 Le Pen was selected to represent the National Front in the 2012 presidential election against incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist candidate François Hollande. In April 2012 Le Pen finished a strong third in the first round of that election, earning more than 18 percent of the vote. While this result did not earn Le Pen a place in the second round, it did represent the best-ever showing for the National Front in a presidential election, topping even her father’s 2002 numbers when he advanced to a runoff with Jacques Chirac.
Le Pen continued to temper the National Front’s image, and her personal popularity reflected the increasing acceptance of the party as a viable alternative to France’s two main parties. As the French economy struggled, Hollande’s Socialists fell from favour, and Le Pen and the National Front appealed to a sector of the electorate that was beginning to see the European Union (EU) as an obstacle rather than a benefit. In local elections in March 2014, the National Front and politicians aligned with it were victorious in more than a dozen mayoral races. Le Pen capitalized on an antiestablishment streak that was growing in France, and the elections for the European Parliament in May 2014 demonstrated just how widespread that sentiment was. For the first time in the National Front’s history, it placed first in a national election, capturing more than one-fourth of the vote and thrusting Le Pen into the international spotlight as the most prominent spokesperson for Euroskepticism.
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Controversial statements by Jean-Marie Le Pen fueled a public feud with Marine, and in August 2015 the elder Le Pen was expelled from the party that he had led for nearly 40 years. On November 13, 2015, a deadly terrorist attack in Paris left 130 people dead and more than 350 wounded, and Marine Le Pen was quick to blame Hollande and France’s immigration policy. Growing anti-Islamic sentiment boosted the National Front’s performance in regional elections in December 2015, and Le Pen finished first in the initial round of voting for the regional presidency of Nord-Pas-de-Calais (now part of the Hauts-de-France région). The third-place Socialists withdrew their candidate in the hope of thwarting a National Front victory, however, and Le Pen finished second to the centre-right Republican candidate in the second round.
6 days ago · But Marine Le Pen, leader of the French far-right Rassemblement National, who was visiting Mayotte at the time, reacted with fury. The AfD “would do better to deal with Germany’s problems ...
May 4, 2021 · 4 May 2021. Reuters. Marine Le Pen's immunity was lifted by the European Parliament before the prosecution could take place. A French court has acquitted far-right leader Marine Le...
