Although the anti-immigration policies are intact, with promises to prioritise homes, jobs and benefits for French nationals, gone is the overt racism and antisemitism of her father, who died last year.
Marine Le Pen has been taken to court herself but ultimately she was acquitted in 2015 of inciting racial hatred for comparing the sight of Muslims praying in the streets to the Nazi occupation of France in World War Two.
Her expulsion of Jean-Marie Le Pen from the National Front in August 2015 marked the culmination of a family feud, and at one point he suggested “Marine Le Pen may want me dead”. After his death, she said she would “never forgive myself for this decision, because I know it caused him immense pain”.
In 2018, a year after she came second to Emmanuel Macron in the presidential election, she rebranded the party entirely.
The purge did not end there. When an old family friend, Steeve Briois, who is still mayor of the National Rally northern stronghold of Hénin-Beaumont, was ousted from the party’s executive, he complained of a shift towards “immigration and identity” at the expense of everyday social issues.
With less than a year before the next presidential vote, that rebranding appears complete.
But the next political moment for National Rally may not fall to her but Jordan Bardella.
A life outside politics seems unlikely for Marine Le Pen, but not inconceivable.
In 2015, after suffering defeat in regional elections she told Le Parisien she could “stop everything, do something else – breed cats for example”.
Five years later she passed a diploma in cat breeding. For a short period she even made a little money from it, listing the names of her six cats in an interview.
Although that venture appears to have fizzled out, only last year she was seen carrying a kitten in a pet crate while on a visit to the Prime Minister’s residence.
