Timeline of French far right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen's career ahead of runoff

Record ID: 1669657

  • Title: Timeline of French far right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen's career ahead of runoff
  • Date: 22nd April 2022
  • Summary: PARIS, FRANCE (FILE - MAY 1, 2011) (REUTERS) BALLOONS READING: “MARINE 2012” NATIONAL FRONT OPEN-AIR RALLY THEN 2012 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE MARINE LE PEN WALKING ON STAGE RALLY PARIS, FRANCE (FILE - FEBRUARY 1, 2012) (REUTERS) EXTERIOR OF FRENCH SENATE WITH GATHERING OF MARINE LE PEN SUPPORTERS LE PEN WALKING TO STAGE, SUPPORTERS SHOUTING (French): "Marine for presiden
  • Embargoed: 6th May 2022 14:43
  • Keywords: France Jean-Marie Le Pen Marine Le Pen career far right presidential election runoff
  • Location: VARIOUS LOCATIONS
  • City: VARIOUS LOCATIONS
  • Country: France
  • Topics: Europe,Government/Politics,Elections/Voting
  • Reuters ID: LVA008334422042022RP1
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: EDITORS PLEASE NOTE: THIS EDIT CONTAINS FOOTAGE THAT WAS ORIGINALLY 4:3
    Marine Le Pen's run on Sunday (April 24) for France's presidency is the culmination of a five-decade rise of the far-right from a fringe movement to one of the country's strongest political forces.
    The far-right Front National (FN) party was founded in 1972 with former paratrooper Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s father, as its president, but meets with little electoral success in its early years.
    The party first pierced through electoral success in 1986 as it won 35 out of 577 seats in parliamentary elections.
    Jean-Marie Le Pen sparked an uproar a year later by calling Nazi gas chambers a "detail of history." Though the remark earned him a conviction for condoning crimes against humanity, he went on to repeat it several times in later years.
    The far-right party saw one of its first major successes in 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen was able to qualify for the presidential runoff in a duel with then-incumbent Jacques Chirac.
    Running for president amid a crime wave, Le Pen's law-and-order focused campaign resonated with voters, leading him to beat Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in one of the greatest political upsets of modern France.
    Chirac ended up winning a second term with 82% of the runoff vote as electors from both the left and right rallied massively behind the conservative to smash any chance of Le Pen winning the presidency.
    Starting from the election season, Marine Le Pen started to take a bigger role in the Front National. In the following years, the party begins courting some voters traditionally on the left and takes some distance from her father's harder lines.
    In 2011, Marine Le Pen is elected as the party's president. The following year, she made her first run for the presidency, coming in third in the first round of voting with 18% of the vote. Her niece, Marion Marechal, becomes an FN lawmaker.
    After a purge of party members opposed to Marine Le Pen's softer line, the FN won in 2014 nearly a quarter of the vote in European Parliament elections, for the first time coming out ahead of the Socialist Party.
    Marine Le Pen’s drive to soften the party’s image culminated in 2015 when the party's leadership expelled Jean-Marie Le Pen after he called into question his daughter's efforts to "de-demonize" the party and after he repeats his remarks about gas chambers.
    That year, the FN won nearly 28% of the first-round vote of regional elections, ahead of the conservative Republicans and the Socialists. However, it could go on not to win control of any region in the following runoff vote.
    In her second run for the presidency, Marine Le Pen qualified for a runoff against Emmanuel Macron with 7.7 million votes in the first round. She lost, though, to Macron in the second round, winning only a third of the runoff vote.
    This time, in her third presidential run, Le Pen qualified again for the runoff, staging a repeat of the faceoff against Macron, with 23% of the first-round vote.
    Recent polls indicate she will once again lose to Macron in Sunday’s runoff election, albeit by a much smaller margin than in 2017.
    (Production: Ardee Napolitano)
  • Copyright Holder: POOL (CAN SELL)
  • Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2022. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
  • Usage Terms/Restrictions: None
Register