“Marine, 45, is blue-eyed, blonde, stout, aggressive and talented. A lawyer with a smoker’s voice, she has been in politics since she was 18.” © Gauthier Bouchet

It took Jean-Marie Le Pen 42 years to build his political movement on the ruins of “French Algeria” and the remnants of pre-Second World War fascist ideology. It has taken his daughter just over three years to transform the Front National (FN) into a party palatable enough to take the lead in the latest European elections.

Marine, 45, is blue-eyed, blonde, stout, aggressive and talented. A lawyer with a smoker’s voice, she has been in politics since she was 18. Enthused with her father’s oratory, her whole life ensconced in the family estate near Paris after two divorces, she has been smart enough to dissociate herself from her father’s anti-Semitic obsessions. She openly contradicted him for the first time in June over a comment he made about a Jewish pop star, in which he appeared to refer to the Holocaust. The dyed-in-the-wool old activists may have thought she was too soft at first, but she has delivered victory.

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