Again, Marine Le Pen had a choice and chose confrontation against compromise.

The 57 year old politician has revived her bid for the French presidency on Tuesday evening, opting for a high-risk legal battle rather than accepting a lighter sentence that would have allowed her to run by conceding guilt.

Whatever the outcome of her appeal on the embezzlement of EU funds, the decision keeps alive the defying ambition that has defined her political career. Le Pen dismissed all the cases against her as a judicial “witch hunt” aimed at her self-styled anti-establishment National Rally (RN).

Over more than two decades, she has transformed the movement she inherited from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, turning the marginal party known back then as National Front into a movement capable of competing for power and reshaping French politics.

As judges and enemies debate her legal chances to win her legal challenge, she is due to campaign on Wednesday alongside Jordan Bardella, the RN’s president, at a street market in La Flèche, in the Pays de la Loire region. Opinion polls suggest the party is well placed to top the first round of next year’s presidential election and reach the runoff.

Friends and foes alike acknowledge that today’s RN is Marine’s creation. Yet its history also illustrates the perils of political inheritance. She secured control of the party only after breaking decisively with its founder, her own father.

Now, after months in which Bardella appeared the inevitable heir should she be barred from standing, Le Pen’s return postpones the succession she had publicly advertised and places her back at the center of the game.

“People think Marine Le Pen has cultivated an image of a phoenix—of resilience and combativeness. But they’re mistaken. It’s not an image; it’s who she really is. Her father was like that, and so is she,” Philippe Olivier, a National Rally MEP and close adviser to Le Pen, told Le Point.

Tuer le père

Marine Le Pen entered politics in the 1980s at the side of her father Jean-Marie, the bombastic founder of the National Front whose convictions for Holocaust denial and racist hate speech made him a political pariah even as he influenced the French debate on immigration and national identity.

Her defining moment came in 2002. As Jean-Marie Le Pen unexpectedly qualified for the presidential runoff against Jacques Chirac, television viewers across France watched his daughter weep with joy on election night.

This image introduced Marine Le Pen to a national audience and foreshadowed the role she would eventually play in taking over the family business.

Winning a parliamentary seat in northern France in 2007, she made the region a case study for her political project: converting a working-class heartland scarred by deindustrialisation and long dominated by the left into one of the RN’s strongest electoral bases.

Marine Le Pen, then 42, with her father Jean-Marie Le Pen. (Photo by Patrick Durand/Getty Images)

Four years later, she succeeded her father as party leader, demonstrating her commitment to her cause.

Le Pen herself reached the presidential runoff in 2017 and again in 2022, each time improving on her previous performance and establishing the far right as a permanent fixture of French politics, despite mounting judicial and financial pressure.

Her ability to run will still depend on judicial ruling at the Court of Cessation, a top judicial body.

“I am someone who is calm and serene,” Le Pen said last week. “I know that politics is a succession is a series of ordeals. I have always considered myself ready to take a bullet, including a judicial one.”

Rebranding

Putting distance between herself and her father’s circle, she renamed the National Front as the National Rally in 2018 and set about convincing French voters that the far right could govern by achieving what her father never could: transforming RN into France’s largest opposition party and propelling it into the mainstream arena.

The strategy, often described as “dédiabolisation“, or de-demonisation, was as much about changing personnel as changing rhetoric. “She managed to build a fairly qualified political team with graduates from France’s elite schools who know how to perform in the media,” said Robert Zarader, a former communications adviser to Socialist President François Hollande.

For Zarader, the rebranding rested on one key move. “Paradoxically, she erased the Jean-Marie Le Pen brand, even though she still bears the name. In doing so, she succeeded in normalising the party on many issues.”

That transformation has extended beyond style, according to a senior political adviser backing Edouard Philippe, the mainstream centre right leader. “Today she has managed to present her party as one that even protects gay people and Jews – the opposite of its origins,” he said.

Many in Paris had already begun treating Jordan Bardella as the National Rally’s future and Le Pen as its past. By forcing herself back to the centre of the story, she has once again shown her preference for fighting against the odds. But if this gamble fails, the succession she postponed may finally become inevitable.

(bw, ow)