Right populist Marine Le Pen
Does your political dream end?
Updated on March 31, 2025 – 07:41 a.m.Reading time: 3 min.
The right -wing populist Marine Le Pen strives for the presidency in France. However, a legal process could bring you down.
She is currently more close to her goal of becoming the first president in France’s history. However, right-wing populist Marine Le Pen could significantly get in the way of the court judgment about the embezzlement of EU funds: According to the will of the public prosecutor, the 56-year-old should not only be sentenced to a prison and fine on Monday, but also to be banned in elections-and also if they are in the question.
Since the parliamentary election last year, Le Pen has been at the head of the largest opposition faction. Her party, the racial embleme nationally (marginal), comes at 120 seats, in 2017 there were only seven. Le Pen is also regularly ahead in surveys for the 2027 presidential election.
Marine Le Pen is the only one of the three daughters of the right-wing extremist party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, who originally did not want to go into politics. She worked as a lawyer for several years before hitting a political career. After taking over the party leadership from her father in 2011, she tried to give the party a better image.
It was part of her strategy of “de-steering” to throw the father condemned as a Holocaust denied out of the party, then rename them from “Front National” into “racial emblems nationally” and only use their first name in the election campaign. The male RN MPs suggested to wear suit and tie in order to appear serious.
In 2012 Le Pen started for the first time for the presidential election and already achieved a better result than her father, who had first moved into the runoff election ten years earlier. In the 2017 election campaign, she was welcomed by the Russian President Vladimir Putin. A Russian-Czech bank also granted her a loan of nine million euros-things that it is reluctant to remind it today.
In 2022 she made it into the runoff election against Emmanuel Macron for the second time. She achieved her best result so far: 41 percent of the vote.
Despite the pens striving to present the RN as moderate and capable of government, the party is essentially ideologically unchanged: it agitates migrants and Muslims, which blames it for numerous social problems, and plays with the fears of their voters. Le Pen likes to show herself close to the financial worries of citizens, which brings her many voices of those who have long since lost trust in politics.
The right -wing populist has often proven that she can appear as aggressively as her father. She once compared prayers of Muslims on the street with the crew of Paris through the Nazis. Le Pen also denied France’s responsibility for the mass arrest of Jews in 1942.
Should the 56-year-old actually get power in France, this would have drastic consequences for the EU and for Germany. Le Pen plans referenders in order to set the priority of French law before EU law and drastically tighten the immigration policy.
Franco-German cooperation is likely to suffer considerably. Instead, it is foreseeable that Le Pen would expand its alliance with EU opponents like Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
