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This is the life of Marine Le Pen: age, years in politics, who is her father and more

2022-04-21T17:14:32.122Z


In France's presidential runoff, Emmanuel Macron will face Marine Le Pen for the second consecutive election, but the woman challenging France's current leader is not the same candidate who lost by almost two votes to one in 2017.


Everything you need to know about the French elections on Sunday 2:49

(CNN) --

In France's presidential runoff, Emmanuel Macron will face Marine Le Pen for the second consecutive election, but the woman challenging France's current leader is not the same candidate who lost by almost two votes to one in 2017.

Le Pen, 53, is currently a member of the French National Assembly representing Calais, the city on the coast near the UK that has had trouble dealing with migrants heading to Britain.

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She is best known as a member of the first family of the French extreme right.

Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founded the Front National in 1972, a political party long seen as racist and anti-Semitic.

When the young Le Pen took over from her father as party leader in 2011, she attempted to rebrand the National Front as more conventional, going so far as to expel her father from the political party he founded after he repeated his claim that Nazi gas chambers had been just one detail of the story.

His relationship with his father and his first steps in politics

Marine Le Pen is the mother of three children.

She has been divorced twice.

She has regularly called for respect for the privacy of her children, trying to shield them from media attention.

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His relationship with his father, however, has been the subject of much media scrutiny.

The explosion of a bomb in the family apartment in Paris, when Marine was 8 years old, made her aware of her father's notoriety.

And after her parents' divorce, she started spending more and more time in her office.

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Her talent for public speaking led her to study law and then, in 1998, she was a legal adviser to her father's party.

As she rose through the ranks — becoming vice president, a European Parliament lawmaker, and then a parliamentarian in France — she, too, tried to soften the party's image.

This caused tension in her relationship with her father.

And it wasn't until she became president of the organization, in 2011, that she was able to reshape the party as much as she wanted.

However, Le Pen shares her father's views on immigration.

In his failed campaign against Macron, he tried to position himself as a French Donald Trump, claiming to represent the forgotten French working classes who have suffered in the wake of globalization and technological progress.

But her economic nationalist stance, her views on immigration, Euroscepticism and her positions on Islam in France (she wants to make it illegal for women to wear a veil in public) proved unpopular with the French electorate, as she was defeated in her first fight against Macron.

In the weeks leading up to the first round of elections, Le Pen campaigned intensely on pocket issues, often starting interviews and media appearances explaining to voters how she would help them cope with inflation and rising taxes. fuel prices, main topics for the French public.

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But some of Le Pen's other political positions could come back to haunt her in the second round because of the war in Ukraine.

She has long been a vocal admirer of Vladimir Putin, the Russian strongman who has become an outcast in the West due to the Kremlin's decision to attack his neighbor.

Le Pen visited the Russian strongman during the 2017 presidential campaign, but this time she was forced to throw away a brochure of hers with a photo of her and Putin from that post-invasion trip.

His previous aversion to NATO (Le Pen's campaign platform in 2017 included pulling France out of the alliance) could also be a drag.

With information from CNN's Melissa Bell

Elections in France National Front Marine Le Pen

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2022-04-21

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