Marion Anne Perrine "Marine" Le Pen (French: [maʁin lə pɛn]; born 5 August 1968) is a French politician and lawyer serving as President of the National Rally political party (previously named National Front) since 2011, with a brief interruption in 2017. She has been the member of the National Assembly for Pas-de-Calais's 11th constituency since 18 June 2017.
She is the youngest daughter of party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen and the aunt of former FN MP Marion Maréchal. Le Pen joined the FN in 1986 and was elected as a Regional Councillor (1998–present), a Member of European Parliament (2004–2017), and a municipal councillor in Hénin-Beaumont (2008–2011). She won the leadership of the FN in 2011, with 67.65% of the vote, defeating Bruno Gollnisch and succeeding her father, who had been president of the party since he founded it in 1972.[1][2][3] In 2012, she placed third in the presidential election with 17.90% of the vote, behind François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy.[4][5][6] She launched a second bid to become President of France at the 2017 presidential election. She finished second in the first round of the election, with 21.30% of the vote, and faced Emmanuel Macron of centrist party En Marche! in the second round of voting. On 7 May 2017, she conceded after receiving approximately 33.9% of the vote in the second round.[7]
Described as more republican than her nationalist father, Le Pen has led a movement of "de-demonization of the National Front" to soften its image,[8] based on renovated positions and renewed teams, and expelling controversial members accused of racism, antisemitism, or Pétainism. She expelled her father from the party on 20 August 2015, after he made new controversial statements.[9][10] She has also relaxed some political positions of the party, advocating for civil unions for same-sex couples instead of her party's previous opposition to legal recognition of same-sex partnerships, accepting unconditional abortion and withdrawing the death penalty from her platform.[11][12][13] A vocal opponent of the United States and NATO, she has pledged to remove France from their spheres of influence.[14]
Le Pen was ranked among the most influential people in 2011 and 2015, by the Time 100.[15][16] In 2016, she was ranked by Politico as the second-most influential MEP in the European Parliament, after President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz
Childhood
Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen was born on 5 August 1968 in Neuilly-sur-Seine,[18] the youngest of three daughters of Jean-Marie Le Pen, a Breton politician and former paratrooper, and his first wife, Pierrette Lalanne. She was baptized 25 April 1969, at La Madeleine by Father Pohpot. Her godfather was Henri Botey, a relative of her father.
She has two sisters: Yann and Marie Caroline. In 1976, when Marine was eight, a bomb meant for her father exploded in the stairwell outside the family's apartment as they slept.[19] The blast ripped a hole in the outside wall of the building, but Marine, her two older sisters and their parents were unharmed.[20]
She was a student at the Lycée Florent Schmitt in Saint-Cloud. Her mother left the family in 1984, when Marine was 16. Le Pen wrote in her autobiography that the effect was "the most awful, cruel, crushing of pains of the heart: my mother did not love me."[21] Her parents divorced in 1987.[22][23]
Legal studies and work
Le Pen studied law at Panthéon-Assas University, graduating with a Master of Laws in 1991 and a Master of Advanced Studies (DEA) in criminal law in 1992.[24] Registered at the Paris bar association, she worked as a lawyer for six years (1992–1998),[24] appearing regularly before the criminal chamber of the 23rd district court of Paris which judges immediate appearances, and often acting as a public defender. She was a member of the Bar of Paris until 1998, when she joined the legal department of the National Front.
Personal life
Le Pen was raised Roman Catholic.[25] In 1995, she married Franck Chauffroy, a business executive who worked for the National Front. She has three children with Chauffroy (Jehanne, Louis, and Mathilde).[22] After her divorce from Chauffroy in 2000, she married Eric Lorio in 2002, the former national secretary of the National Front and a former adviser to the Regional election in Nord-Pas-de-Calais. They divorced in 2006.
Since 2009, she has been in a relationship with Louis Aliot, who is of ethnic French Pied-Noir and Algerian Jewish heritage.[26] He was the National Front general secretary from 2005 to 2010, then the National Front vice president.[27] She spends most of her time in Saint-Cloud, and has lived in La Celle-Saint-Cloud with her three children since September 2014. She has an apartment in Hénin-Beaumont. In 2010, she bought a house with Aliot in Millas.[28]
Early political career
1986–2010: Rise within the National Front
Marine Le Pen joined the FN in 1986, at the age of 18. She acquired her first political mandate in 1988 when she was elected a Regional Councillor for Nord-Pas-de-Calais. In the same year, she joined the FN's juridical branch, which she led until 2003.
In 2000, she became president of Generations Le Pen, a loose association close to the party which aimed at "de-demonizing the Front National".[22] She became a member the FN Executive Committee (French: bureau politique) in 2000, and vice-president of the FN in 2003.[22] In 2006, she managed the presidential campaign of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. She became one of the two executive vice-presidents of the FN in 2007, with responsibility for training, communication and publicity.[24]
2010–11: Leadership campaign
Early in 2010 Le Pen expressed her intention to run for leader of the FN, saying that she hoped to make the party "a big popular party that addresses itself not only to the electorate on the right but to all the French people".[3]
On 3 September 2010, she launched her leadership campaign at Cuers, Var.[29] During a meeting in Paris on 14 November 2010, she said that her goal was "not only to assemble our political family. It consists of shaping the Front National as the center of grouping of the whole French people", adding that in her view the FN leader should be the party's candidate in the 2012 presidential election.[30] She spent four months campaigning for the FN leadership, holding meetings with FN members in 51 departments.[31] All the other departments were visited by one of her official supporters.[32] During her final meeting of the campaign in Hénin-Beaumont on 19 December 2010, she claimed that the FN would present the real debate of the next presidential campaign.[33][34] Her candidacy was endorsed by a majority of senior figures in the party,[32] including Jean-Marie Le Pen, her father.[35][36]
On several occasions during her campaign she ruled out any political alliance with the Union for a Popular Movement.[37][38] She also distanced herself from some of Jean-Marie Le Pen's most controversial statements,[39] such as those relating to war-crimes, which was reported in the media as attempts to improve the party's image. While her father had attracted controversy by saying that the gas chambers were "a detail of the history of World War II", she described them as "the height of barbarism".[40][41]
In December 2010 and early January 2011, FN members voted by post to elect their new president and the members of the central committee. The party held a congress at Tours on 15–16 January.[42] On 16 January 2011, Marine Le Pen was elected as the new president of the FN, with 67.65% of the vote (11,546 votes to 5,522 for Bruno Gollnisch),[24][43] and Jean-Marie Le Pen became honorary chairman.
Controversy
Marine Le Pen received substantial media attention during the campaign as a result of comments, made during a speech to party members in Lyon on 10 December 2010, in which she compared the blocking of public streets and squares in French cities (in particular rue Myrha in the 18th arrondissement of Paris) for Muslim prayers with the Nazi occupation of France. She said:
For those who want to talk a lot about World War II, if it's about occupation, then we could also talk about it (Muslim prayers in the streets), because that is occupation of territory ... It is an occupation of sections of the territory, of districts in which religious laws apply ... There are of course no tanks, there are no soldiers, but it is nevertheless an occupation and it weighs heavily on local residents.[44]
Her comments were widely criticised by media commentators across the political spectrum.[45][46][47] The Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF),[48] the French Council of Muslim Faith (CFCM)[49] and the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA)[50] condemned her statement, and groups including MRAP (Movement Against Racism and for Friendship between Peoples)[51] and the French Human Rights League (LDH)[52] declared their intention to lodge a formal complaint. The imam of the Great Mosque of Paris and former president of the CFCM, Dalil Boubakeur, commented that though her parallel was questionable and to be condemned, she had asked a valid question.[53]
Le Pen's partner Louis Aliot,[26] a member of the FN's Executive Committee, criticized "the attempted manipulation of opinion by communitarian groups and those really responsible for the current situation in France".[54] On 13 December 2010, Le Pen reasserted her statement during a press conference at the FN headquarters in Nanterre.[55][56][57] After Jean-François Kahn's comments on BFM TV on 13 December 2010, she accused the Élysée Palace of organising "state manipulation" with the intention of demonizing her in public opinion.[58][59]
On 15 December 2015, a Lyon court acquitted her of "inciting hatred", ruling that her statement "did not target all of the Muslim community" and was protected "as a part of freedom of expression".[60]
Leadership of the National Front
De-demonization of the FN
Marine Le Pen is often judged to be generally more moderate than her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.[citation needed] Commentators have highlighted how her calm image contrasts with the stereotypes generally attributed to her political family.[61] At the beginning of her media rise, she often talked about her particular treatment as the daughter of "Le Pen" and of the 1976 attack (then the biggest bomb explosion in France since World War II).[61][62] It has been seen as a way to humanize her party.
For example, Bernard-Henri Lévy, a strong opponent of the FN, talked about "a far-right with a human face".[64] Journalist Michèle Cotta claims that the fact she is a young woman condemning racism and refusing her father's "faults" (notably his enjoyment of shocking other people) contributed to her strategy of de-demonization of the National Front.[65] References to World War II or to the French colonial wars are absent from her speeches, which is often looked on as a generation gap.[66] She distanced herself from her father on the gas chambers he famously called "a detail in the history of World War II", saying that she "didn't share the same vision of these events".[67] L'Express wrote that the expulsion of Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2015 was the completion of her endeavour. The opponents of the FN denounce it as a more-dangerous strategy because of its evident success.[68]
In a 2010 RTL interview, Le Pen stated that her strategy was not about changing the FN's program but about showing it as it really is, instead of the image given to it by the media in the previous decades. The media and her political adversaries are accused of spreading an "unfair, wrong and caricatural" image of the National Front. She refuses the qualification of far-right or extreme-right, considering it a "pejorative" term: "How am I party of the extreme right? ... I don't think that our propositions are extreme propositions, whatever the subject".[69] However, the radical far-right (e.g., Minute, Rivarol, Patrick Buisson, Henry de Lesquen) reproached her for abandoning or softening her stances on immigration, gay marriage and abortion. In her speech in Lyon on 10 December 2010, she mentioned the fate of gays living in difficult neighbourhoods, victims of religious laws replacing the republican law.[70][71][72]
In 2014, the American magazine Foreign Policy mentioned her, along with four other French people, in its list of the 100 global thinkers of the year, underlining the way she "renovated the image" of her party, which had become a model for other right-wing parties in Europe after her success in the European elections.[73] At a European level, she stopped the alliance built by her father with some right-wing extremist parties and refused to be part of a group with the radical Jobbik or the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn. Her transnational allies share the fact that they have officially condemned antisemitism, accepted a more liberal approach toward social matters, and are sometimes pro-Israel such as the Dutch PVV. French historian Nicolas Lebourg concluded that she is looked upon as a compass for them to follow while maintaining local particularities.[74][75]
While other European populists embraced Donald Trump's candidacy as US President in 2016, she only supported him by saying: "For France, anything is better than Hillary Clinton". However, on 8 November 2016 she posted a tweet congratulating Trump on his presidential victory.[76] Nevertheless, her strategy has difficulties as her image seems to remain controversial: Germany's Angela Merkel has said she "will contribute to make other political forces stronger than the National Front" and Israel still holds a bad opinion of her party.[77][78] Nigel Farage has said: "I've never said a bad word about Marine Le Pen; I've never said a good word about her party".[79]
Her social program and her support of SYRIZA in the 2015 Greek general elections have led Nicolas Sarkozy to declare her a far-left politician sharing some of Jean-Luc Mélenchon's propositions. President François Hollande said she was talking "like a leaflet of the Communist Party". Eric Zemmour, journalist for the conservative newspaper Le Figaro, wrote during the 2012 presidential election that the FN had become a left-wing party under the influence of adviser Florian Philippot. She has also relaxed some political positions of the party, advocating for civil unions for same-sex couples instead of her party's previous opposition to legal recognition of same-sex partnerships, accepting unconditional abortion, and withdrawing the death penalty from her platform.[80][81][11]
First steps as a new leader: 2011
As a president of the Front National, Marine Le Pen currently sits as an ex officio member among the FN Executive Office (8 members),[82] the Executive Committee (42 members)[83] and the Central Committee (3 ex officio members, 100 elected members, 20 co-opted members).[84]
During her opening speech in Tours on 16 January 2011, she advocated to "restore the political framework of the national community" and to implement the direct democracy which enables the "civic responsibility and the collective tie" thanks to the participation of public-spirited citizens for the decisions. The predominant political theme was the uncompromising defence of a protective and efficient state, which favours secularism, prosperity and liberties. She also denounced the "Europe of Brussels" which "everywhere imposed the destructive principles of ultra-liberalism and free trade, at the expense of public utilities, employment, social equity and even our economic growth which became within twenty years the weakest of the world".[85] After the traditional Joan of Arc march and Labour Day march in Paris on 1 May 2011, she gave her first speech in front of 3,000 supporters.[86][87] On 11 August 2011, she held a press conference about the current systemic crisis.[88]
On 10 and 11 September 2011, she made her political comeback with the title "the voice of people, the spirit of France" in the convention center of Acropolis in Nice.[89] During her closing speech she addressed immigration, insecurity, the economic and social situation, reindustrialization and 'strong state'.[90] During a demonstration held in front of the Senate on 8 December 2011, she expressed in a speech her "firm and absolute opposition" to the right of foreigners to vote.[91] She regularly held thematic press conferences[92] and interventions[93] on varied issues in French, European and international politics.
She is the youngest daughter of party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen and the aunt of former FN MP Marion Maréchal. Le Pen joined the FN in 1986 and was elected as a Regional Councillor (1998–present), a Member of European Parliament (2004–2017), and a municipal councillor in Hénin-Beaumont (2008–2011). She won the leadership of the FN in 2011, with 67.65% of the vote, defeating Bruno Gollnisch and succeeding her father, who had been president of the party since he founded it in 1972.[1][2][3] In 2012, she placed third in the presidential election with 17.90% of the vote, behind François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy.[4][5][6] She launched a second bid to become President of France at the 2017 presidential election. She finished second in the first round of the election, with 21.30% of the vote, and faced Emmanuel Macron of centrist party En Marche! in the second round of voting. On 7 May 2017, she conceded after receiving approximately 33.9% of the vote in the second round.[7]
Described as more republican than her nationalist father, Le Pen has led a movement of "de-demonization of the National Front" to soften its image,[8] based on renovated positions and renewed teams, and expelling controversial members accused of racism, antisemitism, or Pétainism. She expelled her father from the party on 20 August 2015, after he made new controversial statements.[9][10] She has also relaxed some political positions of the party, advocating for civil unions for same-sex couples instead of her party's previous opposition to legal recognition of same-sex partnerships, accepting unconditional abortion and withdrawing the death penalty from her platform.[11][12][13] A vocal opponent of the United States and NATO, she has pledged to remove France from their spheres of influence.[14]
Le Pen was ranked among the most influential people in 2011 and 2015, by the Time 100.[15][16] In 2016, she was ranked by Politico as the second-most influential MEP in the European Parliament, after President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz
Childhood
Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen was born on 5 August 1968 in Neuilly-sur-Seine,[18] the youngest of three daughters of Jean-Marie Le Pen, a Breton politician and former paratrooper, and his first wife, Pierrette Lalanne. She was baptized 25 April 1969, at La Madeleine by Father Pohpot. Her godfather was Henri Botey, a relative of her father.
She has two sisters: Yann and Marie Caroline. In 1976, when Marine was eight, a bomb meant for her father exploded in the stairwell outside the family's apartment as they slept.[19] The blast ripped a hole in the outside wall of the building, but Marine, her two older sisters and their parents were unharmed.[20]
She was a student at the Lycée Florent Schmitt in Saint-Cloud. Her mother left the family in 1984, when Marine was 16. Le Pen wrote in her autobiography that the effect was "the most awful, cruel, crushing of pains of the heart: my mother did not love me."[21] Her parents divorced in 1987.[22][23]
Legal studies and work
Le Pen studied law at Panthéon-Assas University, graduating with a Master of Laws in 1991 and a Master of Advanced Studies (DEA) in criminal law in 1992.[24] Registered at the Paris bar association, she worked as a lawyer for six years (1992–1998),[24] appearing regularly before the criminal chamber of the 23rd district court of Paris which judges immediate appearances, and often acting as a public defender. She was a member of the Bar of Paris until 1998, when she joined the legal department of the National Front.
Personal life
Le Pen was raised Roman Catholic.[25] In 1995, she married Franck Chauffroy, a business executive who worked for the National Front. She has three children with Chauffroy (Jehanne, Louis, and Mathilde).[22] After her divorce from Chauffroy in 2000, she married Eric Lorio in 2002, the former national secretary of the National Front and a former adviser to the Regional election in Nord-Pas-de-Calais. They divorced in 2006.
Since 2009, she has been in a relationship with Louis Aliot, who is of ethnic French Pied-Noir and Algerian Jewish heritage.[26] He was the National Front general secretary from 2005 to 2010, then the National Front vice president.[27] She spends most of her time in Saint-Cloud, and has lived in La Celle-Saint-Cloud with her three children since September 2014. She has an apartment in Hénin-Beaumont. In 2010, she bought a house with Aliot in Millas.[28]
Early political career
1986–2010: Rise within the National Front
Marine Le Pen joined the FN in 1986, at the age of 18. She acquired her first political mandate in 1988 when she was elected a Regional Councillor for Nord-Pas-de-Calais. In the same year, she joined the FN's juridical branch, which she led until 2003.
In 2000, she became president of Generations Le Pen, a loose association close to the party which aimed at "de-demonizing the Front National".[22] She became a member the FN Executive Committee (French: bureau politique) in 2000, and vice-president of the FN in 2003.[22] In 2006, she managed the presidential campaign of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. She became one of the two executive vice-presidents of the FN in 2007, with responsibility for training, communication and publicity.[24]
2010–11: Leadership campaign
Early in 2010 Le Pen expressed her intention to run for leader of the FN, saying that she hoped to make the party "a big popular party that addresses itself not only to the electorate on the right but to all the French people".[3]
On 3 September 2010, she launched her leadership campaign at Cuers, Var.[29] During a meeting in Paris on 14 November 2010, she said that her goal was "not only to assemble our political family. It consists of shaping the Front National as the center of grouping of the whole French people", adding that in her view the FN leader should be the party's candidate in the 2012 presidential election.[30] She spent four months campaigning for the FN leadership, holding meetings with FN members in 51 departments.[31] All the other departments were visited by one of her official supporters.[32] During her final meeting of the campaign in Hénin-Beaumont on 19 December 2010, she claimed that the FN would present the real debate of the next presidential campaign.[33][34] Her candidacy was endorsed by a majority of senior figures in the party,[32] including Jean-Marie Le Pen, her father.[35][36]
On several occasions during her campaign she ruled out any political alliance with the Union for a Popular Movement.[37][38] She also distanced herself from some of Jean-Marie Le Pen's most controversial statements,[39] such as those relating to war-crimes, which was reported in the media as attempts to improve the party's image. While her father had attracted controversy by saying that the gas chambers were "a detail of the history of World War II", she described them as "the height of barbarism".[40][41]
In December 2010 and early January 2011, FN members voted by post to elect their new president and the members of the central committee. The party held a congress at Tours on 15–16 January.[42] On 16 January 2011, Marine Le Pen was elected as the new president of the FN, with 67.65% of the vote (11,546 votes to 5,522 for Bruno Gollnisch),[24][43] and Jean-Marie Le Pen became honorary chairman.
Controversy
Marine Le Pen received substantial media attention during the campaign as a result of comments, made during a speech to party members in Lyon on 10 December 2010, in which she compared the blocking of public streets and squares in French cities (in particular rue Myrha in the 18th arrondissement of Paris) for Muslim prayers with the Nazi occupation of France. She said:
For those who want to talk a lot about World War II, if it's about occupation, then we could also talk about it (Muslim prayers in the streets), because that is occupation of territory ... It is an occupation of sections of the territory, of districts in which religious laws apply ... There are of course no tanks, there are no soldiers, but it is nevertheless an occupation and it weighs heavily on local residents.[44]
Her comments were widely criticised by media commentators across the political spectrum.[45][46][47] The Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF),[48] the French Council of Muslim Faith (CFCM)[49] and the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism (LICRA)[50] condemned her statement, and groups including MRAP (Movement Against Racism and for Friendship between Peoples)[51] and the French Human Rights League (LDH)[52] declared their intention to lodge a formal complaint. The imam of the Great Mosque of Paris and former president of the CFCM, Dalil Boubakeur, commented that though her parallel was questionable and to be condemned, she had asked a valid question.[53]
Le Pen's partner Louis Aliot,[26] a member of the FN's Executive Committee, criticized "the attempted manipulation of opinion by communitarian groups and those really responsible for the current situation in France".[54] On 13 December 2010, Le Pen reasserted her statement during a press conference at the FN headquarters in Nanterre.[55][56][57] After Jean-François Kahn's comments on BFM TV on 13 December 2010, she accused the Élysée Palace of organising "state manipulation" with the intention of demonizing her in public opinion.[58][59]
On 15 December 2015, a Lyon court acquitted her of "inciting hatred", ruling that her statement "did not target all of the Muslim community" and was protected "as a part of freedom of expression".[60]
Leadership of the National Front
De-demonization of the FN
Marine Le Pen is often judged to be generally more moderate than her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.[citation needed] Commentators have highlighted how her calm image contrasts with the stereotypes generally attributed to her political family.[61] At the beginning of her media rise, she often talked about her particular treatment as the daughter of "Le Pen" and of the 1976 attack (then the biggest bomb explosion in France since World War II).[61][62] It has been seen as a way to humanize her party.
For example, Bernard-Henri Lévy, a strong opponent of the FN, talked about "a far-right with a human face".[64] Journalist Michèle Cotta claims that the fact she is a young woman condemning racism and refusing her father's "faults" (notably his enjoyment of shocking other people) contributed to her strategy of de-demonization of the National Front.[65] References to World War II or to the French colonial wars are absent from her speeches, which is often looked on as a generation gap.[66] She distanced herself from her father on the gas chambers he famously called "a detail in the history of World War II", saying that she "didn't share the same vision of these events".[67] L'Express wrote that the expulsion of Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2015 was the completion of her endeavour. The opponents of the FN denounce it as a more-dangerous strategy because of its evident success.[68]
In a 2010 RTL interview, Le Pen stated that her strategy was not about changing the FN's program but about showing it as it really is, instead of the image given to it by the media in the previous decades. The media and her political adversaries are accused of spreading an "unfair, wrong and caricatural" image of the National Front. She refuses the qualification of far-right or extreme-right, considering it a "pejorative" term: "How am I party of the extreme right? ... I don't think that our propositions are extreme propositions, whatever the subject".[69] However, the radical far-right (e.g., Minute, Rivarol, Patrick Buisson, Henry de Lesquen) reproached her for abandoning or softening her stances on immigration, gay marriage and abortion. In her speech in Lyon on 10 December 2010, she mentioned the fate of gays living in difficult neighbourhoods, victims of religious laws replacing the republican law.[70][71][72]
In 2014, the American magazine Foreign Policy mentioned her, along with four other French people, in its list of the 100 global thinkers of the year, underlining the way she "renovated the image" of her party, which had become a model for other right-wing parties in Europe after her success in the European elections.[73] At a European level, she stopped the alliance built by her father with some right-wing extremist parties and refused to be part of a group with the radical Jobbik or the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn. Her transnational allies share the fact that they have officially condemned antisemitism, accepted a more liberal approach toward social matters, and are sometimes pro-Israel such as the Dutch PVV. French historian Nicolas Lebourg concluded that she is looked upon as a compass for them to follow while maintaining local particularities.[74][75]
While other European populists embraced Donald Trump's candidacy as US President in 2016, she only supported him by saying: "For France, anything is better than Hillary Clinton". However, on 8 November 2016 she posted a tweet congratulating Trump on his presidential victory.[76] Nevertheless, her strategy has difficulties as her image seems to remain controversial: Germany's Angela Merkel has said she "will contribute to make other political forces stronger than the National Front" and Israel still holds a bad opinion of her party.[77][78] Nigel Farage has said: "I've never said a bad word about Marine Le Pen; I've never said a good word about her party".[79]
Her social program and her support of SYRIZA in the 2015 Greek general elections have led Nicolas Sarkozy to declare her a far-left politician sharing some of Jean-Luc Mélenchon's propositions. President François Hollande said she was talking "like a leaflet of the Communist Party". Eric Zemmour, journalist for the conservative newspaper Le Figaro, wrote during the 2012 presidential election that the FN had become a left-wing party under the influence of adviser Florian Philippot. She has also relaxed some political positions of the party, advocating for civil unions for same-sex couples instead of her party's previous opposition to legal recognition of same-sex partnerships, accepting unconditional abortion, and withdrawing the death penalty from her platform.[80][81][11]
First steps as a new leader: 2011
As a president of the Front National, Marine Le Pen currently sits as an ex officio member among the FN Executive Office (8 members),[82] the Executive Committee (42 members)[83] and the Central Committee (3 ex officio members, 100 elected members, 20 co-opted members).[84]
During her opening speech in Tours on 16 January 2011, she advocated to "restore the political framework of the national community" and to implement the direct democracy which enables the "civic responsibility and the collective tie" thanks to the participation of public-spirited citizens for the decisions. The predominant political theme was the uncompromising defence of a protective and efficient state, which favours secularism, prosperity and liberties. She also denounced the "Europe of Brussels" which "everywhere imposed the destructive principles of ultra-liberalism and free trade, at the expense of public utilities, employment, social equity and even our economic growth which became within twenty years the weakest of the world".[85] After the traditional Joan of Arc march and Labour Day march in Paris on 1 May 2011, she gave her first speech in front of 3,000 supporters.[86][87] On 11 August 2011, she held a press conference about the current systemic crisis.[88]
On 10 and 11 September 2011, she made her political comeback with the title "the voice of people, the spirit of France" in the convention center of Acropolis in Nice.[89] During her closing speech she addressed immigration, insecurity, the economic and social situation, reindustrialization and 'strong state'.[90] During a demonstration held in front of the Senate on 8 December 2011, she expressed in a speech her "firm and absolute opposition" to the right of foreigners to vote.[91] She regularly held thematic press conferences[92] and interventions[93] on varied issues in French, European and international politics.
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