How Marine Le Pen is Changing the Face of France's Far-Right

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It isn't a full house at the Center of Permanent Education in the northern French city of Lille, but on this snowy December evening the main attraction emphatically works the crowd from uproarious laughter to gasps of horror, from murmured outrage to standing ovations. But the speaker who has the audience of 250 or so hanging on every word isn't a stand-up comic or a self-improvement guru. It's Marine Le Pen, the youngest daughter of extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, and she's wrapping up a three-month tour of France in a campaign to succeed her father as leader of their reinvigorated National Front party.

"Three years ago, the National Front was declared finished - emptied out and pillaged by Nicolas Sarkozy," Marine Le Pen told the rapt room, harkening back to the 2007 presidential election which Sarkozy won after seducing a huge number of National Front (FN) voters to his side by tilting towards hard-line positions on immigration and crime. Now, Le Pen notes, polls show support for the FN surging anew with the 2012 presidential contest in view. "Together," she says to loud cheers, "we will make France's political class tremble!" (See pictures of the French cracking down on migrants.)

To a large degree, it already is - with a whole lot more shaking in store if Le Pen has her way. Her emergence as the face of the far-right started in 2009, when she won a municipal counselor's seat in the northern French town of HÉnin-Beaumont and narrowly missed claiming the mayor's office from the left for the FN. Now Le Pen, 42, looks virtually certain to fill her father's post as president of the party during its congress on Jan. 15 and 16, thanks to a campaign drive that speaks to the FN's core while also catching the attention of mainstream France. The FN, its voters, and Jean-Marie Le Pen have long been vilified as untouchable neo-fascist pariah of France's political scene. But the younger Le Pen has a way of defending extreme-right policies with a moderate tone. As a result, many voters who once dismissed the FN as illegitimate feel its positions are to starting to sound almost acceptable.

To a growing minority, Le Pen is a peculiar oxymoron: a kinder, gentler breed of extreme-rightist. She rejects claims from critics that she's earned that reputation only by peddling a re-packaged platform of FN Lite. Le Pen stresses that the positions she and her father hold are virtually identical. Yet she also readily acknowledges that her being a twice divorced working single mother with three children provides her a more modern-looking public profile than those of her father and the older generation of FN politicians. "I'm anchored in the reality of most people today," she tells TIME after the Lille meeting, saying that firsthand perspective is one reason she supports the abortion rights that older FN leaders oppose. "I'm a product of my times, and defend the policies of the National Front and its voters from that experience." (See Video: "Why Youths are Protesting France's Retirement Reforms.")

And she's good at it, which is a big reason why Sarkozy and his conservative government have repeatedly jerked policy in Le Pen's direction over the past 18 months. To the horror of those who oppose any pandering to extreme-right voters, Sarkozy has been stealing pages from the FN's playbook by making vows to cut back immigration, appearing to stigmatize foreigners and minorities with last year's national debate on French identity, and expelling thousands of European Roma under what he called a "war against crime".

"Those and other measures inspired by the extreme-right were intended to halt Marine Le Pen's spreading influence, but they produced the opposite affect," says StÉphane RozÈs, a political analyst and president of the Paris-based CAP consultancy. "They made Sarkozy appear to validate National Front claims of immigration being responsible for rising crime and loss of French identity, and led many unhappy voters to view Marine Le Pen as a credible voice mainstream conservatives are trying to imitate." (Read: "How to Save Rural France.")

In turn, that has helped Le Pen's "de-demonization" of the FN among mainstream voters - "breaking with the radical, excessive anachronistic groups" of notoriously neo-fascists, racists and revisionists whose support, she says, "has always acted as a brake on our progression." That is the biggest point of conflict in her battle for the party leadership against Bruno Gollnisch - a 60-year-old, long-time lieutenant to Jean-Marie Le Pen whose strongest support has been from such hardcore FN traditionalists. But Le Pen's expanding allure with the wider party base (and the increasingly partisan endorsements by her father) has her heavily favored to capture the FN presidency in January. A mid-December poll of National Front sympathizers showed a whopping 91% wanting Marine to assume the party's top spot - and as such, become its candidate for France's 2012 presidential election.

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Even more significant for France's wider political scene is Le Pen's creeping appeal among voters who've historically shunned the FN's ideology and considered the Le Pen name iconic of everything that's wrong with the extreme right. A poll in early December found 27% of people expressing a favorable opinion of Le Pen - a better score than her father enjoyed at his peak. The same survey found 35% see Le Pen fille as less extreme in both her political positions and language than her father - the latter view perhaps not surprising, given Jean-Marie's hate speech convictions for calling World War II gas chambers a "detail" of history" and characterizing the Nazi occupation of France as "not particularly inhumane".

But Le Pen rejects suggestions that she's softening the party's tenets. She echoes traditional FN calls to halt immigration, withdraw France from the euro, wrest French sovereignty back from the European Union, restore the death penalty for certain crimes, and practice "national preference" to reserve jobs, financial aid, and public housing for French citizens over foreigners - all of which her father championed to the jeers of most of France for nearly 40 years. Also like her father, Le Pen has been at the center of several roiling controversies - the most explosive of them provoked by anti-Muslim language that sounds even more overtly Islamophobic than her father's. She rails against "a minority people who want to impose religious law - notably the Sharia favored by radical Islamists - on the French majority", and makes it clear that she feels Islam is incompatible with "the values and traditions rooted in the Christian history" of France. Most recently, Le Pen sparked a storm of protest worthy of her father in mid-December when she compared Muslims who pray in the streets when their mosques are full to the illegal "occupation of territory" by the Nazis during World War II. (Read: "France's Crusade Against Faith.")

"Marine Le Pen is her father!" said Jean-FranÇois CopÉ, general secretary of the ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), in response. "It's exactly the same personality, the same techniques, the same amalgams and same speech." But Le Pen brushes off CopÉ's comments as a tactic designed to "distract people from what we're actually saying - especially our position against the euro, which, right now in particular, has them terrified the public will realize we've been right on that all along." (Comment on this story.)

Still, despite the softening of the public's opinion of Le Pen, most in France still agree with CopÉ, meaning Le Pen's divisive message and repositioned xenophobia will likely only ever win the backing of a minority of voters. Nevertheless, should the number of people who say they will or might vote for Le Pen - a tally of 17% in a recent poll - continue to grow, she could still provoke major political shifts to the right without ever winning national office. And the perfect storm to bring that about could well be forming on France's horizon. (Watch: French Students Protest Burqa Ban With High Heels, Mini-Shorts.)

With the next presidential election just 18 months off, Sarkozy is suffering historically low approval ratings of scarcely 25%. Just as bad, polls show that any of the several Socialists seeking their party's nomination for the 2012 race would beat him if the election were held today. The situation could get even stickier for Sarkozy if rival candidates from his own camp decide to run as well, and split the center-right vote.

Where does Le Pen fit in? A recent poll found that 30% of UMP supporters want the party to end its ostracism of the FN and form an alliance which would span extreme right to center. So, even if Le Pen doesn't replicate her father's 2002 coup of exploiting a divided mainstream field to qualify as a finalist for the run-of, a sufficiently strong showing by her in 2012 could make the FN an irresistible coalition partner for conservatives struggling to stay in power - or looking for a way back to it from defeat. (Read: "The March to the Far Right.)

"Linking up with Marine Le Pen is something some of Sarkozy's advisers and a certain number of UMP members are already considering," says analyst RozÈs, though he notes a clear majority of conservatives still dismiss the idea as political suicide. "That partnership would likely strengthen the extreme-right at the expense of the traditional right, and risk splitting conservatives who support dealing with the FN and those who reject it as a dangerous, anti-democratic force. But it's undeniable some conservatives are already contemplating it."

For nearly 40 years, France's mainstream rightists - and general public - have made it a point of honor to shun Jean-Marie Le Pen and his band of reactionary backers. But if Marine Le Pen keeps convincing voters to hear her out into 2012, French conservatives may finally decide they can no longer afford to shun the new-look extreme right.