Marion Marechal Le Pen has boosted in the polls since the Paris terror attacks. Photo / Getty
Marion Marechal Le Pen has boosted in the polls since the Paris terror attacks. Photo / Getty
She is the girl wonder of the far-Right, a glamorous 25-year-old poised to break down many mainstream conservatives' qualms about casting their vote for the Front National.
Since she was elected as the youngest MP in French parliamentary history, aged 22, while a Sorbonne law student, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, nieceof the party's president Marine and granddaughter of its obstreperous founder Jean-Marie, has had the steepest learning curve in French politics since Bonaparte's.
Tonight, (On Sunday night) buoyed by the shock of the Islamist shootings in Paris, the list she heads is widely expected to come in first in the Provence-Cote d'Azur region, with polls giving her some 40 per cent of the vote. Even if the third-ranking Socialists drop out to favour her Gaullist opponent in next Sunday's runoff, Marion, as she is known, can give the FN a shot at ruling one of France's most dynamic regions.
These "regionales" will mark the Day of Marion, a new-look, formidably effective politician, who day after day has been making her mark.
The prime-time debate a month ago between the former prime minister and presidential hopeful Alain Juppe, 72, and Ms Marechal-Le Pen, the FN's sole MP, looked to be an unequal battle. The Bordeaux mayor expected an easy win. It didn't go that way.
With the odd toss of her long blond hair, the poised Ms Marechal Le Pen trounced one of France's best-known political figures. She gave back soundbite for soundbite, quoting from Juppe's campaign platform verbatim, forcing him to look up his own points in the book he signed, and dropping on occasion the kind of Latin quote, Boris Johnson-like, which France's Right-wing electorate loves. She made him sound old without sounding wiser.
In debate, she is cool and literate, a style better suited to television than Marine's rabble-rousing oratory. It enables her to make careful points on immigration, Islam and French identity. The mother of a one-year-old girl, with a businessman husband, Marion ticks many boxes neither Marine nor Jean-Marie Le Pen can fill.
While Marine, who lives unmarried with her partner and her three children from her second husband, says she is unpopular with Catholics because of her divorces, Marion tied the knot in church before she had her daughter Olympe. Marine's chief adviser, a former Leftist Socialist, was outed as gay when holidaying with his partner: Marion supported the movement against gay marriage with brought millions in the streets in 2012.
Marine Le Pen's new voters largely come from the Left; Marion's from the mainstream Right. The obvious advantages mean that any rivalry will have to wait.
