How Marine Le Pen survived bomb attack by her Holocaust-denying father’s enemies before ousting from his party to become French presidential candidate
The far-right firebrand has softened her party's image and is going head to head with Presidential frontrunner Emmanuel Macron
FRENCH firebrand Marine Le Pen has dramatically shed her far-right party’s controversial past and is storming towards the French presidency.
National Front leader Len Pen, 48, who expelled her own dad from the party he founded, will go head to head with centrist Emmanuel Macron in a sensational run off for France’s top job on May 7.
Born in 1968, the fiery right-winger has been involved in the cauldron of French politics since she was a small child when she would accompany her father Jean Marine Le Pen to political rallies.
Aged eight, Ms Le Pen saw first-hand the divisive nature of her dad's politics, when she survived a bomb attack on her home orchestrated by Jean Marie’s political enemies.
The National Front was founded in the early 70s and consisted of xenophobes and former Nazi collaborators which operated on the fringes of French politics.
In the 1980s, her mother Pierrette Lalanne posed naked for Playboy in a vicious attempt to hurt her estranged husband Jean Marie.
In her younger days Marine was known for her hard-partying lifestyle, but eventually trained as a criminal lawyer and began working as a public defender in the early 1990s.
She married and divorced fellow National Front member Franck Chauffroy with whom she has three children.
The incredibly private politician is now twice divorced.
Ms Le Pen kicked off her political career in 1998 by winning a regional post and quickly rose through the party’s ranks.
She eventually succeeded her father as party leader in 2011 and ruthlessly expelled him from the National Front in 2015 when he dismissed the Holocaust gas chambers as a "detail of history".
As leader, Ms Le Pen began to soften the party’s image by purging it off its anti-Semitic and racist rhetoric while maintaining its anti-immigration and anti-Islamic stances.
And in a country wounded by the recession and tortured by brainwashed terrorists, the 48-year-old’s public following has grown rapidly.
She believes French citizenship should be “either inherited or merited” and has vowed to slash immigration levels.
In the wake of the deadly Charlie Hebdo attack of 2015, Ms Le Pen launched an assault on Islamist terrorism, which she infamously called “a cancer on Islam”.
After the UK's vote to leave the EU, she held a press conference and chose the Union Jack to illustrate her Twitter account alongside the word "Brexit".
She lavished praise on Brits for standing up to the “totalitarian EU, that prison of people”. "Frexit is next", she vowed.
How does the French Presidential election work?
France has a run-off voting system also known as a two round system.
After the first round of voting, if the winning candidate does not have an absolute majority (or 40-45% of the electorate with a significant winning margin) a second round is held.
But in the second and final vote only the top two candidates are kept while the others are eliminated.
In the 2017 election, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen are the only two candidates who have advanced to the ‘run-off’ which will be held on May 7.
In the 2002 French presidential election, no candidate received an absolute majority so the top two – Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen – went to a second vote, which Chirac won.
The system ensures that the elected President always obtains a majority.
In order to be admitted as an official candidate, runners must receive signed nominations from more than 500 elected officials.
Announcing her candidacy, Le Pen introduced her 144 "commitments" promising to give control back to France and protecting the country from globalisation.
Ms Le Pen says she is determined to lower taxes, but increase welfare payments for the working-class.
She also wants to end access to free basic healthcare for illegal migrants.
Most recently, her campaign team have shown support Donald Trump's "Muslim travel ban" and suggested a similar measure could be implemented in France.
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