The House of Le Pen: France's political immortals

 

The House of Le Pen:

France's political immortals

 

Marine Le Pen’s political future may be cut short. Her father Jean-Marie is dead. Their movement, however, is set for a long life.

 

By VICTOR GOURY-LAFFONT

CGI illustrations by Ricardo Rey for POLITICO

March 26, 2025 10:12 pm CET

https://www.politico.eu/article/marine-le-pen-trial-sentence-jean-marie-france-far-right-politics-jordan-bardella-national-rally/

 

JEAN-MARIE LE PEN, THE INCENDIARY FOUNDER of France’s largest far-right party, was buried on Jan. 11 on an unusually sunny winter’s day in the fancy resort of La Trinité-sur-Mer, where he was born in 1928.

 

The day started with a ceremony inside a modest church built of distinctive Breton granite, where security needed to fend off a handful of skinheads looking to crash the funeral. Perhaps fittingly for a fisherman’s son, it ended with drinks at an unpretentious seafood restaurant, adorned with paintings of local marine life.

 

The funeral was conspicuously subdued for a man who spent his political career as a boisterous, eyepatch-wearing bogeyman. A former paratrooper in the Algerian war who played down the Holocaust, Le Pen helped forge what was to become — in its latest incarnation as the National Rally — Europe’s most powerful populist, anti-immigration party. Though many people gathered around the graveyard to catch a glimpse of events, only a couple of hundred of those closest to him were officially invited.

 

Attendees included family and allies who accompanied him over the span of his long career: his youngest daughter, Marine, who took over what was then known as the National Front about 15 years ago; Bruno Gollnisch, the man who had long hoped to inherit the party but was ultimately unable to compete with a family member; and Marion Maréchal, the cherished granddaughter whose loyalty to her grandfather’s ideals eventually pushed her to leave the party Marine rebranded, believing the National Rally had become too moderate.

 

The festivities had the air of a series finale, not too dissimilar to HBO’s “Succession.” French media may like to compare the Arnault dynasty that runs LVMH to the fictional Roy family, but it’s the Le Pens who boast France’s most complex, drama-packed saga. And it’s their family empire at risk of crumbling, with an outsider — 29-year-old National Rally President Jordan Bardella — stepping in to take the reins.

 

While Marine has no intention of stepping aside willingly, legal troubles may force her hand. 

 

Last year she and the National Rally were charged with participating in a scheme to embezzle millions of euros worth of European Parliament funds, and prosecutors have asked that the far-right leader be immediately barred from running for public office for the next five years — which would include the next presidential election scheduled for 2027, a vote she knows she has a shot at winning. 

 

The verdict will be delivered on Monday and, if the judges agree to hand down her sentence right away rather than wait for the appeals process to play out, it could shatter Le Pen’s dreams of climbing the steps of the Élysée Palace. 

 

But the story of the Le Pens has never been one of a clan ready to accept collapse; it’s one of constant resurrection. Whatever happens, this is not going to be the final chapter, particularly given the popularity of her party and of the movement at large.  

 

For five decades, the family has weathered scandals in the media, battles lost in court and defeats at the ballot box, only to come back stronger. And even if none of Jean-Marie’s blonde scions make their way to the Elysée, the Le Pens’ ideological mission — mainstreaming the far right in a country haunted by its history of Nazi collaboration — has been accomplished.

 

“There’s something tragic to Marine Le Pen’s story,” said one of the far-right leader’s closest allies, who, like others quoted in this story, was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the Le Pens and their future. “But in the tragic dimension, there’s a constant blessing. She always comes back.”

 

Mainstreaming the far right

Two years before Marine was born, Jean-Marie founded the National Front alongside a ragtag group of political misfits and Nazi collaborators.

 

The party was a bit player during Jean-Marie’s first presidential run in 1974 and various local races that followed before his breakthrough in the 1984 European election, when it won 11 percent of the general vote. Two years later, Jean-Marie and 34 other members of the National Front were elected to the National Assembly.

 

Jean-Marie initially built his success by appealing to upper-class voters before “gradually taking hold among blue-collar workers,” said Nonna Mayer, a leading academic expert on the French far right. He successfully stoked xenophobia, particularly against immigrants from Africa, and sought to capitalize on the suffering of those living in France’s former coal and steel regions by gradually shifting toward protectionism — decades before Donald Trump’s MAGA movement employed the same tactics.

 

In 2002, he reached the pinnacle of his political career, shocking the country by making the runoff against Jacques Chirac in that year’s presidential election. Ultimately, he was utterly crushed in the second round, by a margin of 82.2 percent to 17.8 percent.

 

That performance revealed an important truth: A country haunted by its collaboration with the Nazis was never going to accept a politician convicted of antisemitic hate speech. 

 

“[The Le Pen name] invokes the sulfurous origin of this party, with Holocaust deniers, former members of the Waffen-SS, and Vichy regime collaborators,” said Mayer.

 

On the night of the election, few party operatives were eager to jump on a television set and offer post-game analysis. It fell to Marine, then a 34-year-old regional councilor, to speak on behalf of the party and family. 

 

Feigning confusion, she asked: “Tonight, I can hear all the politicians unanimously telling us that, thanks to them, the Republic, liberty and democracy have been saved, but saved from what?” 

 

“The Republic, liberty and democracy have never had enemies, at least not in our camp,” she said.

 

That appearance was widely regarded as the moment it became clear Marine would take the mantle from her father. 

 

When the time came to unveil his successor little less than a decade later, Jean-Marie announced in his booming voice to a crowd of partisans that Marine had been elected to the post. The new face of the far right took her place on stage, bowed theatrically, and warmly embraced her father.

 

Yet Marine would embark on a mission at odds with Jean-Marie’s rabble-rousing persona, not so much on the party’s positions but on how to message them. With a zeal and ruthlessness that would have made Siobhan Roy, of “Succession,” proud, Marine fought to clean up the National Front’s image and soften its tone to make the party and its policies more palatable to mainstream voters.

 

How far she was willing to go became clear in 2015, when Marine’s then-octogenarian father repeated his claim that the Nazi gas chambers used to commit genocide against millions of Jews had been a mere “point of detail” in World War II history. 

 

Marine had not broken with Jean-Marie when he made that same claim several times before. But this time, she was brutal. She kicked him out of the party he founded, publicly disavowed him and, a couple of years later, changed the National Front’s name to the National Rally to remove any possible whiff of her father’s scent that may have lingered. 

 

Marine’s strategy has paid dividends at the ballot box as a hard-right tide has progressively swept over Europe, and her party’s stances on immigration and security have become increasingly mainstream across the continent.

 

Despite being the face of what had long been one of the most reviled families in France, Marine has come within striking distance of winning the presidency, twice making the runoff. 

 

She lost, on both occasions, to President Emmanuel Macron, but she proved that voters across the political spectrum are no longer joining forces to keep a Le Pen out of power the way they did when Jean-Marie faced off against Jacques Chirac.

 

Marine netted 34 percent of the vote in the second round of the 2017 presidential election and 41.5 percent in 2022 — a remarkable improvement on her father’s showing.

 

Some opinion polling for the next presidential election shows Marine finishing first and making the runoff regardless of which other candidates run. In one survey from respected pollster IFOP, she’s predicted to win the presidency.

 

Political death

Marine Le Pen’s path toward the presidency seemed clear until a pair of prosecutors addressed a packed courtroom under the fluorescent lights of Paris’ state-of-the-art courthouse in September.

 

The lawyers for the state, Louise Neyton and Nicolas Barret, alleged the National Rally and its leadership had, from 2004 to 2016, operated a “system” in which they illicitly siphoned money from the European Parliament earmarked for European parliamentary assistants and illicitly used those funds to pay for party employees who seldom or never dealt with affairs in Brussels or Strasbourg. 

 

Neyton and Barret said the defendants had effectively treated the European Parliament like a “cash cow.” The Parliament itself estimated it was swindled out of €4.5 million.

 

The defendants have repeatedly professed their innocence, and Marine Le Pen made a point of being present in court on nearly every day of the proceedings, presenting a cool demeanor as a token of her good faith.

 

But the National Rally’s defense, for the most part, crashed and burned against the compelling proof presented against the party. The evidence included a text from one of the accused asking if he could be introduced to the MEP he was purportedly working for, months after the contract started. The prosecution also revealed that another defendant had exchanged a single text message over the course of the eight months he was under contract with his purported employer.

 

When the time came for sentencing recommendations, Le Pen sat in the front row, staring directly and listening diligently to the prosecution. Behind her were her 24 co-defendants, all accused of having taken part in or benefited from the scheme, and a flock of party officials and elected representatives who had amassed in the courtroom in a show of solidarity and loyalty to their leader.

 

Le Pen finally lost her temper when Neyton said, in relation to one contract not involving Le Pen, that evidence was scarce, but that it would be “too painful” to call for charges to be dropped, owing to her strong hunch. Le Pen stood up and yelled: “It’s the first time in my life I’ve heard the public prosecutor say I’ve got nothing against them, but I’d be too butt-hurt to let them off the hook.”

 

But the most consequential drama lay ahead. 

 

The two prosecutors asked a judge to hand down sentences ranging from fines to serious jail time. The harshest punishment was reserved for Le Pen, as prosecutors alleged she had both benefited from the system as an MEP and oversaw its continued operation during her early years leading the National Rally. They asked the judge to give her five years in prison, three of which would be suspended, fine her €300,000 and hand her a five-year ban on running from public office.

 

Barret and Neyton alleged Le Pen’s crimes were so serious that they merited a sentence that comes into immediate effect — effectively barring her from running in the 2027 presidential election regardless of her next legal moves. Typically, in France, penalties are delayed until the appeals process has been exhausted, which can take years.

 

Stepping out of court after the prosecution’s recommendations, Le Pen told reporters that the prosecution had only one goal in mind: “Marine Le Pen’s exclusion from political life,” as Le Pen herself put it. A few days later, she said that the prosecutors wanted her “political death.”

 

If the court follows the prosecution’s recommendations, Le Pen could try to oppose the decision before a higher court, but would have to wait for the start of the appeal trial to challenge the penalty on constitutional grounds, said Benjamin Morel, a constitutional law professor at a leading French law school. 

 

“As long as the appeal trial hasn’t passed, she would be in an extremely complicated situation,” Morel said.

 

Party officials have remained tight-lipped over what could come next for the National Rally if Marine Le Pen is sidelined.

 

Across several conversations with POLITICO, many of the three-time presidential candidate’s allies have insisted that the issue is not being discussed in internal party meetings and that Le Pen appears at ease.

 

After all, they claim, stopping Le Pen from running would be a democratic scandal that judges would not dare to instigate. And there’s a tacit understanding that if anything were to stop Le Pen from running, Bardella, the loyalist president of the National Rally, is already waiting in the wings.

 

Le Pen’s lawyer, Rodolphe Bosselut, told POLITICO that the defense would not comment or weigh in on the trial until the verdict in order “to avoid the impression of interference and speculation.”

 

A far-right future

By most accounts, Marine took her father’s death particularly hard despite their very public falling out. Gossip magazine Paris Match published photographs of a distraught Marine on board a plane at what was likely the moment she learned of Jean-Marie’s death. (The images were pulled shortly after due to backlash from the National Rally.)

 

Those closest to Marine say that even after a life of brutal political battles, legal troubles and personal tribulations, never had she appeared more morose than she did after her father’s death.

 

Yet after a period of mourning, Marine’s confidence appears unshaken — with good reason.

 

The National Rally remains France’s most significant right-wing opposition. It scored 31.4 percent of the vote in last June’s European election, more than double the vote count of the second-place finisher, Macron’s Ensemble coalition.

 

During the French snap elections that followed, Le Pen’s party became the largest single group in the National Assembly.

 

Positions staked out by the far right years ago on immigration and culture war issues are increasingly mainstream. Even France’s current centrist Prime Minister François Bayrou employed a decade-long National Rally trope when he said in January that it felt like parts of the country were being “flooded” by immigrants.

 

In the first three months of this year alone, French lawmakers have advanced measures restricting birthright citizenship in the overseas French region of Mayotte; banning athletes from wearing hijabs during sporting events; and preventing undocumented immigrants in France from marrying French citizens. All three have a realistic shot at becoming law.

 

And in Bardella, the National Rally has a telegenic —  if polished-to-a-fault — leader ready to take the baton from the Le Pen family. 

 

Whether all of this was discussed over drinks in that modest Breton seafood shack will likely remain a mystery to those not in attendance. 

 

But the friends and family on that winter night would have offered a grieving Marine some consolation over the future of the Le Pens’ dreams. It would’ve been an opportunity to swap stories, shed tears and raise a toast. Jean-Marie may be dead and Marine’s dreams of the presidency may be on the verge of being dashed, but the political movement of the Le Pens’ seems destined for robust longevity.