Le Pen's daughter looks likely to lead from front

Marine Le Pen says she is not racist but a multicultural country can never live in peace. Photo / Bloomberg

Marine Le Pen was late back from lunch. This is a common condition among French politicians but unusual for Le Pen. She is known for being on time and being polite, charming and, unlike her father, difficult to dislike. She arrived "only" 20 minutes late.

The National Front, she says,is not a racist party, xenophobic party, not even a far-right party but a "patriotic party" of neither left nor right.

If she takes over its leadership from her father in January (which she almost certainly will), she intends to "sweep away the caricatures" and transform the National Front from a party of protest into a "party of government".

She said: "To exercise power is the objective of all politicians. The National Front is still a young party. We should now be ready to take a step upwards and have no fear of assuming responsibility. If the party does not want to win, I don't want to lead them. That wouldn't interest me. I'm not ready to settle for a permanent posture of complaint."

When she entered politics, Jean-Marie Le Pen's youngest daughter was large and somewhat lumbering. Ten years on, as she prepares to replace her father, she is slender, elegant and tanned at 42. She wears a grey jacket, a grey blouse, tight blue jeans and high heels. Her supporters hope - and her enemies inside and outside the party fear - that she will achieve an equally startling transformation of the National Front.

Alain Duhamel, France's shrewdest political commentator, says: "Marine is just as demagogic as her father and even more dangerous. Jean-Marie Le Pen wanted only to be a player, to be noticed, to show off. Marine Le Pen wants to win and to rule."

Her 82-year-old father will retire as National Front president in January. A party conference will choose his successor from a short-list of two. The candidates are his bookish, grey, unreconstructed, hard-line deputy, Bruno Gollnisch, 60, and the youngest of his three daughters, Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen, always known as "Marine". Jean-Marie, the founder and colossus of the party, has already made it known that he thinks Marine will, and should, win.

Nicolas Sarkozy, who won the French presidency in 2007 partly by reclaiming votes from the NF, is worried. His decision in July to make a theatrical link between foreigners and crime by declaring war on Roma immigrants from eastern Europe is admitted in the Elysee Palace to be part of an "anti-Marine" strategy.

But is her drive to "sweep away misconceptions" about the NF not, de facto, an attack on her dear old dad? She says that the media "demonised" the NF. But what about Jean-Marie Le Pen's extremist statements over the years? (Too many black players in the France football team; immigration is a Jewish-led conspiracy to destroy France.)

That was then, she said. This is now.

"It's true that, 30 years ago, Jean-Marie Le Pen maybe used a few provocative remarks to make himself heard when the political and media classes would give no space to our ideas. There is no need to use such methods today because, in so many areas, the facts have proved that the National Front was right. On uncontrolled immigration. On the EU. On globalisation. On ultra-capitalism. Even President Sarkozy seems to agree with us on a number of subjects. We are now in a position where we can offer solutions, not just try to convince people that we have identified the right problems."

She believes that not only in France, but across Europe, the time is right for a less histrionic, more pragmatic form of populist nationalism. This would be anti-immigration but "not racist"; anti-EU but not anti-European; anti-globalisation but not anti-market.

"In many European countries, there is a growing tide of anxiety driven by uncontrolled immigration, globalisation and the rules of the EU," she says. "People feel pushed around, threatened with losing their identity, their traditions and their jobs."

In her quest to modernise, and "de-demonise" the Front, she says wants to "abolish a number of ambiguities linked to our past". What does she mean? "I will give you an example. People say we are a free-market party. Yes, we believe in free enterprise but we are not an ultra-capitalist party. We believe in frontiers. We also believe that the state should have a strategic role in the economy. We fight against 'ultra-liberalism', which we consider to be a totalitarian system which insists on the free movement of people, goods and capital, something we reject."

In American terms, she says the NF is not a right-wing party. She sees it as much less right wing than the Tea Party movement, which distrusts all government and hates all taxes.

Le Pen insists she is not a racist, that France is "not a racist country" and that the NF was "never a racist party". Why then did she tell her first campaign meeting in the Var in southern France that all the other parties wanted to "Islamise" France and that they had plans to introduce "sharia law"?

Marine becomes a little heated for the first time. "We are are in a trial of strength between Islam and the secular values of the French republic, an insidious trial of strength and one that we are losing," she said. How so? The signs are all around us, she says. Her evidence scarcely seems overwhelming.

Several swimming pools have allowed women-only times for Muslim bathers; 22 Quick burger restaurants (out of hundreds) now sell only halal meat; pork has been taken off the menu in some schools, and a few streets are occasionally blocked to allow Muslims to pray in the open air.

"You say to me that a multicultural country can live in peace," she said. "I don't think that can ever happen."

She is distrusted by many within the NF, a disparate coalition of mutually suspicious tribes from die-hard patriots, to Catholic fundamentalists, to pagan nature-worshippers. Her support for abortion and the rights of homosexuals angers social conservatives.

Marine says she knows she is not to everyone's taste in the party but does not care. "That's the beauty of this [internal] election," she said. "It gives me the chance to be clear about what I stand for. I don't want to seduce the National Front. I want to convince it. Lots of factors, the polls, the anxiety within [Sarkozy's centre-right party] the UMP [Union pour un Mouvement Populaure] suggest that I am the person best placed to take the Front's ideas as far as they can be taken."

Marine, twice married and twice divorced, has three children. She is a lawyer, a Euro MP and a town councillor in a town near Lille. She believes she can put the nationalist-patriotic, anti-European, anti-immigration, anti-globalisation argument in ways that appeal to previously moderate voters of the right and left. With Sarkozy floundering and the French centre-left muddled, in 2012 she could be a dangerous opponent.

- Independent