Marine Le Pen: far-right heir aiming to take down EU

Paris: Marine Le Pen was a daddy's girl growing up, and she wept for joy when her father -- the bogeyman of French politics -- beat his Socialist rival for a spot in the final of the 2002 presidential election.

But while Jean-Marie Le Pen never seemed to truly covet the top job, his charismatic daughter is convinced that, come May 7, France will have its first woman president.

Over the past six years her rebranded "party of patriots" from both left and the right has gone from strength to strength, propelled by the kind of anti-globalisation, anti-establishment fury that drove Britain's vote to leave the EU and Donald Trump's election in the United States.

"Against the moneyed right and the moneyed left I am the candidate of the French people," Le Pen declared in a TV debate with four rivals last month.

Since taking over the leadership of the far-right National Front (FN) in 2011 from her father, the telegenic 48-year-old former lawyer has promoted her efforts to purge the party of the anti-Semitism and overt racism that were its hallmarks.

But her recent remarks about the roundup and deportation of around 13,000 French Jews during World War II may have set back those efforts.

Le Pen was criticised for declaring that France was "not responsible" for the roundup carried out by French police acting on orders from the collaborationist Vichy regime -- despite three former presidents admitting France's guilt.

Le Pen said she was thinking of France's youth. "I want them to be proud of being French," she said.

But her remarks inevitably drew comparisons with the revisionism of her father, whom she booted out of the party for describing the Holocaust as "a detail of history".

Le Pen suspended her father in 2015 from the party he co-founded for downplaying the Nazi gas chambers.

A wounded Jean-Marie refused to go quietly, dragging the FN before the courts.

French first 

Like Trump, Le Pen is proposing to pull up the drawbridge and restore French glory with a policy of "economic patriotism" that most economists see as a recipe for ruin.

Her plans to ditch the euro and hold a "Frexit" referendum have caused particular alarm.

Le Pen also wants to pull out of Europe's Schengen border-free area, adopt a French-first policy on jobs and public housing and tax products from French companies that offshore factory jobs by 35 percent.

In the last presidential election in 2012 she finished third on just under 18 percent.

Five years later, with the left in disarray and the conservative candidate Francois Fillon dogged by scandal, polls show her running neck-and-neck with centrist frontrunner Emmanuel Macron in the first round.

But they show her falling at the final hurdle, with voters predicted to rally in the May 7 run-off behind her opponent, just as they plumped for conservative Jacques Chirac when he faced Le Pen senior in 2002.