LE PEN. Three times candidate and two times finalist in the presidential election, Marine Le Pen has established herself as one of the main opposition figures since the 2010s. Youth, family, relations with her father Jean-Marie Le Pen and political career… Detailed biography.

Marine Le Pen is the main figure of the National Rally , three times a candidate in the presidential election and twice qualified for the second round of the election, she received 21.30% of the votes in the first round and 33.90% of the votes in the second round in 2017, then 23.15% and finally 41.45% of the votes in 2022. Elected deputy for the 11th constituency of Pas-de-Calais in June 2017 and re-elected in June 2022, she was appointed the same year president of the National Rally group in the National Assembly. A group of 88 elected representatives, a level never before seen for the far-right party in the Fifth Republic.

Marine Le Pen took over the National Front from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in January 2011. She renamed the National Rally in 2018 after a long process of “de-demonization” and relinquished the reins in September 2021, to better devote herself to her electoral campaigns and then to her functions within the Assembly. A Member of the European Parliament from 2004 to 2017, she also sat as a regional councilor, in Ile-de-France for one term (2004-2010), but especially in Nord-Pas-de-Calais then in Hauts-de-France, from 1998 to 2004 and from 2010 to 2021. She will try three times to run for the head of the region, in vain. Marine Le Pen was also elected departmental councilor of Pas-de-Calais in July 2021.

A youth marked by politics

Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen – her real name – was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine on August 5, 1968 and was quickly baptized Marine Le Pen. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter was born into a family of three children, three girls, and therefore has two sisters: Marie-Caroline Le Pen, born January 23, 1960 and Yann Le Pen, born November 18, 1963. All of them will have played a role, directly or indirectly, in their father’s political project, as in the interminable family saga. Marine Le Pen, first and foremost, owes everything to her father in politics. It is in his wake that she became known, that she wove her networks and that she forged a political career.

From the age of 13, Marine Le Pen assisted her father in an election campaign. But she also spoke several times about her “difficult” youth, confronted as she was with the animosities aroused by Jean-Marie Le Pen, a man of scandals and controversies.

Survivor of the Villa Poirier attack in 1976

On November 2, 1976, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Parisian apartment, located at the Villa Poirier, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, was the target of an attack. One of the worst that Paris had experienced since the war. The twenty kilos of explosives destroyed a large part of the home, but fortunately caused no casualties, apart from a few minor injuries. Jean-Marie Le Pen was clearly targeted, but the press preferred to headline about a miracle baby.

Marine Le Pen was 8 years old at the time. She will remain deeply affected by this event and has spoken several times in the media about this moment when her childhood bed was “full of glass”. “It took this night of horror for me to discover that my father was involved in politics. And it was there, at the age of dolls, that I became aware of this terrible and incomprehensible thing for me: my father is not treated as an equal to others, we are not treated as equal to others”, she also wrote in her autobiography, “A contre flots”, published in 2006, evoking “a major element of [her] own construction”.

Party girl and lawyer for undocumented immigrants before the FN

Marine Le Pen attended the Lycée Florent-Schmitt in Saint-Cloud before studying law and becoming a lawyer. The surprising sequel is told in particular by journalists David Doucet and Mathieu Dejean, authors of “La politique malgré elle, la jeunesse cachée de Marine Le Pen” (published by La Tengo), published in 2016. Their investigation into Marine Le Pen’s past confirms that her studies were not very brilliant and that the future candidate for the Elysée had an immoderate taste for partying. In addition to various brief references to winter sports, several passages in the biographies and portraits devoted to her described, from the 1990s to the early 2000s, a “lofteuse” or even a “night-clubber”, annoying her political enemies.

As a lawyer, Marine Le Pen also defended undocumented immigrants. In 1995, Maître Le Pen saved an Algerian client, Nourredine Hamidi, from an expulsion that had been promised to him for… 24 years! A fight that she did not consider, at the time, “in contradiction” with her ideas.

It must be said that until the end of the 1990s, Jean-Marie Le Pen thought above all of his elder, Marie-Caroline, to succeed him, until she joined the felon Bruno Mégret, during the split of 1998. It was because of this betrayal, but also because her career as a lawyer was floundering that Marine Le Pen decided to work for the FN. First as a small hand. In 1998, she therefore became a permanent member of the party “for food” and obtained her first political mandate as regional councilor of Nord-Pas-de-Calais. At the FN, she was first employed by the legal department.

Who are Marine Le Pen’s family members?

Marine Le Pen is the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen and Pierrette Le Pen. She has two older sisters, Marie-Caroline and Yann Le Pen. Her parents separated when she was 17 years old.

Marine Le Pen and Jean-Marie Le Pen

Marine Le Pen has always had a complicated relationship with her parents. The National Front denied it at the time, but she did, for example, leave the party very early on, at the beginning of 2005. A member of the executive board trying to smooth out the FN’s image since its stinging defeat in 2002, she was then scandalized by the comments of Jean-Marie Le Pen who, interviewed by the French far-right weekly Rivarol in January, played down the German occupation – Jean-Marie Le Pen had more precisely described the enemy occupation as “not so inhumane”, provoking a real outcry. Angry, Marine Le Pen even left the family villa in Saint-Cloud for a few days with her children, where she was then living next door to her father (she now lives outside Montretout, in Celle-Saint-Cloud).

In addition to the attacks related to her sulphurous surname, Marine Le Pen has forged a conviction, this time political: the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who climbed the ranks within her father’s party for years, is determined to shatter the “glass ceiling” that reduced it to secondary roles and the necessary de-demonization of the FN. She has since worked to make people forget the excesses and the slip-ups, the Pétainist and sometimes revisionist line of the movement, to offer it a new face. 

Marine Le Pen will thus try to purge the party of its most embarrassing elements as soon as she takes power over the FN in 2011. Starting with her father himself, who became honorary president of the movement that same year. The latter quickly became problematic in this strategy of “de-demonization”, continuing to defend Marshal Pétain or proposing in a video in June 2014 to make a “batch” of the singer Patrick Bruel… Marine Le Pen will finally prefer to exclude Jean-Marie Le Pen from the party that he himself founded on August 20, 2015, because of his comments on the gas chambers, described as a “detail” of the Second World War .

The case will be settled in court. The court will initially validate the exclusion of Jean-Marie Le Pen in November 2016, while confirming him as honorary president. But this function will finally be removed in March 2018, during a Congress, after a long legal battle. The change of name of the National Front to “National Rally”, in the summer of 2018, will be experienced as a “betrayal” by the patriarch, who has since alternated between criticism and timid support, on the sidelines of his daughter’s electoral campaigns. Jean-Marie Le Pen chaired the far-right party for 39 years.

Marine Le Pen and her mother Pierrette

With her mother Pierrette Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s relationship was just as complex for fifteen years. Pierrette Lalanne, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s first wife, caused a scandal in the 1980s by posing as a maid in Playboy, while her husband was preparing to run for president of the Republic. The couple was in the process of divorcing at the time and the provocation served as revenge. Pierrette Le Pen left the family home when Marine Le Pen was 16 years old. “She left overnight. My sister came to pick me up from school and told me ‘mom’s gone'”, the president of the RN would later recount.

For fifteen years, Pierrette did not give any direct news. “I found myself with my father with whom I did not have daily relations”, commented Marine Le Pen. Fifteen years later, their mother having gotten closer to Marie-Caroline, the eldest, it was time for a reunion, about which the leader of the National Front said: “You do not see your mother for 15 years. You see her again and it is as if you had seen her yesterday”. If Marine Le Pen admits to never having had a real explanation for this interminable absence, she has since said that she has “a great relationship” with her mother.

Who is Marine Le Pen’s partner?

Marine Le Pen married business leader Franck Chauffroy in 1997, with whom she had three children (read below). In 2000, she divorced and remarried in 2002 with the former regional councillor of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Eric Iorio. After another divorce in 2006, she began dating Louis Aliot in 2009, then secretary general of the FN, who became vice-president of the party in 2011. The two FN executives had made their relationship official in 2010. It was Louis Aliot who announced their breakup almost ten years later, on 11 September 2019.

A Toulouse native and Chirac supporter, before joining the National Front in 1988, Louis Aliot was elected regional councillor for Midi-Pyrénées in the 1990s, then was appointed campaign coordinator for Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2001. He then became the patriarch’s European parliamentary assistant in 2004. Louis Aliot was also paid as a parliamentary assistant to Marine Le Pen between 2011 and 2013. According to the Canard Enchaîné, he was paid 5,000 euros gross for part-time work. In 2013, the European Union Anti-Fraud Agency (OLAF) criticised Marine Le Pen for this collaboration. The RN leader then argued that her relationship with Louis Aliot could not be described as a “stable relationship”, since she was neither married nor in a civil partnership. Louis Aliot was a Member of the European Parliament between 2014 and 2017, the year he entered the National Assembly alongside Marine Le Pen. He was also elected municipal councilor of Perpignan in 2014 and then mayor of the city in 2020.

In the show “Une ambition intime” broadcast on M6 in November 2021, Marine Le Pen explained that she was single, and lived in a shared apartment with Ingrid, a good childhood friend considered “a sister”. And added: “There are no men in this house. Only women. Even cats are pussies!”

Who are Marine Le Pen’s children?

Marine Le Pen is the mother of Jehanne, a first name spelled like ” Joan of Arc ” in ancient times, born in 1998, as well as twins Louis and Mathilde, born in 1999. Several passages are devoted to them in Marine Le Pen’s autobiography, “A contre flots”, published in 2006. But it is difficult to know more about them as Marine Le Pen has always taken care to maintain the greatest secrecy about her offspring, not hesitating to take legal action when, for example, her children’s surnames are revealed.

Marine Le Pen lifted a small corner of the veil during the 2017 presidential campaign, indicating that her son Louis was “a stalwart” passionate about rugby. “My son plays quite well and regularly, he’s a stalwart!”, she had thus let slip on France Bleu in April. “My daughter was captain of the team that she formed in her boarding school,” she had added.

In October 2018, AFP and BFMTV reported that a daughter of Marine Le Pen and one of her cousins ​​had been violently attacked in Nanterre. It was a question of a “fight” during which the two young members of the Le Pen family were “hit in the face”, although the exact cause of the altercation is not known. Marine Le Pen’s daughter, whose first name was not given, was “punched” and “was taken to hospital by the firefighters”. “Dragged by the hair, thrown to the ground and beaten”, she suffered a broken nose. The men behind the beatings, two individuals aged 32 and 47, were sentenced in February 2019 to 15 months in prison with a 7-month suspended sentence for aggravated assault.

How old and tall is Marine Le Pen?

Marine Le Pen was born on August 5, 1968, she was 43 years old when she ran for the first time in the presidential election, in 2012. That year, as in 2017, she was one of the youngest candidates in the presidential election. Among the most important contenders for the presidency of the Republic, only Emmanuel Macron was younger (39 years old). It was precisely him that she would meet in the second round in 2017 as in 2022, with the results that we know…

Marine Le Pen is 1.74 m tall, like her niece Marion Maréchal-le Pen. Her father, Jean-Marie, is 1.77 m tall. It will be noted throughout the presidential elections that the candidate is exactly the same height as… Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

What is Marine Le Pen’s net worth?

In her declaration of assets and interests as a candidate for the 2022 presidential election, Marine Le Pen had declared a total of 1.29 million euros in real estate: a house in Yvelines, of which she owned 25% jointly, or 565,801 euros; a family home of 120 m² in La Trinité-sur-Mer (Morbihan), of which Marine Le Pen was co-owner with her sisters in joint ownership – she owned 28.5%, or a value of 111,883 euros; and the family villa in Montretout, in Saint-Cloud (Hauts-de-Seine). With her sister Yann, she was then a stakeholder in the “SCI du pavillon de l’Ecuyer”, owner of the 633 m² residence. Their father had inherited this sumptuous 5000 m² estate at the end of the 1970s, under conditions that remained opaque. At the start of 2022, Marine Le Pen owned the equivalent of 12.50% jointly, or 616,800 euros. 

Marine Le Pen, however, did not declare any freehold housing at the time, all having been received as donations.
According to her declaration of interests and activities, available on the HATVP (High Authority for Transparency in Public Life) website, the far-right candidate said she received a comfortable income of €9,879 on average each month. Her salary was based on two main activities: president of the National Rally, which she no longer was (€18,000 in 2017 then €60,000 per year from 2018 to 2021) and member of parliament (nearly €70,800 per year net taxable). Finally, the candidate received money as a departmental councillor (€20,764 net annually).

What are Marine Le Pen’s ideas and program?

With the strategy of “de-demonization” of the National Front started in 2011, Marine Le Pen has gradually changed the party line. A visible change in the economic field in particular: starting from a liberalism claimed in the 1980s, the program of the FN and then of the RN has become openly interventionist and protectionist, its candidate targeting the modest middle classes and workers of so-called “peripheral” France. Some historical FN executives will have criticized Marine Le Pen for having given too much space to the ideas defended by the former Chevènementist Florian Philippot, at one time expected to become a pillar, if not the Prime Minister of a hypothetical government, but who resigned from the FN at the start of the 2017 school year, during a bloody settling of scores.

The question of leaving the euro was the subject of a major internal debate within the FN between the two rounds of the 2017 presidential election. In January 2019, Marine Le Pen finally made a decision, declaring that the euro is “a burden”, but that leaving it is “no longer a priority”.

The fact remains that the ideological matrix of the RN is still articulated on a few fundamentals: national priority in terms of employment and social assistance, the extreme restriction of immigration, a very identity-based conception of the Nation, based on an idealized and traditionalist vision of France, the denunciation of the European Union and the institutions of the Republic.