She described Britain’s vote for Brexit as the most important event since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Donald Trump’s US presidential victory as “an additional stone in the building of a new world”.
Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front (FN), is fighting to achieve a similar earthquake in France in the presidential elections in 2017.
But with her increasing appeal to the centre and the left of French politics, how much can she really be characterised as far-right?
Marine Le Pen is the youngest daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, former leader of the FN and a convicted racist, who last year repeated an old anti-Semitic slur that the Nazi gas chambers were “a detail of history”.
Having grown up in a political home, accompanying him to meetings from the age of 13, Marine Le Pen was always going to struggle to shake off the far-right label.
But she did denounce her father’s comments in 2015, and effectively expelled him from the party. While her father was leader, the FN was the party that wanted to deport three million foreigners, the party of Holocaust denial and xenophobia. But under Marine Le Pen the FN began to distance itself from such controversial issues.
