French regional elections: who is Marion Marechal-Le Pen?

“Marion Marechal-Le Pen is France's future,” one elderly voter told Reuters last month. The idea that the striking 25-year-old Front National MP, niece of party leader Marine and granddaughter of founder Jean-Marie, represents anything close to the mainstream of French politics might alarm those who deplore her party’s far-right, racially-driven platform. But since she became France’s youngest member of parliament in modern times three years ago, there’s no denying that Le Pen the younger has been a phenomenon.

In the first round of France’s latest regional elections, held yesterday, Marechal-Le Pen scored above 40 per cent in the southern Provence-Alps-Cote-d’Azur region. That means she’s likely to bring home a landmark win in the run-offs next week, and she and her aunt could win control of two of France’s 13 “super regions” (Marine is running in a northern region which includes Calais.) It would bring little actual power—regions have a largely administrative function over dry policy areas like public transport, education and tourism. But symbolically it would be a huge step forward for the insurgent party, and another move towards granting Marine the presidency in 2017.

Marechal-Le Pen’s politics are traditional and unbending. She is a socially conservative right-wing Catholic, who makes an annual pilgrimage to Chartres, has pledged to cut subsidies to family planning clinics in her region, and participated in 2013 anti-Gay marriage demonstrations in France. Economically, she is seen as sharing her Grandfather’s right-liberal views—she is a vocal supporter of entrepreneurs and businesspeople. On both counts, her opinions are distinct from Marine’s. The party leader has sought to tone down some of her party’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and pursue a more protectionist economic line in an attempt to “detoxify” the Front National brand and win working class votes.

Striding into the limelight in 2012 when, at 22, she was one of two Front National candidates to win the party’s first seats in a quarter of a century, Marechal-Le Pen has won a reputation as a formidable debater and a confident campaigner. She took apart conservative Presidential hopeful Alain Juppe in a TV debate last month, the Telegraph reports. Fellow parliamentarians say she does not allow herself to be intimidated by those who believe their age or gender set them above her. Following her 2012 victory she told the Guardian that a male politician “looked at me and said: 'And whose secretary are you?’" One imagines her response was unabashed.

Whether Marechal-Le Pen truly is a harbringer of France’s future depends on the Front National’s ongoing fortunes. The 2017 Presidential election, which will see a higher voter turnout and all the forces of France’s political establishment thrown against the party, could yet prove too much for it. But Marechal-Le Pen does speak for some French youth who appear to be less liberal than their parents. Unlike Ukip, their closest British equivalent, the Front National poll best among young people. Some 84 per cent of French youth have little or no trust in politicians and most believe there is no difference between left and right, leaving them ripe for wooing by insurgent right wing parties.

Marine Le Pen has said that her niece “represents a more rigid generation” than her own. Whatever happens to her party, if her aunt is correct then Marechal-Le Pen could be at the forefront of a young conservative surge. That might shape French politics for years to come.