When Marine was just 8 years old, her family’s apartment building was bombed, destroying 12 apartments and injuring two adult and four children. No one in the Le Pen family was harmed, but French authorities came to believe it was an attack aimed at her father for his far-right views. The bombers were never caught. [...]
The original far-right supporters were very often religious, or at least believing, Catholics. Marine is twice divorced. A mother of three, she now lives with her longtime partner, a man named Louis Aliot, whom she has not married. She has been very vocal about women’s rights and refuses to oppose abortion or contraception. Her closest aide is gay. The original FN was considered homophobic; Marine has won gay supporters. [...]
Marine, on the other hand, had begun to try to reach out to Jews, in a slow but steady effort to untangle herself from the party’s anti-Semitic reputation. In January 2005, she sat down with the Jerusalem Report, an Israeli news magazine, and opined that Jews should turn to the FN for help against those from Muslim immigrant neighborhoods who had carried out attacks on Jewish targets around the country that prompted a country-wide concern about a new anti-Semitism. Beginning with the second intifada in 2000, tensions between Jews and Muslims in France had increased dramatically. [...]
“She wants to campaign on the core issues of the National Front: immigration and identity,” says Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right. “It is on those topics that she is really different from the mainstream conservative party. And we all know that immigration is the first and foremost topic when you ask people who vote for the National Front.”
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