Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the granddaughter of the founder of France’s far-right Front National (FN), has seen off heavyweight rivals to win a top seat on the party’s central committee.
The 24-year-old won a landslide 80% of party members’ votes at an FN congress on Saturday.
The victory is another step in the seemingly unstoppable rise of Maréchal-Le Pen, who was hailed as the republic’s youngest ever member of parliament after she was elected to the Assemblée Nationale in 2012.
Along with her grandfather Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the FN in the 1970s and is now honorary president, and her aunt Marine Le Pen who took over as party president in 2011, she is now one of the FN’s powerbrokers.
Maréchal-Le Pen, whose mother is Yann Le Pen, the second of Le Pen senior’s three daughters, joined the FN in 2008 and stood for her first municipal election the same year, abandoning her studies in 2012 to devote herself to politics.
The FN’s 83,000 members who took part in the postal election gave Maréchal-Le Pen more votes than the party’s number two Florian Philippot and Louis Aliot, Marine Le Pen’s partner. There were a total of 400 candidates for places on the party’s central committee.
She has, however, has turned down an offer to become a vice-president of the party to avoid the FN “looking like a family affair”.
“I am delighted and honoured. This allows me to have a legitimacy above and beyond my name. I thank the voters and hope to be worthy of this confidence,” she told journalists after learning of her unexpected victory.
“I’m fighting for Marine Le Pen to become president,” she said.
During the party congress in Lyon, Jean-Marie Le Pen, 86, continued to confound his daughter’s attempts to “de-demonise” the FN’s xenophobic past and clean up its image.
Given a standing ovation, Le Pen senior launched into a 15-minute address on his favourite theme of immigration.
He spoke of the “Islamist tsunami” threatening Europe and added that “a million immigrants means a million unemployed”. He also said the French had suffered a “population substitution” over the last 40 years in certain regions.
“Massive immigration is not the only cause of France’s decline, but it’s the biggest and most important,” he said.
He called on the French to make his daughter president “the sooner the better because France’s situation is getting worse by the day”.
