by Paul Kirby
With nine months to go until the 2027 presidential election she may be ahead in the opinion polls - but she enters the race under the shadow of a court conviction for embezzlement.
"I will not change my mind," she said defiantly on French TV. "There is no longer any scenario in which I could not run".
Le Pen came third in the 2012 presidential race and was then twice runner-up to Emmanuel Macron in 2017 and 2022. This could be her best chance yet, but her candidacy coincides with her challenge to France’s highest civil court.
"I want to pursue every possible avenue of appeal to defend my innocence in this case," she said.
The risk is that she loses the case before the election race moves into top gear and is required to wear an electronic tag, as ordered by the Paris court of appeal.
Marine Le Pen, 57, had been prepared to hand the baton to her protege, Jordan Bardella, if she had been barred from running. But the court watered down last year’s initial verdict, and made clear she was free to join the race.
For 15 years Le Pen has been the most powerful figure in France’s anti-immigration politics.
And when she appeared with supporters last weekend in Liévin, in the heart of her constituency in the Pas-de-Calais, some observers felt she was preparing to step back.
She was seen singing along to the words of a popular 1980s song by female singer Dalida in the twilight of her career called Mourir sur scène, with the chorus "I want to die on stage in front of the spotlights".
A trained lawyer and an accredited cat-breeder, she does have alternatives beyond frontline politics, but Marine Le Pen has been seeped in it since childhood, and it is hard to envisage her taking a backseat role.
Her father Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the far-right National Front (FN) in the 1970s, and she took over the leadership in 2011, gradually removing all trace of him, and then in 2018 renaming the party Rassemblement National - or National Rally.
Marine Le Pen was eight years old when she and her two elder sisters survived a November 1976 bomb attack that destroyed their family’s flat in central Paris
She, her sisters Marie-Caroline and Yann and her parents escaped with a few scratches, in what she later called a "night of horror" that made her realise her father was in politics.
Eight years on, her mother Pierette left the family home with Le Pen’s biographer in September 1984 and later posed for Playboy.
While all three sisters took their father’s side, it was Marine, the youngest, who adopted his political legacy.
Still protective of her father, she said on French TV in 2004: "You’re born Le Pen’s daughter, you die Le Pen’s daughter. He’s the man of my life. He’s made me the woman I am."
By the early 1990s, Marine Le Pen had graduated as a lawyer in Paris and entered politics.
Her family background meant other lawyers would boycott her and she focused on her career in the National Front, eventually becoming vice-president of the party in 2003 and winning a seat in the European Parliament in 2004.
Her father reached his political peak in 2002, coming second to Jacques Chirac in the presidential race with 18% of the vote, but it was not for another nine years that his daughter became party leader.
She remained a Euro MP until 2017, and the fake jobs conviction against her last year found that she had played a "central role" in a scheme to use European Parliament funds to pay party assistants.
The Paris appeal court confirmed the seriousness of the scam, initially driven by her father but then taken over by her. However, it stressed the absence of personal enrichment among those involved, and ruled that the embezzlement was undertaken to alleviate the National Front’s financial problems.
For years, the National Front struggled to raise money, as French banks would not lend any money because of its racist and antisemitic past.
That meant Marine Le Pen’s party went cap in hand to a Russian-Czech bank linked to the Kremlin, in the very year that Vladimir Putin staged his illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea. Le Pen repeatedly backed Putin’s occupation, and on the eve of the 2017 presidential race visited him at the Kremlin.
Over time, she had expressed her admiration for the Russian leader, but that image of the pair shaking hands came back to haunt her.
Although she won almost 11 million votes in 2017, a record for the National Front, Macron told her in an ill-tempered televised debate that "France deserves better than you" and went on to win over two-thirds of the electorate.
Five years later, and with another presidential vote looming, Putin was on the cusp of sending Russian troops into a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. "I do not believe at all that Russia wishes to invade Ukraine," she told the BBC, before going on to say that if it did indeed happen she would back Ukraine’s sovereignty.
Her biggest success has been in the detoxification or dédiabolisation (de-demonisation) of what her father had created in her bid to join the political mainstream.
Although the anti-immigration policies are intact, with promises to prioritise homes, jobs and benefits for French nationals, gone is the overt racism and antisemitism of her father, who died last year.
Marine Le Pen has been taken to court herself but ultimately she was acquitted in 2015 of inciting racial hatred for comparing the sight of Muslims praying in the streets to the Nazi occupation of France in World War Two.
Her expulsion of Jean-Marie Le Pen from the National Front in August 2015 marked the culmination of a family feud, and at one point he suggested "Marine Le Pen may want me dead". After his death, she said she would "never forgive myself for this decision, because I know it caused him immense pain".
In 2018, a year after she came second to Emmanuel Macron in the presidential election, she rebranded the party entirely.
The purge did not end there. When an old family friend, Steeve Briois, who is still mayor of the National Rally northern stronghold of Hénin-Beaumont, was ousted from the party’s executive, he complained of a shift towards "immigration and identity" at the expense of everyday social issues.
With less than a year before the next presidential vote, that rebranding appears complete.
Never before have the opinion polls given her such hope of electoral victory, and she is buoyed by the support of Bardella, the young lieutenant she wants as prime minister.
A less risky course may have been to pass the baton to him, as she and her party will now have to wait several months for the Court of Cassation to rule on her case.
Marine Le Pen was never likely to accept a guilty verdict, especially one that removed a five-year bar on running for public office and left the door open for a fourth candidacy.
Her retirement from politics is now out of the question.
*Published first on BBC.com
By: N. Peter Kramer