In a busy marketplace in Provence, a fresh-faced and smiling young woman is handing out election tracts, posing for photographs and signing autographs.
She looks and sounds familiar: blonde hair, blue eyes, talk of French values and family honour. Her full name is Marion Maréchal Le Pen, but today she is introducing herself as plain Marion Le Pen.
This is the 22-year-old law student who has just become the third generation of France’s far-Right dynasty to take to the hustings. As niece to the feisty Marine Le Pen, president of the Front National, and granddaughter of the party’s founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, she has Right-wing politics in her DNA.
This weekend she is campaigning hard in Carpentras, a small provincial town near Avignon in the south of France, in an attempt to become the youngest MP to sit in the Assemblée Nationale, and one of the first Front National MPs elected for more than 24 years.
She has every chance of success. The seat she is contesting in parliamentary elections this month is quite winnable, experts believe, along with several others across France as the Front National enjoys a popular resurgence. » | Kim Willsher, Paris | Sunday, June 03, 2012
