ABSTRACT
The period following the 2002 presidential and legislative elections saw Le Pen bask in his new notoriety while his party projected itself bullishly as the major force of opposition in France. With no elections scheduled for two years, the FN concentrated on completing its structural recovery from the split of 1999. At the party’s triennial congress in April 2003, Le Pen was re-elected unopposed as president. This deferred the thorny question of the leadership succession until, at the earliest, the next congress due in spring 2006 but set back until autumn 2007, after the presidential and legislative elections of spring and summer 2007.1 With that prospect in view, the most significant internal development was the promotion within the party leadership of Le Pen’s youngest daughter, Marine. Nominated at her father’s urging to a vice-presidency with a seat on the FN’s key executive bureau, Marine Le Pen emerged almost overnight as a potential rival to the long-serving Bruno Gollnisch and Carl Lang, the party’s delegate-general and secretary-general.2 Having attracted media attention in support of her father’s presidential bid in 2002, she had gone on to win almost 25 per cent of the vote in the first round of the legislative elections in the mining town of Lens in Pas-de-Calais, a former left-wing stronghold. Relishing her new-found celebrity, the 35-year-old Marine made no secret of her ambition to give the FN a more modern and respectable image and to rescue it from its isolation on the far right, with Italy and Austria offering lessons in how this might be achieved.
