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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Angelique Chrisafis in Paris

On the brink of power: how France’s National Rally reinvented itself

The party’s co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen (left) and his daughter Marine Le Pen, its current leader (right) pictured in 2014, sat side-by-side in a room filled with people waving French flags
In 2015 Marine Le Pen (right) excluded her father (left) from the party he co-founded, after he repeated comments about Nazi gas chambers being a ‘detail’ of history. Photograph: Valéry Hache/AFP/Getty Images

Political opponents of Marine Le Pen’s poll-leading National Rally are seizing on the far-right party’s history to try to mobilise voters against it in the run-up to France’s snap election.

Leftwing and centrist politicians have sought to remind voters that when Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, co-founded the party – originally named Front National – in 1972, its ranks included former members of a Waffen SS military unit under Nazi command during the second world war.

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