Marine Le Pen

"Politics set a trap for me" ... Marine Le Pen. Photo: Alastair Miller Jean-Marie Le Pen's daughter has shed the extremist rhetoric in an attempt to become the next French president, writes Paola Totaro. Thursday morning in Nanterre, a few kilometres west of the French capital's historic heart. It is sunny but jaw-grindingly cold, smokers puffing hurriedly outside office blocks, walkers hunched against the breeze. On the horizon Paris's skyscrapers sparkle like modern icebergs. On the Rue Des Suisses in the suburb's older, residential fringe looms the headquarters of the French National Front, a multi-storey concrete block guarded by a clutch of London-style security cameras and electronic gates. Inside the compound, an enormous, garish rendition of the Gallic rooster, unofficial national symbol of the French republic, stands guard. The two-metre fibreglass monster, it turns out, is a recent tongue-in-cheek acquisition, lugged back from an agricultural fair by Marine Le Pen, the ultra-nationalist party's leader. In a second-floor office she discreetly pushes a packet of cigarettes under a pile of papers before stepping out from her desk. She shakes hands, offers coffee and talks eloquently for more than an hour, her eyes drawn with hypnotic regularity to the fags at her elbow. Advertisement: Story continues below Le Pen is as striking in real life as she is telegenic. Tall, blonde and blue-eyed, she has the natural, long stride that smacks of confidence. Her voice, deep and tinged with the grate of tobacco, is modulated even when defensive. This morning, with an extraordinary couple of polls just out, Madame Le Pen exudes a palpable confidence. At the helm of the party for just three months, she has had a meteoric rise in the popularity stakes, eclipsing both the President, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Socialist leader, Martine Aubry. The polls, shocking the French themselves, now regularly predict that she could become a third force in the presidential elections next year. The most recent, published on Tuesday, suggests she would Rosetta Stone have wrested 24 per cent of the first round vote, with Aubry on 23 per cent and Sarkozy trailing on 21 per cent. An unprecedented 40 per cent of the French people now believe that Le Pen is well placed to repeat, or better, her father Jean-Marie Le Pen's 2002 upset when he knocked the socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, out in the first round, only to lose later to Jacques Chirac. But Madame Le Pen, four decades younger than the reviled, former paratrooper and neo-fascist - and perhaps as many times more ambitious - is not content with merely being a spoiler candidate. She has worked strategically to ''de-demonise'' the party, rejecting the ''loony extreme right'' (her own words) as well as many of Le Pen snr's more loathsome utterances, from his dismissal of Hitler's genocide of the Jews as a ''detail of history'' to his hatred of homosexuals. According to Le Pen, political choice in France now is not between the old left and right but between globalist and patriot, those who would leave markets to ''the law of the jungle'' and those, like her, who want to put the brakes on the ''ultra-capitalist models''. Hers is a melange, not entirely coherent, of populist ideas packaged with alarming eloquence and education, rather than the bigoted ignorance of old. Unabashedly anti-big-business and anti-big-banks, she insists she supports free trade but with ''limits''. She is gleeful in spruiking a need for the French state to revive its sovereignty in a globalised world and is furiously anti-single-currency (and therefore implicitly anti-Europe). A passionate opponent of the privatisation of public utilities and the French social security system, she has also identified the desire for identity and a return to old values in an increasingly volatile globalised world. ''Money crushes everything in its path - traditions, lifestyles, customs, values - to the detriment and collapse of everything that has benefited societies the world over '' she says. When I observe that this could be an old socialist talking she says, with some force: ''Attention, no!