Marine Le Pen's Self-Negating 'Rebrand'

When former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon took the stage before a crowd of National Front (FN) members in the northern French city of Lille, he was prepared to give France’s far-right a pep talk. “Let them call you racist,” he told FN party faithfuls over the weekend. “Let them call you xenophobes, let them call you nativists. Wear it like a badge of honor. Because every day we get stronger, and they get weaker.”

The party, which was founded in 1972 on a nationalist, anti-immigration platform, by a leader with a history of Holocaust denial, has certainly been called all three of those things. Its current leadership has jettisoned , or National Rally. She said this moniker would not only demonstrate the party’s willingness to form alliances with likeminded parties in the future, but would also distance it from the more extreme connotations associated with its past and, in particular, with her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. His daughter, who took over as leader in 2011, sought to take the party more mainstream. Deeming her father’s xenophobic and anti-Semitic remarks a liability to that goal, from the party in 2015. Taking that expulsion a step further this past weekend, the party voted to strip the elder Le Pen of his symbolic title as honorary president for life. “We were originally a protest party,” Le Pen said at the congress. “There is no doubt now that we can be a ruling party.”