Is Marine Le Pen an extremist or a fascist, the insults routinely hurled at the leader of France’s National Rally? Frankly, it is not even clear which side of the political sphere she belongs to, given her Left-wing economic manifesto. 

Le Pen is unquestionably guilty of one thing, however, and that is of being a mediocre politician. Once more she has been soundly beaten by Emmanuel Macron in the presidential election, and while she wasn’t thrashed as she was in 2017, her share of the vote, 41 per cent, was less than the polls had predicted. It’s hard to emphasise the depth with which many millions of French loathe Macron, and yet still they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for the only person who could have stopped him occupying the Élysée for another five years. 

What is about Le Pen that makes her a perennial loser? The family name, for a start, and no matter how hard she has tried to rebrand herself since becoming leader of the party in 2011 she will forever be the daughter of the man who founded the National Front in 1972. Jean-Marie Le Pen was a dyed-in-the-wool bigot, a man who in 1987 dismissed the holocaust as a “detail of history”. Last week the French government’s official spokesman, Gabriel Attal, criticised Marine Le Pen for her past support of Vladimir Putin, and said that the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine are for her “just a detail”. 

Those words were carefully chosen, designed to resonate with French voters old enough to remember the boorish bigotry of her father. Indeed, as Eric Zemmour noted on Sunday evening, the Le Pens have now jointly lost eight presidential elections. Some highlight the progress made by the daughter, noting that she has reached the final stage twice. They forget that she has lost a run-off twice.

More specifically with Marine, the French saw that she hasn’t a head for figures, she struggles to grasp policy detail and she lacks intellectual agility. These are glaring deficiencies in any aspiring leader. The only reason that she has kept her hold over the National Rally (rebranded from the National Front in 2018) is, ironically, because she is a Le Pen. 

The National Rally has often been described as less of a political party and more of a clan, ruthlessly controlled by first Jean-Marie and then Marine. Dissenters are forced out, even if they are family. This was the case in 2017 when Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal, one of only two National Front MPs at the time, quit the political scene. She had made no secret of her divergence with Le Pen on a number of issues, believing she was moving too far to the Left economically and socially. 

Maréchal returned to the political fray in March when she endorsed Eric Zemmour, a man who like her is an economic liberal and a social conservative. Unlike Le Pen, Zemmour warrants the term “far-Right” but his Reconquest party only polled 7 per cent of the vote in the first round of the election. 

Indeed, in the eyes of many on the French Right, the one person who might be able to lead a credible Right-wing coalition going forward is the 32-year-old Maréchal. This has been her plan for a number of years, and in 2019 it was reported that she had met several figures within the Republican Party to discuss a convergence of “conservative values” between their party and disenchanted members of the National Rally. Among those Republicans reportedly open to such a coalition is Laurent Wauquiez, who to the delight of the grassroots tried to steer the party more to the Right when he was leader between 2017 and 2019, but who was ultimately deposed by the centrist grandees. 

This is the civil war raging within the Republican Party, between centrists embodied by their presidential candidate, Valérie Pécresse, and those on the Right, such as Wauquiez and MP Eric Ciotti, who has advocated deploying the army to restore order in the more unruly suburbs of France. 

Last week Maréchal called for a “Union of the Right”, a coalition of the National Rally, the Republicans and Reconquest, to contest June’s parliamentary elections, a cry that was echoed on Sunday evening by Zemmour. Maréchal may well have her eye on the leadership of such a coalition but to do that she must overthrow her aunt. 

And yet, as Marine Le Pen indicated in her defeat speech on Sunday evening, she has no plans to go quietly into the night. Macron will be delighted, for as long as Le Pen remains on the scene he will have little to fear from the Right.