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| Old video has emerged of Emmanuel Macron kissing his now wife, Brigitte Trogneaux. |
ONE’S mother posed for Playboy dressed as a maid, while the other vowed at age 16 to marry his former teacher — welcome to presidential politics, French style.
With Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron of En Marche set to go head to head, here’s what you need to know about the two-anti establishment candidates that will change the nation.
MARINE LE PEN
The 48 year-old National Front leader is part of a political dynasty that is both loved and loathed. Securing 21.5 per cent of the vote on Sunday was a major coup for Le Pen, who has worked to “de-demonise” the party founded by her father in her six years at the helm, and marks its transition from the fringes of French politics to the mainstream.
Since the vote she has quit as head of the far-right party in an apparent bid to broaden her voter appeal.
Le Pen has predicted the European Union will “die” and wants to pull France out of Europe. She also wants to return to the French franc and close the borders, while introducing a cap on immigration at 10,000 people a year.
She has advocated banning religious symbols including headscarves and veils in public, said she will crack down on radical Islamist terror and scrap a law that provides a path to citizenship for the children of immigrants. She wants to penalise groups that hire foreign workers, introduce a 35 per cent tax on companies bringing in foreign goods and lower the retirement age to 60 from 62.
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| Marine Le Pen has completed a transition of her party from fringe to mainstream with her place secured in the second round of the French presidential race. |
The family later moved to a gated mansion in the suburbs of Paris, Montretout, where her parents’ marriage dissolved in a public battle. When Marine was aged 15 her mother left the family home and was not seen by her again for 15 years, according to reports. In the 1980s she also posed for Playboy in shots that have recently resurfaced in French media.
Family biographer Olivier Beaumont, who wrote a book called In the Hell of Montretout about the family, told NPR Marine picked up the political torch from her father. But their relationship was severed when his dogs killed her cats at the Montretout property.
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| Jean-Marie Le Pen at the home in Montretout with daughters from left, Marine, Yann and Marie-Caroline. |
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| Marine’s niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen, has helped bring a new breed of voters on board. |
Despite her father’s outright anti-Semitic views that include calling the gas chambers a “detail” of history, he also made it to the second round of the Presidential elections in 2002. However after Marine took over the leadership in 2011 she has worked to soften its image with a broader appeal to voters. Her niece Marion, has been instrumental in helping to attract younger, socially conservative voters from France’s wealthier southern regions.
Marine now lives with her partner Louis Aliot, who is also a party member. She has three children.
EMMANUEL MACRON
The 39-year-old former investment banker has emerged from relative obscurity in the past 12 months to take the political scene by storm. If elected on May 7 as polls predict, he would become the youngest head of state France has seen since Napoleon.
Having previously served as the economy minister under Francois Hollande, Mr Macron quit the Socialist Party to found his own movement, En Marche! Taking inspiration from both left and right, the party has signed up 200,000 members in one year and secured 23.75 per cent of the vote on Sunday to take him through to the next round.
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| A young Emmanuel Macron receives a kiss from the teacher who was to become his wife. |
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| Emmanuel Macron kisses his wife Brigitte Trogneaux after his victory. The pair met in their hometown when he was a student and she was a married drama teacher. |
He also wants to reduce unemployment and keep the 35-hour working week while allowing businesses to negotiate separate contracts with employees. His support is clustered in major cities like Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon and Nantes.
Macron claims his camp has been the target of Russian “disinformation” during the campaign, including unsubstantiated claims he has a secret gay lover. He is married to his former teacher, Brigitte Trogneaux, who is 24 years his senior and a grandmother of seven, with three children of her own.
Ms Trogneaux opened up about their relationship in a documentary last year including the fact he told her at 16 he would marry her.
“He wasn’t like the others,” she said. “He wasn’t a teenager. He had a relationship of equals with other adults.”
“I didn’t think it would go very far …. I thought he would get bored. We wrote, and little by little I was totally overcome by the intelligence of this boy.
“We’d call each other all the time and spend hours on the phone,” she said. “Bit by bit, he defeated all my resistance, in an amazing way, with patience.”
The pair married in 2007 and she has featured in his campaign. Mr Macron’s biographer Anne Fulda said his task is now to convince the electorate to fall in love with him as well.
“He wants to give the idea that, if he was able to seduce a woman 24 years his senior and a mother of three children, in a small provincial town ... despite opprobrium and mockery, he can conquer France in the same way.”
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