It was a defining moment in Marine Le Pen’s painstaking bid to “de-demonise” her party.

As the National Rally (RN) leader was about to deliver a speech at her party’s traditional May 1 march in 2015, her estranged father took to the stage.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the ageing Holocaust denier had just issued a fresh salvo of anti-Semitic comments, including that he had never considered France’s wartime collaborationist leader Philippe Petain a traitor and labelling then prime minister Manuel Valls an immigrant due to his Spanish roots.

Dressed in red in defiance, waving his fists in the air and exclaiming: “I’ve been disowned.”

He was later booted out of the party altogether.

Marine’s cut-throat family purge appears to have spectacularly paid off as her party has reached “the gates of power” after clinching a historic score in Sunday’s first round of snap parliamentary elections.

While the RN may yet fall short of an absolute majority in next Sunday’s run-off, the fact that 10.6 million French, or 33 per cent of voters, cast a ballot in her favour is a massive vindication of Ms Le Pen’s attempts to erase its pariah status.

“In the space of a few years we’ve gone from being the most hated party in France to the most loved party,” she recently told the Telegraph.

The RN won 31 per cent of the vote in the June 9 European elections, way ahead of Emmanuel Macron’s camp on 14.6 per cent, with several polls suggesting her bid to prove she had broken with her party’s xenophobic anti-Semitic past was gradually bearing fruit.

Last year, for the first time since 1984, more French people (45 per cent) than the reverse (41 per cent) said they no longer viewed the RN as a “threat to democracy”, according to a Verian-Epoka survey.

“Now, that’s not something you can do by snapping your fingers. I’m not the only one responsible, but come on, maybe I’ll give myself a little credit for this development”, said Ms Le Pen, who has an eye on the presidency in 2027.

“I think we’ve done our homework. Does that mean that the political and media system is not yet reticent? Of course it is, but it’s been humming along for 30 years and someone coming along and changing things creates resistance. That’s not a problem, we’re used to it.”

During the campaign, political rivals seized on the party’s toxic history to try to mobilise voters against it in the run up to France’s snap election.

Left wing and centrist politicians reminded voters that when Ms Le Pen’s father 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.

However, president Macronhas previously cautioned against this approach.

When Élisabeth Borne, his former prime minister and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, told a radio station in 2023 that Ms Le Pen’s party were heirs of Pétain he warned that “history and morality” were no longer effective in countering its apparently inexorable rise.

“You will never make millions of people who have voted for the ‘far Right’ believe they are fascists,” Mr Macron reportedly told ministers, suggesting that gunning for its policies, not its past was the best way to bring it down.

That past is undoubtedly racist and anti-Semitic. Mr Le Pen, a former paratrooper who had served in Algeria, once founded a company that sold recordings of Nazi speeches and German military songs.

In 1987, he famously dubbed the Holocaust a “mere detail” of the Second World War and was subsequently convicted of hate speech and contesting crimes against humanity.

‘Unabashed racist’

An unabashed racist, in 1996, he said he believed in the “inequality of the races” and that ebola was a blessing for Africa as it would end in fewer migrants coming to Europe.

When, in 2002, he shocked France by making the second round of the presidential election, it sparked mass street demonstrations. His rival, Jacques Chirac, won with more than 82 per cent of the vote.

When Ms Le Pen, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s youngest daughter, took over the anti-immigration party in 2011, she ousted many of its most extreme elements and toned down its language, framing it as a governing rather than protest party.

She then ousted her father from the party, saying his outbursts were “political suicide”.

In 2018, she changed the party’s name to National Rally and took a case to France’s highest administrative court, the Council of State, arguing that it should no longer be labelled “far-Right” by the interior ministry. The case was dismissed and France officially classifies the party as far-Right.

However, heated debate erupted during this campaign over whether the term was still appropriate.

David Pujadas, a well-known anchorman on rolling news channel LCI said he thought it wasn’t.

“Studying the far Right in Europe, I saw what Geert Wilders was proposing in the Netherlands, what the AfD was proposing in Germany... And I saw the gulf that separated these parties from the RN,” he told Le Quotidien. “So here, it’s the far Right and elsewhere it’s the far far Right? That’s why I changed.”

In that case, ex-Trotskyist Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his France Unbowed party should be dubbed “far Left” said RMC colleague Apolline de Malherbe even if the Council of State does not use that term for that party.

Perhaps Ms Le Pen’s main weapon in her detoxification drive is Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old party leader who hopes to become France’s next prime minister after the run-off on Sunday.

With his Colgate smile, ideal son-in-law good looks and taste for TikTok and selfies, Mr Bardella has brought in a new generation of supporters with a consensual image.

However, both he and Ms Le Pen have kept the party’s essential doctrine, namely “national preference”, and which she has rechristened “national priority”. In other words, French citizens should be given priority over non-nationals for jobs, social welfare assistance and housing.

Rights groups and constitutionalists say the doctrine is discriminatory and anti-constitutional.

A key plank of its manifesto is to end birthright citizenship, namely the right for children born to foreign parents on French soil, who are raised and schooled in France, to later claim French nationality.

But experts point out that eliminating birthright citizenship could encounter constitutional hurdles.

His party also shocked many during the campaign by expressing its intention to ban dual nationals from taking up sensitive posts, which would have barred a former education minister and various diplomats from keeping their jobs. France has three million dual nationals and the mooted measure caused uproar.

The party has also kept its long-running hard line on law and order, arguing that crime is linked to immigration. Ms Le Pen wants to introduce a presumption of “legitimate defence” for police officers firing weapons.

De-demonising the party

Mr Bardella has pledged to fight a “cultural battle” against Islamism, to demand a €2 billion (£1.7 billion) rebate from the European Union, drastically reduce legal and illegal immigration and deport foreign criminals if he leads the government.

Speaking to the Telegraph recently, he said: “We’ve been de-demonising the party for 10 years. Now I want to institutionalise it.”

That he said had been done by the 88 MPs from his party forming the largest single-party opposition force in the previous parliament. In what has been dubbed “the tie strategy”, they were ordered to look the part and avoid any controversial rhetoric to show they were ready to take the levers of power.

“We’ve changed dimension. We are the most serious group in the National Assembly,” he claimed. Meanwhile, the national cursor had moved to the Right on most of the issues it had been defending for years.

By contrast with the RN, the Left has wreaked chaos in parliament, flouting basic rules by, for example, brandishing Palestinian flags in the National Assembly and blocking debates.

But economically, the RN is, if anything, far-Left, proposing to cut the retirement age to 60 for some, slash VAT on energy prices and block the price of essential goods, even if it toned down some of these during the campaign to avoid scaring the markets.

National Rally expert Jean-Yves Camus said that it resembled other European “illiberal” parties found in Hungary with Victor Orban or in Poland’s Law and Justice party that “undermine the system of checks and balances that is characteristic of democracy”. It is also historically pro-Putin, seen as a strong hand who defends traditional values and Christian roots, but has rowed back since the Ukraine war.

He said perhaps the main reasons the RN had become more palatable was the state of the other parties, which were either in ruins or had radicalised, making the Le Pen camp appear more mainstream.

“First, we have a president who wanted to play poker and lost, never had a real political party to act as a conveyor belt for his ideas and is now paying for the fact that he wanted to establish a quasi-vertical link with the French people and failed,” he told the Telegraph.

“Second, France is probably the only major country in Europe without a conservative Right.”

The once-mighty Gaullist Republicans, which won 10 per cent of the vote, are deeply divided after a spectacular split over whether ot not to back Ms Le Pen.

Ms Le Pen has benefited from the xenophobic, anti-Islamic outbursts of Eric Zemmour, a polemist whose rhetoric makes her look like a shrinking violet, and has distanced herself from Germany’s far-Right AfD.

Last month, she said her party would no longer sit in the EU parliament with the AfD after the head of its European election list said that someone who had been a member of the SS was “not automatically a criminal”.

By contrast, she has sought to build bridges with Giorgia Melona, the Italian prime minister, who on Monday said that attempts to “demonise” far-Right voters were losing impact.

“I notice something that in different forms is also happening in Italy: the constant attempt to demonise and corner the people who don’t vote for the Left,” said the most Right-wing Italian leader since the Second World War.

“It’s a trick that serves to escape debating on the merits of different political proposals. But it’s a trick that fewer and fewer people fall for. We’ve seen it in Italy, and we’re seeing it more and more in Europe and throughout the West”.

But above all, said Mr Camus, Ms Le Pen’s ranks had swollen due to the mass rejection of the fiery Jean-Luc Mélenchon, an admirer of Hugo Chavez and Mao Zedong, whose Unbowed France, LFI, is part of the New Popular Front, which came second on Sunday.

“No doubt on Sunday, moderate voters, even social democrat voters, will find it very difficult to put a Popular Front ballot paper in the box due to his outbursts.”

This explains why Mr Bardella is so keen to debate with Mr Mélenchon rather than a more moderate member of the Left-wing alliance.

Beyond his tepid support for Ukraine and refusal to call Hamas a terrorist organisation after the Oct 7 attack on Israel, Mr Mélenchon has been accused of downplaying anti-Semitic incidents and pandering to the radical Muslim vote.

“It reminds me a lot of George Galloway in the UK whose Respect Party tried to bring about this sort of fusion between political Islam and the far Left. It worked quite well but is a turn-off for most,” he said.

As parties jockey to forge alliances and strategies to keep the RN out, Sunday will be the ultimate crash test of whether the de-demonisation drive is complete.

Supporters upbeat

Meanwhile, its supporters have the wind in their sails and are prepared to forget Mr Bardella’s decision to dilute some of his policies.

Shortly after the results were announced at Ms Le Pen’s northern fiefdom of Hénin-Beaumont, one said: “He’s reasonable, in fact he does what other parties fail to do, which is not to offer promises he cannot keep. We won’t be able to do everything straight away.”

Then the subject moved onto immigration and the tone became more radical.

One supporter called Vanessa said: “We need to bin immigration. We don’t have the same culture, we don’t have the same values. They want to try and change us. Never. I’d rather die. With the Popular Front, we’ll end up under under Sharia law. No way.”

Edouard was even more direct. “I’ve had enough of the Left that doles out lessons to everyone. If they love migrants that much, they can have them in their block of flats. They have houses, a job and cars. Why are they in my social housing and whites sleep on the sidewalk?”

Minutes earlier, Ms Le Pen had taken to the stage to call on the French to vote National Rally to “finally get back unity and fraternity”.