Months after that vote, President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy, whom Le Pen called a “foreigner” because of his Greek, Jewish and Hungarian ancestry, seized on the FN’s main campaign themes of national security and immigration in the legislative elections, openly saying, that the FN intends to go to the vote.
This swept the rug out from under FN. Le Pen’s party failed to win a single seat in the National Assembly and, weighed down by financial problems, he announced plans to sell his party’s headquarters outside Paris.
In 2011, he resigned as party leader and was replaced by his daughter Marin.
Father and daughter quarreled almost immediately. Marine Le Pen has consciously moved away from her father’s more extreme policies to make her more attractive to Eurosceptic voters.
Then the relationship was irretrievably broken.
In 2015, Jean-Marie Le Pen repeated detail, his Holocaust denial in a radio interview. After months of bitter legal wrangling, FN party members eventually voted to expel their own founder.
Two years later, during her presidential campaign, Marin changed the name of the party to National Assemblyor the National Rally.
Her father condemned the move as suicide.
