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PARIS, Jan. 17 (UPI) -- France's far-right National Front has chosen as its head the group's "first daughter" Marine Le Pen, who is set to unnerve President Nicolas Sarkozy in the run-up to next year's elections. As per Sunday's inner-party vote, the mother of three succeeds her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the FN in 1972 and increased its voter support ever since.
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"We are going to make the FN a great popular force," said Marine Le Pen, 42, after her victory over party rival Bruno Gollnisch was announced, the BBC reports.
Her father's footsteps are large.
One of France's most controversial politicians, Jean-Marie Le Pen, 82, has been a five-time contender for the French presidency. To widespread surprise, he beat Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin and made the 2002 presidential runoff against Jacques Chirac.
His populist campaigns have forced several presidents, notably the current one, to adopt tougher security and anti-immigration policies.
Yet while the aging father has often shocked mainstream voters with decidedly racist slurs -- he once called the Holocaust a "detail" of history -- Marine has tried to move the party away from its neo-Nazi image.
She's comes across less radical and is probably more eloquent than her father. A frequent guest at French TV talk shows, she has managed to identify new foes that have the potential to move voter support, mainly what she says is an "Islamization" of French society.
By supporting more state influence to curtail capitalism, she's also playing on traditionally left-wing ideals. This puts her in line with a new generation of populist far-right leaders in Europe, mainly Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and politicians in Scandinavia and Germany.
Le Pen's new course could make the FN a serious contender for Sarkozy's center-right UMP party in upcoming regional elections and national elections, observers say. Past votes have handed the FN around 15 percent of the ballot, and recent polls have suggested that the FN is the country's third-most popular party, behind Sarkozy's UMP and the Socialists.
During the coming year, Le Pen will try to drain support from the UMP to boost her chances in the presidential elections, which are scheduled for the spring of 2012.
Sarkozy and Socialist leader Segolene Royal have ruled out teaming up with the FN in regional elections, a strategy observers say could ward off some of the party's vigor.
Instead, mainstream politicians aren't convinced the the FN under Marine Le Pen will change.
"It's still the same extreme right," Labor Minister Xavier Bertrand, a member of the UMP, told French radio station Europe 1.
