Marine Le Pen steps down as leader of France’s far-right National Front

Monday’s move appears to be a way for Le Pen to embrace a wide range of potential voters ahead of the May 7 run-off between herself and Emmanuel Macron, the independent centrist who came in first in Sunday’s first round.

“Tonight, I am no longer the president of the National Front. I am the presidential candidate,” she said on French public television news.

Le Pen has said in the past that she is not a candidate of her party, and made that point when she rolled out her platform in February, saying the measures she was espousing were not her party’s, but her own.

Le Pen has worked to bring in voters from the left and right for several years, cleaning up her party’s racist, anti-Semitic image to do so.

The news comes as it was revealed that centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron got nearly one million more votes than Le Pen in the presidential election’s first round.

Macron collected 8.66 million votes, or 24 per cent, while Le Pen garnered 7.68 million votes, or 21.3 per cent, according to the official final count published by the Interior Ministry.

For Le Pen, it is the best result ever achieved by her nationalist anti-EU and anti-immigration party the National Front in a French presidential election.

Also on Monday Macron received the backing of French President Francois Hollande in May’s presidential run-off, citing “the risk for our country’s future” if Marine Le Pen won.

Hollande said French purchasing power would be hit, “thousands” of jobs would be lost and prices would soar if Le Pen won and then implemented her pledge to take France out of the eurozone and hike tariffs on imports.

A far-right victory would also “deeply divide France” at a time when it needed to show “solidarity and cohesion” in the face of terrorism, he said.

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