Marine Le Pen is France's most controversial politician.Over the past five years, she has taken far-right National Front party ' which was founded by her father ' from a marginalised voice to one of the most important forces in French politics.Le Pen officially launched her election campaign on February 5, and the latest polls put her closely behindcenter-right candidate Emmanuel Macron.The first round of voting takes place this Sunday. If no candidate obtains a majority, the top two candidates move to a runoff.Polls then project she will lose the second round, which will ultimately decide who becomes president, to either centrist Emmanuel Macron or conservative Franois Fillon ' but the gap between the candidates is diminishing quickly.Though she has been in politics for the better part of two decades, and members of her family are in politics too, not much is known about Le Pen's private life, which she guards ferociously. This is a look at what we do know about Marine Le Pen, the controversial, charismatic far-right politician who might become the first woman to lead France.Le Pen was born on August 5, 1968, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a commune just outside Paris. She is the youngest of three daughters by Jean-Marie Le Pen and his first wife, Pierrette.They grew up between Paris and the palatial manor of Montretout in Saint-Clouda fact that journalists and politicians often point out when Le Pen says she is "the candidate of the people."Jean-Marie Le Pen was an unpopular figure, which meant Marine's childhood was far from the ordinary. At some point she was even pulled out of school for over a month and hidden with family friends in the south of France because of a surge in death threats against her father.The most notable of those incidents was the bombing of their Paris apartment in 1976, which was reportedly aimed at killing the whole family.Le Pen's parents separated when she was 17 years old, and the divorce, as well as the media furore that surrounded it, had a profound impact on her life.Her mother ran away with a journalist who was writing a biography of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Le Pen later called it one of the most painful events in her life and railed against the media that, according to her, had little regard to a family's privacy.One of the most extraordinary moments of the divorce was Le Pen's mother's naked shoot for Playboy, which she reportedly did to get back at her ex-husband. Le Pen harshly condemned her mother's actions, likening her to a "public dump," and did not see her for 15 years following the divorce.Throughout different interviews, the Le Pen sisters all characterised their father and mother as absent parentsYann Le Pen, Marine's older sister, even told Vanity Fair she wondered why her parents had children.But the drama in the Le Pen family did not stop with their parents. Though all of the Le Pen girls fell out with their mother following the divorce, only Yann still speaks to her father now. The eldest daughter, Marie-Caroline, fell out with her father during an internal fraction of the National Front in the late 1990s. Marine Le Pen also fell out with Yann in recent years and Yann's daughter also recently feuded with her aunt. Their latest spat was over abortion rights.Le Pen read law at the Universit Paris 2 Panthon-Assas, from which she obtained a master's in law in 1991. She passed the bar exam in Paris and worked as a lawyer until 1998, when she took up a role in the legal department of the National Front.She has been married twice, first to Franck Chauffroy, who at some point worked for the National Front, in 1997. They have a daughter born in 1998 and twins born in 1999. Le Pen divorced Chauffroy in 2000 and married ric Iorio, who also worked for the National Front, in 2002 before divorcing him in 2006.She is now in a relationship with Louis Aliot, the vice president of the National Front in charge of training and events.A difficult relationship with her fatherLe Pen had her first contact with the political world in 1983 when she accompanied her father as he campaigned for municipal elections. She says she decided to go with him because she wanted to get to know her father and wanted her father to know her. Following him onto the political terrain was the only way to do that, Le Pen explained in a televised interview in 2006.See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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