Singing the French national anthem and smiling broadly after Sunday's first-round presidential vote launched her into the runoff with centrist Emmanuel Macron, Le Pen said her National Front party will represent "the great alternative" for French people frustrated with the status quo. “I’m taking a leave of absence as president of @FN_officiel [the Front National]; I’m now simply a candidate in the presidential election,” Le Pen tweeted from her official account. 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. She has worked to bring in voters from the left and right for several years, attempting to clean up her party's racist, anti-Semitic image to do so, but the party remains a totem of right wing extremism in France and beyond.
Presidential candidate Marine Le Pen announces she is stepping down as leader of the National Front.