How Marine Le Pen is preparing for power

It is anRNRNRN annual ritual in France for politicians to make a new year’s address. Time was that Marine Le Pen, the leader of the (, formerly the National Front), did so from the back room of a boxy building in Nanterre, on the drab outskirts of Paris. In those days the party she took over in 2011 from her father, Jean-Marie, was more about low-budget protest and fringe provocation than taking power.This January the job fell to Jordan Bardella, her slick 28-year-old protégé and now president, whom she watched from the front row. In a dark suit and tie, he spoke from a grand on the swanky Avenue Hoche in Paris, a step away from the Champs-Elysées. The symbolism was potent. The shift from the capital’s periphery to the heart of elite Paris encapsulates a strategy: the is preparing for power.