Candidate dumps dad, shaping ‘far right with a human face’

National Front party leader Marine Le Pen sanded down some of the rougher edges of the far-right French political party that her father founded and led for decades — taking her social and political renovations of the France-first party so far that she booted her father altogether.

Le Pen says her thrust into politics started at the age of 4, when her childhood apartment was bombed in an attack on her politically controversial father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

“Politics for me started in violence,” Le Pen recently told The Atlantic, “against me.”

Le Pen, 48, joined the National Front in 1986 and worked as its legal director before being elected to European Parliament in 2004. She also managed her father’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2002. Under Le Pen, the National Front distanced itself from the anti-Semitism of its past, attacked the European Union as an economic issue for France and expelled members accused of racism. And though she is credited with cleaning up the party, she embraced the movement’s anti-immigrant positions and rebranded its nationalism.

Some call her shake-up of the party a “de-demonization” of the National Front, while others see it as becoming a “far right with a human face.”

Regardless, Le Pen took the effort so seriously she expelled her father from the party he founded when a Paris court ruled he denied a crime against humanity and was complicit in condoning war crimes for saying the Nazi occupation of France was “not particularly inhuman” and calling the Holocaust a “detail of history.”

In 2012, Le Pen ran against incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy, a Republican, and Socialist Francois Hollande, finishing third in the first round of the election with 18 percent — the strongest showing ever for a National Front presidential candidate.