Marion Maréchal

At the age of 22, she became the youngest person to enter the French Parliament in modern political history (Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, at 24 years old in 1791, was the previous youngest MP).

Her grandfather, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founded the Front National party on 5 October 1972.

Marion Jeanne Caroline Maréchal ( Le Pen, born 10 December 1989), known as Marion Maréchal-Le Pen from 2010 to 2018, is a French conservative politician, part of the Le Pen family, granddaughter of National Front (renamed National Rally in 2018) founder Jean-Marie Le Pen and niece of its current leader Marine Le Pen.

She was born on 10 December 1989 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Yvelines, Île-de-France.

Her Father Samuel Maréchal was the leader of the Front National Youth movement (FNJ) for seven years (1992–1999).

She featured with her grandfather in a campaign poster at the age of two.

She and Gilbert Collard became the first members of the National Front to win seats in the National Assembly since 1997.

She was a candidate in seventh position on the FN list in Saint-Cloud, Hauts-de-Seine, in the 2008 municipal elections.

She was not elected, for the FN list only got 6.29% with one municipal councillor elected from the first round.

In the 2010 regional elections, she figured in second position on the FN departmental list in the Yvelines, Île-de-France.

Marie-Christine Arnautu's FN list, which polled 9.29% in the whole of Île-de-France in the first round, could not take part in the run-off, given that a list must cross a threshold of 10% of the valid votes at a regional level.

Because of the process of elimination, she was not elected in the Île-de-France's regional council.

Her aunt Marine Le Pen has been FN president since 16 January 2011, with Jean-Marie Le Pen first becoming honorary chairman and later excluded in August 2015.

Her mother Yann Le Pen, Jean-Marie Le Pen's second daughter, does not carry out any official duties within the FN.

She is a former member of the National Front and served as the member of the National Assembly for the 3rd constituency of Vaucluse from 2012 to 2017.

Aged 22 years at the time of her election, she became France's youngest parliamentarian in modern political history.

Until 2012, she was enrolled in Panthéon-Assas University's masters of public business law.

On 14 November 2012, she wrote in an official statement that she had decided to put aside her studies in order to dedicate herself to her office.

Maréchal-Le Pen's parliamentary candidacy in Vaucluse's 3rd constituency was publicly confirmed on 25 April 2012, between the first round of the presidential election and its run-off.

After her candidacy was made official by the FN nomination committee, she then campaigned in this constituency which includes the southern part of Carpentras.

In the first round of the presidential elections, Marine Le Pen had achieved her highest national performance in Vaucluse (27.03%) and most notably in this constituency (31.50%) where she outdistanced the UMP incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy (27.60%).

In the run-off on 17 June 2012, she defeated the incumbent MP Jean-Michel Ferrand, who had continuously sat in the National Assembly for twenty-six years (Rally for the Republic: 1986–2002, Union for a Popular Movement: 2002–2012).

In a book entitled The Conquerors (Les Conquérantes) launched on 18 November 2013, the French journalist Christine Clerc revealed that Samuel Maréchal is not her biological father.

On 7 November 2013, the French weekly news magazine L'Express disclosed that her biological father was Roger Auque, a French diplomat and investigative journalist.

On 8 November, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen announced that she was suing L'Express for a "serious invasion of her privacy".

Maréchal-Le Pen married businessman Matthieu Decosse on 29 July 2014, at the Saint-Cloud town hall.

Their daughter was born that September.

After the 2015 regional election, for which she received the best result for a FN candidate, she became the Leader of the Opposition in the Regional Council of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur.

She won her case in April 2015.

They divorced in 2016.

In 2017, she did not seek reelection as a member of the National Assembly and resigned as a regional councillor.

She is currently involved in the education sector with her private school, the Institut des sciences sociales, économiques et politiques (ISSEP).

After retiring from politics in 2017, Marion Marechal-Le Pen enrolled in a Master of Business Administration (MBA) at Emlyon Business School.

About her early interest in politics, Maréchal-Le Pen explained: "Contrary to what everyone thinks, in my family we didn’t talk about politics at home and we were free to make our own choices. I became interested in politics around 15 or 16 and in various approaches, not necessarily FN".

As a teenager she once attended a meeting addressed by Nicolas Sarkozy, "out of curiosity" because he "intrigued" her.

She added: "I very quickly came down to earth."

At the age of 18, she became a member of the FN.

Maréchal-Le Pen became engaged to Italian politician Vincenzo Sofo in 2018.

The couple married on 11 September 2021.

Maréchal-Le Pen gave birth to a second child, her daughter Clotilde, on 10 June 2022.