French elections 2022: Marine Le Pen shows softer side in Oprah-style chat

Marine Le Pen is a joyous type who lives happily with a woman housemate, free from any male presence, and spends her time gardening and caring for four cats, according to a TV show.

More than two million people tuned in to watch the French hard-right leader reveal this side of herself to Karine Le Marchand, a reality TV host, on Sunday night. “There are no men in this house. Only women. Even the cats are females,” the presidential candidate, 53, told Le Marchand, an interviewer in the Oprah Winfrey mould.

Viewers had just been introduced to Ingrid, a childhood friend who has lived with Le Pen for five years in a modest rented house in the western Paris suburbs. Living with a woman was more peaceful than sharing life with a man, Le Pen, who has been divorced twice, said. “The difference is that you don’t scream at each other.”

Le Pen’s session on the sofa opened the Intimate Ambition programme on the M6 channel. It also included heart-to-hearts with Anne Hidalgo and Valérie Pécresse, two other contenders in the presidential election in April, as well as with the politicians Rachida Dati and Marlène Schiappa.

Until recently, such dips into politicians’ private lives were unthinkable in France, a nation contemptuous of the American-style trivialisation of public life. That changed after the domestic soap opera of François Hollande’s presidency between 2012 and 2017, which included a messy break-up with his partner, Valérie Trierweiler.

During the 2017 election campaign, Le Marchand shook up tradition with a series of soft focus and often flirtatious interviews with the top candidates.

She has increased the emotion in her latest series, prompting the women in the first episode to soften the hard exteriors that they all said the male-dominated political world forced on them.

In a touch that still sounded a little shocking, Le Marchand called Le Pen and the others by their first names. At one stage she quipped to Le Pen: “Let me find you a guy.”

Le Pen, who is making her third presidential attempt and is threatened by competition from Éric Zemmour, a radical-right pundit, said: “I am a joyous woman . . . but I have this image of being severe, even hard.”

She hated conflict, she added. “I want my private life to be a haven of peace, planting flowers in the garden.”

Le Pen acknowledged for the first time that she had performed disastrously in a TV debate with Emmanuel Macron that sealed her defeat in 2017. “It was a misery,” she said.

Her mother, Pierette Lalanne, made a rare appearance to voice her pride in the daughter she abandoned for 15 years after leaving Jean-Marie Le Pen when Marine was 13.

In her session, Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor of Paris, talked of her childhood as the daughter of poor Andalusian immigrants, her love of dancing, and her devotion to Jean-Marc Germain, her second husband, who she said did all the cooking.

Hidalgo, who is far behind in the polls, acknowledged that she had an authoritarian style. “As a woman . . . you have to show authority,” she said.