French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has announced that she is temporarily stepping aside as leader of her National Front party, in what is seen as an attempt to broaden her appeal beyond its far-right constituencies.

“Tonight, I am not the president of the National Front, I am the presidential candidate, the one who wants to gather all the French around a project of hope, of prosperity, of security,” she said in an interview on French television.

Her campaign calls for sharp curbs on immigration and on the rights of immigrants living in France, as well as the expulsion of foreigners under suspicion of having militant Islamist links.

But she is seeking all the same to move the party away from the xenophobia and anti-Semitism that had infected it since its creation in the 1970s by her father Jean-Marie and to distance herself from his toxic legacy. She even banned the words “Front National” and her family name from all election campaign literature and from rally stage sets, using only the slogans “Marine Presidente” and “Au Nom du Peuple”.

Yesterday, Mr Le Pen told France Inter radio that he thinks his daughter has produced a “too laid-back” campaign.

He said in her position, he would have done a “Trump-style” campaign that would have been “very aggressive against those who are responsible for the country’s decadency”.

Mr Le Pen shocked the world in 2002 by qualifying for the second round of the presidential election and then went on to lose in a landslide to conservative Jacques Chirac. In 2015, his daughter pushed him out of the party because he had refused to desist from anti-Semitic provocations that were undermining her bid to become French president and make the National Front an acceptable political alternative. AGENCIES