Paris - (AFP) - For the second time in a row, far-right leader Marine Le Pen reaches the decisive round of the French presidential elections, crowning a decade she spent improving her image in public opinion without changing her program.

The ambitious lady, known for her sharp nature, is the youngest daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front and one of the most controversial faces in the modern history of French politics.

Like her father in 2002, Marin reached the second round of the 2017 elections, when she lost to Emmanuel Macron, whom she will face again on Sunday.

For decades, Le Pen Sr. remained the dominant name in the French far right. However, he could not have dreamed of the extent to which the youngest of his three daughters had reached.

However, Marin's presence was not exclusively the result of political inheritance. Rather, her success in achieving this was mainly due to her work to dismantle what her father had established, especially the removal of all the racist and anti-Semitic deposits that marked his speech.

Le Pen proceeded to "de-demonicize" the National Front, and went so far as to expel her founding father in August 2015, after she became convinced that his controversial and controversial positions would remain an obstacle to any victory at the national level.

In this regard, she said, "I followed the example of this man (...) I fought a lot for him, but at a certain moment, I had to stop."

Le Pen has worked to change the image of the party she has headed since 2011, through the path of "normalization", one of which was changing the name, as the "National Assembly" replaced the "National Front" in 2018.

The game of names is no longer strange to its political bloc: the heavy legacy left by Jean-Marie prompted the party to run the election campaign, focusing on the name "Marine" instead of her nickname, which was a burden on her for many years.

In an interview with Closer magazine, she said that during her youth, "it wasn't easy for people to get romantically involved with Marine Le Pen" because of the name she bore. "I remember that one of the men chose to separate from me because of the pressure his social environment imposed on him," she added.

Le Pen, 53, is the mother of three children from two marriages that led to divorce.

Beyond personal issues and names, Le Pen has sought during the past years to present a more friendly image: less emotional reactions in the face of journalists' questions, clothes in light colors, and a smile present even in the midst of the televised debate with Macron days before the decisive day.

In the political core, he focused on the economy, which was marginal in the list of priorities of the National Front, seeking to attract voters who had been "lost" by globalization.

Le Pen focused in the 2022 campaign against Macron, the former banker whom some describe as a "president of the wealthy", on the purchasing power that has become a preoccupation for the French with the rise in global energy and food resources prices in light of the Russian war on Ukraine.

The relationship between Le Pen and Russia, which she visited during 2017, was mainly present in the televised debate with the president.

The latter accused her of being financially dependent on Russia because of a loan she had obtained from a Russian bank, and that she had become "dependent" on Russian President Putin. Le Pen responded by affirming her support, "A free Ukraine that does not belong to the United States, the European Union, or Russia, this is my position."

The two rivals engaged in a heated debate over the European Union, which is a main focus of Macron's foreign policy, while Le Pen denied accusations that she wanted to take France out of the bloc.

"I want to develop this European organization, but Mr. Macron, I did not think you would adopt a conspiracy theory," she said, while the outgoing president considered that Le Pen's positions make Sunday's elections a "referendum with or against Europe."

In the first round, to the right of Le Pen was candidate Eric Zemmour, who holds extremist and controversial positions.

Zemmour left the race after winning about seven percent of the vote, but called for a vote for Le Pen in the second round.

The former competitor stirred controversy during his campaign. He has said, for example, that he would require families to give their newborns "French names," and might set up a "re-immigration" ministry to expel unwanted foreigners. Although she also belonged to the extreme right, Le Pen avoided being drawn into Zemmour's sharp stances.

Associate researcher at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris, Cecile Aldoi, said that compared to the "radical and even crude discourse" adopted by Zemmour, "Marine Le Pen chose the opposite, to normalize, moderate and soften her discourse."

Aldoy, a specialist in the study of the far right, stressed that "the (Marine Le Pen) program did not deviate at all from the foundations of the National Front such as immigration and national identity, but it chose other words to justify it."

She explains that Le Pen is now "attacking Islam and wants to radically limit non-European immigration under the pretexts of secularism, republican values, and even feminism."

A newly published Jean-Joris study concluded that Le Pen's positions on immigration have become more hardened.

The far-right candidate wants to include in the constitution "national priority", which would deprive foreigners of several privileges.

Like Zemmour, it also wants to expel illegal immigrants, criminals and foreign offenders, as well as those suspected of extremism and foreigners who have been unemployed for more than a year.