LILLE — Three weeks ago, left-wing firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon was an entertaining sideshow in France’s presidential race — fun to watch on TV thanks to his cutthroat speaking style but ultimately no threat to the frontrunners. 
 
 Nobody is laughing now. 
 
 Less than two weeks before the first round of the presidential election, the anti-EU, pro-Moscow Mélenchon is busting open what was already an unpredictable race and threatening to sink the campaign’s only viable pro-EU candidates. 
 
 Benefitting from the collapse in support for socialist candidate Benoît Hamon, Mélenchon enjoys the support of 18.5 percent of votes. That’s on a par with conservative former prime minister François Fillon and only 3.5 percentage points behind centrist frontrunner Emmanuel Macron, according to a daily poll of first-round voting intentions by Ifop. 
 
 Mélenchon is still no shoo-in for the presidency. But his increasing popularity is becoming a problem for the two frontrunners, because a large swathe of his backers — 42 percent of them, according to Ifop — say they won’t vote in the second-round run-off between the top two candidates if Mélenchon is no longer in the picture. 
 
 Far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who is almost certain to make the second round, can rejoice. 
 
 “Abstention among Mélenchon voters can turn into a determining factor,” Ifop’s Jérome Fourquet said. “Many people in this group are going to find it impossible to vote for ‘Macron the banker’ — how many exactly it’s hard to say. What’s clear is that the tactical voting we saw in 2002 that kept Jean-Marie Le Pen out of power is not going to work as well this time.” 
 
 ‘Operation Abstain’ 
 
 On Wednesday night, at a massive rally in the northern city of Lille, Mélenchon offered a glimpse of his appeal for millions of French people. 
 
 Dressed in his signature Mao-style jacket, the candidate put on a freewheeling performance that alternated between mocking commentary of news articles, snippets of stump speeches and diatribes against rivals. 
 
 Hands-free thanks to the kind of microphone Madonna would wear, he moved around the small stage to make sure he addressed everyone. Outside, thousands who were unable to get in stood in the cold watching him on a giant screen for more than two hours. The candidate’s voice, amplified by powerful speakers, could be heard half a kilometer away. 
 
 Mélenchon explained the thrust of his speech as seeking to show “two visions of the world that oppose one another.” 
 
 But the substance was devoted to his rivals, namely Macron, whom he repeatedly referred to as a “banker.” If either Macron or Fillon were elected, Mélenchon bellowed at one point, then they would make ordinary men and women “spit blood” from overwork. 
 
 “In 2008 we both had a membership card for the Socialist Party,” he went on, referring to Macron. “I turned my card in to defend my ideas. He turned his card in to join the Rothschild bank. That’s about as much as you need to know.” 
 
 The crowd was vocal. Every time Macron’s name was mentioned, they booed long and loud. Mélenchon let them do so, saying at one point: “Doesn’t it feel good to shout?” But when they hissed at the mention of the Communist Party, which has not thrown its support behind Mélenchon, he cut them short. “None of that,” he snapped. “They are our friends.” 
 
 The anti-Macron message was being heard loud and clear. 
 
 Eight out of 10 supporters questioned by POLITICO said if Mélenchon did not make it into the election’s final round, they would abstain — even if that meant the head of the National Front, whom most otherwise opposed, became France’s next president. 
 
 ‘The Trojan Horse of finance’ 
 
 “Macron represents capitalism, which along with financial lobbies is shaping Europe,” said a 60-year-old art teacher who only wanted to be identified as Mathilde. “He is the Trojan horse of finance.” 
 
 She added: “If in the second round Mélenchon is not there, so be it, I will not vote. We’ll have the far-right. I don’t care. I can promise you that there are many, many people in my situation. We are just completely fed up.” 
 
 Lucas, an 18-year-old preparing to vote in his first presidential election, was on the same page. “If it’s Macron against Le Pen in the second round, I am not voting.” 
 
 Ditto Lydie and Fabrice from Lille. “What I will do is take two pieces of paper with Mélenchon’s name on them and slip them in the ballot box at both rounds,” said Lydie, a retired postal worker. “I could not bring myself to vote for [Macron],” echoed Fabrice. 
 
 Mélenchon offers such a similar vision of world affairs to the National Front chief. 
 
 A massive refusal of Mélenchon backers to switch to Macron in the election’s second round would seriously harm his chances. 
 
 While polls show Macron prevailing in the final round, he will need supporters of rivals on the left and right to help him over the finish line. Much of his second-round support is implied as part of a tactical voting scheme known as the “Republican Front.” 
 
 However, conversations with several Mélenchon backers suggested they had little interest in forming a Republican Front. A reporter from a local newspaper who had voted against Le Pen in a regional election in 2015 said she would be unable to do so this time around against Macron. 
 
 Others shrugged when asked if they would be able to accept a Le Pen presidency. One said he would vote for Le Pen against Macron in the final round. Two hinted that a President Le Pen was preferable to a President Macron, because she represented a “real change” whereas the former economy minister was “the same old recipes.” 
 
 If some Mélenchon backers are ready to accept a Le Pen presidency, it may be partly because the candidate offers such a similar vision of world affairs to the National Front chief. 
 
 Both advocate a confrontation with the EU, and a referendum if they don’t get what they want; both are skeptical of the United States, friendly toward Russia and want to redefine France’s relationship with NATO. ||||| Backstage at a rally in southern France in the early days of the presidential race, Marine Le Pen took a puff on the electronic cigarette that has replaced her two-packets-a-day tobacco habit. “I’m going to run a joyful campaign,�? she smiled. 
 
 French elections: all you need to know Read more 
 
 Le Pen wanted to soften her harsh image and “soothe�? voters – she had posed for pictures hugging horses and pet kittens – but also to offer a hardline programme she believed would “reassure�? a French population despairing of decades of mass unemployment and a persistent terrorist threat. 
 
 The aim, as always for the far-right Front National founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 1972, was keeping France for the French. There would be a referendum to change the constitution so that “national priority�? would be given to French people over non-nationals in jobs, housing and welfare. There would be another referendum to leave the European Union. Le Pen promised an immigration clampdown and a ban on religious symbols, including the Muslim headscarf, from all public places in France. 
 
 Marine Le Pen, 48, is the closest she has ever been to the French presidency – with a chance of making it to the final runoff in an election that is impossible to predict. In the six years since she took over the party from her father, she has steadily increased her party’s vote in every local and European election. If her ex-paratrooper, Holocaust-denying, provocateur father was content to be a protest vote, Marine Le Pen wants power and political office. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marine Le Pen visits a horse show in Villepinte, Paris, in December. Photograph: Jacky Naegelen/Reuters 
 
 Le Pen, controlled and image-conscious, has always a walked a tight line between denouncing the system and trying to be part of it. Her life has played out in the public eye ever since, aged six, she was photographed being tucked into her bed in a bedroom incongruously wallpapered with Front National election posters about fighting the “Marxist cancer�?. The Le Pen family dynasty was always something of a national soap opera, with the blond clan living together – including the three Le Pen daughters well into their 30s – in a 19th-century manor house perched on a hill outside Paris, watched over by dobermans. 
 
 But the troubled father-daughter bond – and the brutal public breaking of it – has hung over her presidential campaign. Marine Le Pen’s election strategy has been to broaden her voter base by sanitising the party’s image, moving it away from the racist, jackbooted and antisemitic imagery of the past. The problem was that Papa Le Pen felt left out. In 2015, he deliberately wrecked her plans by repeating the Holocaust denials that had landed him a series of convictions for hate speech and contesting crimes against humanity. After a bitter public feud, she expelled him from the party. He publicly disowned her and they haven’t spoken since. 
 
 But the ghosts of the second world war persist in French politics. Marine Le Pen was asked on a radio programme this week about a major wartime roundup of Jews in Paris. She said France as a nation was not responsible, only “those who were in power at the time�?, sparking fury from Jewish organisations. Le Pen argued that modern France should not be locked in permanent repentance and that the “real�? France was Gen de Gaulle’s resistance, not the “illegal�? Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime. “If you’re trying to say Marine Le Pen is a Nazi, come out and say it but that will make everyone laugh to the rafters because it’s simply not credible,�? her chief strategist, Florian Philippot, angrily told a chatshow host. Le Pen slammed what she called a pointless controversy. 
 
 Marion Anne Perrene Le Pen – swiftly nicknamed Marine – was born west of Paris in 1968, the youngest of three daughters. Her father showed off his children in the press. But their home life was more disjointed than it seemed. In the Le Pens’ first Paris apartment building, the children lived separately from their parents, in a flat upstairs with a nanny. Jean-Marie Le Pen and his wife, Pierrette Lalanne, would go off on holiday or long sailing trips around the world on their own, sometimes missing Christmas. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marine Le Pen attending a wreath-laying ceremony in 2010 with her father Jean-Marie at the statue of Joan of Arc in Paris. Photograph: Jacques Brinon/AP 
 
 It was only when the eight-year-old Marine woke up in her nightdress amid shards of glass and a blown-away bedroom wall, after a bomb attack aimed at killing her father, that she realised his political role and the extent of hatred towards him. “As an eight-year-old girl, I was suddenly made aware of death,�? she told me when she took over the Front National leadership. “But maybe that gave me a distance, a kind of armour, that’s useful when you’re aiming for positions of responsibility.�? 
 
 The family surname was a burden – she recalled teachers at school referring to her sisters as “daughters of a fascist�? – but she constantly stood up for her father. When, in 1985, the paper Libération revealed that Le Pen Sr had engaged in torture during the Algerian war, he denied it and advised the teenaged Marine Le Pen to take the day off school. She refused and went in defending him. 
 
 In the 1980s, as he gained political prominence, Le Pen Sr commissioned a biography from a journalist who spent time at the family’s manor house. One day, Marine , then 16, was surprised to find one of her older sisters waiting outside school. “Mum’s gone,�? she said. Without telling anyone, Lalanne had taken all her possessions and left with Le Pen’s biographer to set up a new life. She didn’t see or speak to her daughters for more than 15 years. Marine , the youngest and most attached to her mother, was left alone with her distant and distracted father. She said she waited every day for some kind contact from her mother, but none came. 
 
 “Marine Le Pen grew up in a very odd atmosphere, a family that appeared close but was actually very distant,�? said David Doucet, who co-authored a biography of her early years, La Politique Malgré Elle. “She lived almost 20 years without her mother. Her father hardly knew her. She was brought up by nannies and governesses, left to her own devices.�? 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jean-Marie Le Pen with his wife Jany and daughters Marine and Yann in 2002. Photograph: Prestige/Getty Images 
 
 A vicious, public divorce battle followed. Jean-Marie Le Pen rebuffed Lalanne’s maintenance claims, saying she should work as a cleaner. As revenge, Lalanne posed naked in French Playboy scrubbing kitchen floors. 
 
 Marine Le Pen occasionally accompanied her father out campaigning as a teenager as a way to spend time with him and win a little attention. But she didn’t initially set herself up for a political career. She told me once: “My father says I’m like Obelix. I fell into the magic potion of politics when I was young.�? In fact, she had tried to escape the party by studying law. To make extra income beyond her law firm jobs, she worked for six years as a state-appointed duty lawyer, defending illegal immigrants facing deportation. “They are human beings who have rights,�? she said recently in a TV interview. “We don’t blame immigration policies on them. It’s not their fault.�? 
 
 At 30, she won her first role as regional councillor for the Front National in Henin-Beaumont, a depressed, former coal-mining town in the north, which she later made her political laboratory, a place to reinvent herself as a “defender of the people�?. She recognised that France’s northern industrial belt, which had traditionally voted left, could turn to the Front National if the party stood not just against immigration, which remained its chief selling point, but for the victims of deindustrialisation and the financial crisis. “It used to be called her laboratory, but now it’s the place she still has an apartment, the region I think she feels most at ease in,�? said Sébastien Chenu, who ran her northern campaign in the last regional elections. “She’s easy to approach. That’s why it works for her in the north. She likes the contact.�? 
 
 Le Pen keeps her old friends close. “If anyone tried to betray her, they couldn’t stick around,�? Chenu said. The Front National party-funding corruption cases currently under investigation – including allegations of misusing European public funds to pay French party workers, and false-accounting in election funding – have seen some of Le Pen’s closest childhood friends placed under formal investigation. They and the party deny all charges. But the cases showed how she had placed people she met at college in positions of trust. 
 
 Le Pen protects her children from the public exposure she had a child. Twice married and divorced from men who were active in the Front National, she had three children in the space of one year – a daughter immediately followed by twins. Her current partner is the party deputy, Louis Aliot. 
 
 She once described her feud with her father as “the hardest time of my life except childbirth�? but hinted she expected him to call her if she won the presidency. Le Pen Sr’s idea of parenting was always about toughening up his daughter. When Marine Le Pen was 20, he took her to the morgue to see the corpse of a party figure killed in a car crash. When she asked why, he said: “I don’t want the first dead person you see to be me.�? 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marine Le Pen during a campaign meeting earlier this week. Photograph: Chamussy/Sipa/Rex/Shutterstock 
 
 Marine Le Pen 
 
 Potted profile 
 
 Born: 5 August 1968 
 
 Career: She was legal officer for her father’s far-right Front National party before winning different councillor posts in Henin-Beaumont in the north and in Paris. Currently regional councillor for the northern region, Hauts-de-France. Member of the European parliament since 2004, where she co-heads the anti-EU grouping, Europe of Nations and Freedom – a bloc of rightwing nationalist parties. 
 
 High point: Taking over the leadership of the Front National from her father in 2011. 
 
 Low point: Failing to win control of any French regions in 2015 elections, despite topping the first round and massively increasing her party’s score. The left and right grouped together to oppose her. 
 
 What she says: “We’re thrilled that the British have seized this extraordinary opportunity to escape their servitude�? – on Britain’s vote to leave the EU. 
 
 What they say: “A danger for France and a danger for Europe,�? – European commissioner and former Socialist French economy minister, Pierre Moscovici. ||||| French television recently broadcast video from the 1990s of Mr. Loustau visiting an aging prominent former SS member, Léon Degrelle, a decorated warrior for Hitler and the founder of the Belgian Rex party, a prewar fascist movement. 
 
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 Other video showed Mr. Chatillon speaking warmly of his own visit with Mr. Degrelle, who was a patron saint of Europe’s far-right youths until his death in 1994. 
 
 Some in the National Front flatly deny Mr. Chatillon and Mr. Loustau are either anti-Semitic or nostalgic for the Third Reich, while others make no secret of avoiding them, precisely because of their taint. 
 
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 But their lingering presence in Ms. Le Pen’s inner circle has called into question the sincerity of her strategy to “un-demonize” her party and renounce its heritage of deep-rooted anti-Semitism since she took over from her father, Jean-Marie, in 2011. 
 
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 “By the evidence,” said the historian Nicolas Lebourg, a leading National Front specialist at the University of Montpellier, “she considers it’s not something very important.” 
 
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 The two trusted men continue to work closely with the party’s top leadership, including Ms. Le Pen. They have been charged by French prosecutors in an elaborate campaign-finance scheme that has been crucial to keeping the National Front afloat for years. 
 
 The financial scandals have not dented Ms. Le Pen in the polls before the first round of voting on April 23. Potentially more damaging may be the recent revelations about the people she has surrounded herself with, in particular Mr. Chatillon and Mr. Loustau. 
 
 “They have remained National Socialist,” said Aymeric Chauprade, once Ms. Le Pen’s principal adviser on foreign affairs until a falling out, partly over his pro-Israel stance. 
 
 “They are anti-Semites, nostalgic for the Third Reich, violently anticapitalist, with a hatred for democracy,” he added in an interview. “People think they’re marginal. But in fact, I discovered, she protects them. She supports them. They are at the heart of everything.” 
 
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 Mr. Chauprade recalled a dinner with Mr. Chatillon and others in the spring of 2014 that was “full of anti-Semitic jokes.” But he added: “They are not joking. They are real Nazis.” 
 
 In court documents and in interviews, the two men are depicted as unreformed Nazi sympathizers. And a new book, “Marine Knows Everything,” by two investigative journalists, Marine Turchi and Mathias Destal, includes a photo of Mr. Chatillon, fist raised, at a 1994 rally for a far-right student movement called G.U.D., or Groupe Union Défense. 
 
 Photo 
 
 Separately, an affidavit filed in a 2014 defamation lawsuit (later dropped) offers a fuller portrait of Mr. Chatillon’s extremist views from that era. 
 
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 In the affidavit, Denis Le Moal, once a member of G.U.D., described Mr. Chatillon’s nostalgia for the Third Reich and his closeness to Holocaust deniers. 
 
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 Mr. Le Moal told of a 1993 rally Mr. Chatillon organized for the student group in Paris that resounded with “Sieg Heils” and Nazi salutes. 
 
 “During that period, every year, Frédéric Chatillon organized a dinner on the birthday of the ‘fuhrer,’ April 20, to pay homage to ‘this great man,’” the affidavit states. 
 
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 It goes on to describe a gathering in a Paris restaurant when Mr. Chatillon brought a painted portrait of Hitler — “a portrait Chatillon showed us during the dinner, saying, ‘My beloved fuhrer, he is magnificent,’ and kissing the picture.” 
 
 It says he also organized “striped-pajama” parties as a student, an allusion to the clothing Jews wore in death camps and concentration camps. 
 
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 “The only debatable point, in the use of the term ‘neo-Nazi,’ is the wrongful qualifier ‘neo,’” the affidavit states. 
 
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 Requests to arrange interviews with Mr. Chatillon and Mr. Loustau through associates of theirs were unsuccessful. The men have made no secret of their disdain for journalists. 
 
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 “To hell with Hitler and the Third Reich!” Mr. Chatillon wrote in a recent Facebook posting. “But to hell also with these ‘journalists’ who write whatever the hell they want.” 
 
 On Twitter, Mr. Loustau denounced “these activists hiding behind a press card, benefiting from all the means of state television to try to destroy us.” 
 
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 The National Front’s treasurer, Wallerand de Saint-Just, defended the men. “In no sense are they nostalgic for the Third Reich,” he said. 
 
 “They were turbulent boys, but they have become true professionals,” Mr. Saint-Just said. “They work closely with us and we have confidence in them, in the conception, printing and delivery of campaign materials.”
– For the first time since her father founded the party in 1972, Marine Le Pen has an actual shot at delivering the French presidency to the National Front, the Guardian reports in a profile of the far-right candidate. The profile touches on Le Pen expelling her Holocaust-denying father from the party, her political awakening at a young age, and the manor house above Paris where her family lives "watched over by dobermans." The Guardian says Le Pen is the "closest she has ever been to the French presidency," thanks in part to her efforts to move the party past its racist and anti-Semetic past. But those efforts may be just for show, the New York Times reports. Court documents and interviews with close associates of Le Pen accuse two of her closest friends and members of her inner circle of anti-Semitism and "Hitler nostalgia." Le Pen's former top foreign adviser says the men "are real Nazis" and "are at the heart of everything" for her campaign. Meanwhile, France's far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon, may help the far-right candidate secure the presidency. According to Politico, 42% of Melenchon's supporters say they won't vote in the second round of the presidential election if Melenchon doesn't make it. That would be a huge boost to Le Pen. France's presidential election starts in less than two weeks.