“…like Calais where i visited recently, shows the damaging effects of uncontrolled immigration and the lack of government. It is an eloquent example. The French are no longer able to cope with massive legal and illegal immigration” – Marine Le Pen

“Anyone who is in the United States illegally is subject to deportation…We will treat everyone living or residing in our country with great dignity, we will be fair, just and compassionate to all but our greatest compassion must be for our American citizens” – Donald Trump

Only one day from now, the French will determine the fate of their country at the presidential election. Eleven candidates are in the race to take over the reins of leadership from current President, Francois Hollande. But one candidate stands apart from the entire eleven and from the five major hopefuls. Marine Le Pen. One of the two female presidential aspirants.

Marine Le Pen is the leader of France’s far-right party, National Front (FN). The FN party was founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972 and was based on anti-European Union and anti-immigration policies. Marine, though the youngest daughter of Le Pen, developed an interest in politics at a young age. At 18, she officially became a member of the party although she had been attending meetings with her father five years prior to this time.

Marine was entrusted with a number of leadership roles in the party and in 2007, her father handed the presidential campaign which saw him run alongside Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal. It is important to note that though Marine and her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen worked under the same party, they really did not share the same world views.

Jean-Marie Le Pen is an unapologetic racist who has been at the centre of a long-standing controversy over his anti-Semitic and Xenophobic comments. In 1987, Le Pen championed the isolation of persons living with HIV in a special “sidatorium”. In 2007, he referred to fellow presidential candidate, Nicolaz Sarkozy as a foreigner. But the most widely offensive of all was Holocaust minimizing or even denial comments he made in 1987 and repeated again recently in 2016. He said of the Nazi attack on Jews during World War II, “I ask myself several questions. I’m not saying the gas chambers didn’t exist. I haven’t seen them myself. I haven’t particularly studied the question. But I believe it’s just a detail in the history of World War II“. Nine years after this statement, he echoed the same sentiments at a press conference in Germany when he claimed that the record of the gas chambers will take only 10 to 15 lines and that of the Nazi concentration camps will take only two pages in a 1,000-page book about the Second World War. He reiterated, “this is what one calls a detail“. Jean-Marie Le Pen was fined on several occasions for these statements that attempted to reduce the dreadful killing of six million Jews to a minor detail in history.

Now, all these proved to be injurious to Marine Le Pen and her ambition so she took the step to refashion the FN party and the first major move she made in that regard was to expel her father from the party in 2015. She also publicly distanced herself from him and disowned his controversial comments. But is Marine really that far off from her father?

Her campaign is committed to many things including cutting back on state benefits like free health care and free education for non-French citizens, even though they are in France legally. She promises to also massively cut down on legal migration. For Le Pen, French citizenship should either be “merited or inherited”. She will also kick out illegal immigrants as they “have no reason to stay in France, these people broke the law the minute they set foot on French soil“. All very similar to Trump’s policies and watered-down versions of her father’s.

[Read also: World Trade is bouncing back but President Trump might be a problem]

Marine has many times echoed Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan iterating that she will return France to her glory days by putting the country’s national interests first. Her anti-globalization views feed into her plan to hold a referendum that will see France exiting the European Union if she becomes president. She would also like France to give up the single currency, the Euro and analysts believe that, “the potential result of Marine Le Pen winning this presidential election is the end of the European Union as we know it,…“.

Watch how she feels about President Trump’s victory:

When CNN news show host, Anderson Cooper sat with Marine Le Pen for his show, 60 minutes, he came to the conclusion that although it was easy to draw parallels between Le Pen and Trump based on their shared political interests, it’s not that simple to just brand Le Pen France’s Trump. Cooper says of her personality, “Everything about her presentation is very practiced. She’s a politician. She’s a professional politician…She’s a fascinating character.”

Without explicitly endorsing Le Pen, US President Donald Trump has described as the strongest candidate in the elections. He said to the Associated Press, “Whoever is the toughest on radical Islamic terrorism, and whoever is the toughest at the borders, will do well in the election…she’s the strongest on borders, and she’s the strongest on what’s been going on in France.”

Away from her life as a politician, Marine Le Pen has been married and divorced twice. She’s currently in a relationship with a top force in her FN party, Louis Aliot and they’ve been together since 2009. She has three children from her first marriage.