France's Marine Le Pen, who brought hard-right National Rally to cusp of electoral success

Marine Le Pen has tasted defeat before, but if the Paris appeal court bars her from running in the 2027 presidential election, it could bring down the curtain on her long political career as leader of France's nationalist right.

Le Pen, 57, told supporters at the weekend in Liévin, in the heart of her constituency in the Pas-de-Calais, that "if the judiciary bars me from running for the presidency", she would instead devote her energy to supporting her young protege Jordan Bardella.

A trained lawyer and an accredited cat-breeder, she does have alternatives beyond frontline politics, but Marine Le Pen has been seeped in it since childhood, and it is hard to envisage her taking a backseat role.

She came third in the 2012 presidential race and was then runner-up to Emmanuel Macron in 2017 and 2022. Ahead in the polls for next year's election, and with Macron not running, this would be her best chance yet of winning the presidency.

She remained a Euro MP until 2017, and the fake jobs conviction against her last year found that she had played a "central role" in a scheme to use €1.4m (£1.2m) of European Parliament funds to pay party assistants.

For years, the National Front struggled to raise money, as French banks would not lend the party money because of its racist and antisemitic past.

That meant that Marine Le Pen's party went cap in hand to a Russian-Czech bank linked to the Kremlin, in the very year that Vladimir Putin staged his illegal annexation of Ukraine's Crimea. Le Pen repeatedly backed Putin's occupation, and on the eve of the 2017 presidential race visited him at the Kremlin.

Over time, she had expressed her admiration for the Russian leader, but that image of the pair shaking hands came back to haunt her.

Although she won almost 11 million votes in 2017, a record for the National Front, Macron told her in an ill-tempered televised debate that "France deserves better than you" and went on to win over two-thirds of the electorate.

Five years later, and with another presidential vote looming, Putin was on the cusp of sending Russian troops into a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. "I do not believe at all that Russia wishes to invade Ukraine," she told the BBC, before going on to say that if it did indeed happen she would back Ukraine's sovereignty.

Her biggest success has been in the detoxification or dédiabolisation (de-demonisation) of what her father had created in her bid to join the political mainstream.

Although the anti-immigration policies are intact, with promises to prioritise homes, jobs and benefits for French nationals, gone is the overt racism and antisemitism of her father, who died last year.

Marine Le Pen has been taken to court herself but ultimately she was acquitted in 2015 of inciting racial hatred for comparing the sight of Muslims praying in the streets to the Nazi occupation of France in World War Two.

Her expulsion of Jean-Marie Le Pen from the National Front in August 2015 marked the culmination of a family feud, and at one point he suggested "Marine Le Pen may want me dead". After his death, she said she would "never forgive myself for this decision, because I know it caused him immense pain".

In 2018, a year after she came second to Emmanuel Macron in the presidential election, she rebranded the party entirely.

The purge did not end there. When an old family friend, Steeve Briois, who is still mayor of the National Rally northern stronghold of Hénin-Beaumont, was ousted from the party's executive, he complained of a shift towards "immigration and identity" at the expense of everyday social issues.

With less than a year before the next presidential vote, that rebranding appears complete.

But the next political moment for National Rally may not fall to her but Jordan Bardella.

A life outside politics seems unlikely for Marine Le Pen, but not inconceivable.

In 2015, after suffering defeat in regional elections she told Le Parisien she could "stop everything, do something else - breed cats for example".

Five years later she passed a diploma in cat breeding. For a short period she even made a little money from it, listing the names of her six cats in an interview.

Although that venture appears to have fizzled out, only last year she was seen carrying a kitten in a pet crate while on a visit to the Prime Minister's residence.