The first round of the French presidential elections is scheduled for Sunday, followed by a runoff between the top two candidates on May 7. Though the dynamic of the race has been volatile, Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front (FN) is still expected to make it to the second round, with a strong possibility that she will win a plurality in the first. Moreover, with the French party system currently in crisis, all bets are off, and there is a slim chance that Le Pen might even win the runoff.

A Le Pen victory would have been utterly unthinkable decades ago. Founded in 1972 by Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, the FN was for most of its existence a fringe nationalist movement whose racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism placed it beyond the pale. Jean-Marie himself has infamously characterized the Holocaust as a “detail of history,” and has frequently gotten into trouble for racist remarks.

But despite its unsavory origins, the FN has in recent years ridden a wave of popular discontent with France’s political and economic elite to emerge as the country’s leading party. It has been able to do so, in part, because of a sustained effort by Marine Le Pen since her election as party leader in 2011 to clean up the FN’s image. To this end, she has cut ties with some extremist elements, and has gone out of her way to condemn antisemitism and to court Jews. This effort to “de-demonize” the FN and to distance its past has been serious enough to open a rift between Le Pen and her more provocative father, whose expulsion from the party was engineered in 2015 after he once again referred to the gas chambers as a “detail.”