MARINE LE PEN has announced she is temporarily stepping down as her party’s leader.

The far-right presidential candidate is taking on Emmanuel Macron in the French presidential election, after they topped the poll in yesterday’s vote.

The move appears to be a way for Le Pen to embrace a wide range of potential voters ahead of the 7 May runoff between herself and Macron, the independent centrist who came first yesterday.

“Tonight, I am no longer the president of the National Front. I am the presidential candidate,” she said on French public television news.

Le Pen has said in the past she is not a candidate of her party, and made that point when she rolled out her platform in February, saying the measures she was espousing were not her party’s, but her own.

She has worked to bring in voters from the left and right for several years, trying to clean up her party’s racist, anti-Semitic image to do so.

Read: France had a presidential election yesterday…now what happens?

Read: “It is time to liberate the French people” – Le Pen is through to the final round in the presidential election