MARSEILLE, France — Earlier this year, Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of France’s anti-immigrant National Front, criticized the national soccer team for having too few whites. Not long after, his daughter Marine Le Pen, the party’s chief strategist, publicly praised an African-born player.

As 78-year-old Mr. Le Pen prepares for his fifth run for the presidency next year, his increasingly visible 38-year-old daughter is focusing on the party’s future by trying to move it further into France’s political mainstream — “fighting against our demonization,” as she put it in a memoir published this year.

A lawyer and party vice president, the chain-smoking Ms. Le Pen aims to broaden a movement that upended the political establishment in the 2002 election and propelled her father to a second-place finish behind Jacques Chirac.

Her strategy includes avoiding racist appeals and nostalgia for a nation of small shopkeepers and farmers while attracting more women voters. A divorced mother of three, she has broken with her father on abortion, which he wants to outlaw, and advocates increased welfare payments for single mothers.

“As a working woman from the Paris region, with her kids, her voice raspy from smoking, she embodies a big group,” a researcher at the Institute for Political Studies in Paris, Dominique Reynie, said. “That may help the National Front make its way into new categories of the population.”

Father and daughter share the desire to cut taxes, restore the death penalty, kick out all illegal immigrants, exit the European Union, and give native-born French priority in housing and welfare benefits.

Their message resonates at a time when French voters have already turned against the political establishment to express anger at increasing immigration and the global competition that is threatening their social safety net.

The 2005 defeat of the European constitution in a referendum, riots in impoverished suburbs, nationwide protests that forced the repeal of a youth-labor law, and fears of terrorism suggest the time is ripe for appeals to discontent, Nonna Mayer said. Ms Mayer studies the National Front and similar movements at Cevipof, a political research center in Paris.

The National Front “can play to its usual strength, and that is the fear of immigrants and of Islam,” Ms. Mayer said.

Fourteen percent of the French have a positive opinion of the National Front, the highest since the 2002 election, a TNS-Sofres survey of 1,000 eligible voters showed last month. Nine months before the 2002 election, its support was at 8%. Thirty-five percent say. The Le Pens’ party “enriches” the political debate, an Ifop poll showed in April.

“I’ve got my own personal path,” Ms. Le Pen said in an interview in the Paris suburb of St. Cloud. “There’s clearly an appeal to a group that was maybe not there before.”

She avoids direct comment about World War II. Last year, her father said the German occupation was not “particularly inhumane.” He is known for his 1987 remark that the Holocaust was a “detail” of history, and he is set to be tried for breaking laws that bar denying the Holocaust.

Ms. Le Pen faces obstacles both inside and outside the party. “She wants to lead the National Front to build normal relationships in several years, or even alliances with democratic parties,” Mr. Reynie said.”That may backfire because it risks alienating the party’s base.”

Her father’s deputy, Bruno Gollnisch, has expressed doubts about her plan to forge a new image. He said the party flourishes when it challenges the establishment.

Meanwhile, others are looking to steal some of the National Front’s voters, even as they attack the party itself. The likely governing-party candidate, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, 51, has ramped up his own anti-immigrant rhetoric to attract Mr. Le Pen’s voters, mainly discontented white men.

At the same time, politicians in Mr. Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement, known by its French initials UMP, and the rival Socialists warn their members to prevent “another April 21” — the date of the first-round election in 2002, when Mr. Le Pen gained the runoff against Mr. Chirac, knocking out Prime Minister Jospin, a Socialist.

While the National Front overtook the Communist Party to become France’s third biggest in the early 1980s, it still represents a fringe, the head of political studies at TNS-Sofres, Brice Teinturier, said. “Current polls don’t indicate Le Pen will make it to the second round this time,” he said.

Mr. Le Pen started his political career in the 1950s as a lawmaker in a party defending shopkeepers’ interests before creating the National Front in 1972. His first breakthroughs came when the party broke the 10% mark in some local elections in 1983 and in European parliamentary elections in 1984.

His daughter mostly avoided politics until she formed the party’s legal department in 1998. She became a television regular after her father got 18% of the vote in the 2002 run-off against Mr. Chirac.

She says her strategy is working. In 2002, Ms. Le Pen won 32.3% of the votes in a legislative election in a working-class constituency in northern France. In 2004, she was elected to the European Parliament and the Paris regional council, which doles out some public funds.

Party membership has risen to more than 60,000 from 30,000 in 2001. That compares to 270,000 for the UMP and 208,000 for the Socialists.

“One day, the National Front will be in a leading position,” she said.