- Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right National Front party, has died at the age of 96.
- Le Pen participated in five presidential elections. He reached a runoff in 2002, but lost by a landslide to mainstream conservative Jacques Chi.
- Le Pen was succeeded as party leader of the National Front by his daughter Marine. Opinion polls make her the frontrunner in the next presidential election, which will take place in 2027.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right National Front party who played on working-class concerns over immigration and globalization and built a career on provocative rhetoric that many saw as racist and xenophobic, has died at the age of 96 .
His death was confirmed by his daughter Marine Le Pen’s political party, National Rally (Rassemblement National).
Jean-Marie Le Pen spent his life fighting, either as a soldier in the French colonial wars, as the founder of the far-right National Front party, for which he contested five presidential elections, or in feuds with his daughters and ex-wife. often performed publicly and furiously.
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Controversy was Le Pen’s constant companion: accusations of racism and anti-Semitism continued to haunt the National Front from the moment he co-founded the party in 1972.
He was tried, convicted and fined in 1996 for contesting war crimes charges after stating that the Nazi gas chambers were “merely a detail” of the history of World War II and that the Nazi occupation of France was “not particularly inhuman” .
Those comments sparked outrage in France, where police had rounded up thousands of Jews deported to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the far-right political party Front National, has died at the age of 96. (Reuters/Charles Platiau/File Photo)
“I stand by this because I believe it is the truth,” he said in 2015 when asked if he regretted the gas chamber comment.
Commenting on Le Pen’s death, President Emmanuel Macron said: “As a historical figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for almost seventy years, which is now a matter for history to judge.”
A populist and fiery orator, Le Pen helped rewrite the parameters of French politics in a forty-year career that, riding waves of voter dissatisfaction and capitalizing on discontent over immigration and job security, in some ways fueled the rise of Donald Trump in the White House.
He reached a runoff presidential election in 2002, but lost by a landslide to Jacques Chi, as voters supported a mainstream conservative rather than bringing the far right to power for the first time since Nazi collaborators in the 1940s ruled.
Le Pen was the scourge of the European Unionwhich he saw as a supranational project that usurped the power of nation states, tapping into the kind of resentment felt by many Britons who later voted to leave the EU.
Marine Le Pen learned of her father’s death during a stopover in Kenya while returning from the cyclone-hit French overseas territory of Mayotte.
FOREIGN LEGION
Born in Brittany in 1928, Le Pen studied law in Paris in the early 1950s and gained a reputation for rarely spending a night out on the town without a fight. He then joined the Foreign Legion as a paratrooper in 1953 and fought in Indochina.
Le Pen campaigned in the late 1950s to keep Algeria as an elected member French The French Parliament and a soldier in what was then French territory. He publicly justified the use of torture, but denied using such practices himself.
In his memoirs, he says he lost an eye in 1965 when, while campaigning for a far-right presidential candidate, he broke the support pillar of a large tent and punched him in the face before a rally.
After years on the fringes of French politics, his fortunes changed in 1977 when he was bequeathed a country house outside Paris by a lender, along with 30 million francs, about $5.2 million in today’s currency.
This allowed Le Pen to achieve his political ambitions and agenda despite being shunned by traditional parties.
“Many enemies, few friends and honor in abundance,” he said in an interview with a website linked to the far right. He wrote in his memoirs: “No regrets.”
COMMON TOUCH
His wife eloped with his biographer in the 1980s and posed half-naked in Playboy to avenge a man she labeled violent. She left with one of his spare glass eyes and only gave it back when he agreed to give her back her cremated mother’s ashes.
Le Pen continued to tap into white working-class anger over immigration and resentment of Paris-based business and political elites, and the National Front did well in local, regional and then European elections.
Traditional parties tried to win back voters by talking tougher about immigration. That tactic helped conservative Nicolas Sarkozy secure the presidency in 2007 tough on crime and immigration is now more mainstream.
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In 2011, after keeping a tight rein on the National Front, Le Pen was succeeded as party chief by daughter Marine, who campaigned to shake off the party’s enduring image as anti-Semitic and rebrand it as Defender of the working class.
She has reached (and lost) two presidential election runoffs, but opinion polls make her the front-runner in the next presidential election, which will take place in 2027.
The rebranding did not go down well with her father, whose inflammatory statements and sniping forced her to expel him from the party.
