- Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded France’s far-right National Front party, has died at 96 years old.
- Le Pen ran in five presidential elections. He reached a run-off in 2002, but lost by a landslide to mainstream conservative Jacques Chi.
- Le Pen was succeeded as National Front party chief by his daughter, Marine. Opinion polls make her the frontrunner in the next presidential election, due in 2027.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right National Front party who tapped into working class concerns over immigration and globalization and built a career on provocative rhetoric that many saw as racist and xenophobic, has died aged 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, whether as a soldier in France’s colonial wars, as a 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 conducted publicly and furiously.
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Controversy was Le Pen’s constant companion: accusations of racism and antisemitism dogged the National Front from when he co-founded the party in 1972.
He was tried, convicted and fined in 1996 for contesting war crimes after declaring that the Nazi gas chambers were “merely a detail” of World War Two history and that the Nazi occupation of France was “not especially inhumane”.
Those comments provoked outrage in France, where police had rounded up thousands of Jews who were deported to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of France’s far-right National Front political party, has died at age 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: “A historic figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for nearly 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 career spanning 40 years that, riding waves of voter discontent and harnessing discontent over immigration and job security, in some ways heralded Donald Trump’s rise to the White House.
He reached a presidential election run-off in 2002 but lost by a landslide to Jacques Chi as voters backed a mainstream conservative rather than bring the far right to power for the first time since Nazi collaborators ruled in the 1940s.
Le Pen was the scourge of the European Union, which he saw as a supranational project usurping the powers of nation states, tapping 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 layover in Kenya as she returned 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 of rarely spending a night out on the town without a brawl. He went on to join the Foreign Legion as a paratrooper fighting in Indochina in 1953.
Le Pen campaigned in the later 1950s to keep Algeria French, as an elected member of France’s parliament and a soldier in the then French-run territory. He publicly justified the use of torture but denied using such practices himself.
In his memoirs he said he lost an eye in 1965 when, out campaigning for an extreme-right presidential candidate, the mainstay of a marquee tent snapped and whipped him in the face before a rally.
After years on the periphery of French politics, his fortunes changed in 1977 when he was bequeathed a mansion outside Paris by a millionaire backer, along with 30 million francs, around $5.2 million in today’s money.
That allowed Le Pen to further his political ambitions and agenda despite being shunned by traditional parties.
“Lots of enemies, few friends and honor aplenty,” he said in an interview with a website linked to the far-right. He wrote in his memoir: “No regrets.”
COMMON TOUCH
His wife eloped with his biographer in the 1980s, posing half-naked in Playboy to avenge a man she denounced as violent. She left with one of his spare glass eyes and returned it only when he agreed to give her back her cremated mother’s ashes.
Le Pen continued to tap white, working-class anger over immigration and resentment against the Paris-based business and political elites and the National Front surged in local, regional and then European elections.
Traditional parties sought to win back voters with tougher talk on immigration. That tactic helped conservative Nicolas Sarkozy secure the presidency in 2007, and being tough on crime and immigration is now more mainstream.
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In 2011, after keeping a tight personal rein on the National Front, Le Pen was succeeded as party chief by daughter Marine, who campaigned to shed the party’s enduring image as antisemitic and rebrand it as a defender of the working class.
She has reached – and lost – two presidential election run-offs, but opinion polls make her the frontrunner in the next presidential election, due in 2027.
The rebranding did not sit well with her father, whose inflammatory statements and sniping forced her to expel him from the party.