Jean-Marie Le Pen, who helped launch the political rise of the far right in France, has died at 96

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right National Front party who tapped into working-class concerns about immigration and globalization and built a career on rhetoric that many saw as racist and xenophobic, has died at 96.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Marine Le Pen’s National Rally political party.

Jean-Marie Le Pen spent his life fighting, either as a soldier in the French colonial wars, as the founder of the National Front (for which he contested the presidential elections five times) or in conflicts with his daughters and ex-wife, which were often fought publicly. .

Controversy was Le Pen’s constant companion. Accusations of racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia followed the National Front after the party was co-founded in 1972.

In the early years of the AIDS crisis, Le Pen suggested that patients should be isolated in separate facilities.

He was tried, convicted and fined in 1996 for contesting war crimes after declaring that Nazi gas chambers were “just a detail” of World War II history and that the Nazi occupation of France “was not particularly inhumane.”

The comments sparked outrage in France, where police arrested thousands of Jews who were deported to the Auschwitz death camp.

“I stand behind it, because I believe it’s true,” Le Pen said in 2015 when asked if he regretted the gas chamber comments, angering his daughter Marine.

In recent years, Le Pen has made Islam and Muslim immigrants her main target, blaming them for France’s economic and social woes. He once told the Associated Press that “I would despair if I found the culture of Brooklyn in France.”

‘History is about judging’: Macron

Marine Le Pen learned of her father’s death during a vacation in Kenya while returning from the cyclone hit the French overseas territory of Mayotte.

Jordan Bardella, president of the National Assembly, praised him for “always serving France, defending its identity and sovereignty.”

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 almost 70 years, which is now a matter for history to judge.”

A populist and fiery orator, Le Pen has helped reshape the parameters of French politics in a 40-year career, riding waves of voter discontent and capitalizing on discontent over immigration and job security.

He reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election, but lost convincingly to Jacques Chirac, as voters chose to back a conservative conservative rather than return 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, fueling the kind of resentment felt by many Britons who later voted to leave the EU.

Born in Brittany in 1928, Le Pen studied law in Paris in the early 1950s and joined the Foreign Legion as a paratrooper fighting in Indochina in 1953.

In the later 1950s, Le Pen campaigned for Algeria to remain French, as an elected member of the French parliament and a soldier in the territory then under French administration. He publicly justified the use of torture, but denied using such practice himself.

In his memoirs, he said he lost an eye in 1965 when, while campaigning for a far-right presidential candidate, a tent pole snapped and whipped him in the face before a rally. By then he had formed a company with Léon Gaultier, once a soldier in the Waffen-SS for Nazi Germany, which sowed the seeds for the formation of the National Front.

After years on the fringes of French politics, Le Pen’s fortunes changed in 1977 when a millionaire sponsor left him a mansion outside Paris, along with 30 million francs, about five million euros (Cdn 7.4 million) in today’s money.

This allowed Le Pen to advance her political ambitions and agenda despite being shunned by traditional parties.

His first wife, Pierrette Lalanne, eloped with his biographer in the 1980s, posing topless in Playboy to get revenge on a man she denounced as abusive. She left Le Pen with one of his spare glass eyes and only returned it when he agreed to return her cremated mother’s ashes.

Unable to testify in recent corruption investigation

Le Pen continued to highlight white, working-class anger over immigration and resentment of the Paris-based business and political elites and the National Front that grew in local, regional and then European elections.

Traditional parties sought to win over voters with tougher talks on immigration. This tactic helped conservative Nicolas Sarkozy secure the presidency in 2007, and getting tough on crime and immigration is now more mainstream.

In 2011, after maintaining firm personal control over the National Front, Le Pen was succeeded as party leader by daughter Marina, who campaigned to shed the party’s enduring image as anti-Semitic and rebrand the party as a defender of the working class.

Le Pen left behind his wife Jeanne-Marie Paschos and three daughters: Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine.

Marine Le Pen reached two second rounds of presidential elections, losing to Macron both times. Although she is a likely candidate for the next presidential election, due in 2027, she also faces the possibility of jail time and a ban from running for political office in case of embezzlement.

Yann Le Pen is also implicated in the case, accused of using money meant for EU parliamentary aides to pay staff who instead did political work for the party between 2004 and 2016, in breach of the 27-nation bloc’s rules. Jean-Marie Le Pen was declared incompetent to testify.