- Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the far-right French National Front, has died at the age of 96.
- Le Pen ran for five presidential elections. He reached the second round in 2002, but lost convincingly to conservative Jacques Chi.
- Le Pen was succeeded as head of the National Front party by his daughter Marine. Public opinion polls make her the favorite in the next presidential election in 2027.
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 provocative rhetoric that many saw as racist and xenophobic, has died at 96.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Marine Le Pen’s National Rassemblement political party.
Jean-Marie Le Pen spent his life fighting, whether as a soldier in the French colonial wars, as the founder of the far-right National Front party, for which he contested the presidential election five times, or in quarrels with his daughters and ex-wife, often spent publicly and furiously.
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Controversy has been Le Pen’s constant companion: accusations of racism and anti-Semitism followed the National Front since 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 “just a detail” of World War II history and that the Nazi occupation of France “wasn’t particularly inhumane.”
The comments sparked outrage in France, where police arrested thousands of Jews who were deported to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the French far-right political party National Front, has died at the age of 96. (Reuters/Charles Platiau/photo)
“I stand behind it because I believe it’s true,” he said in 2015 when asked if he regretted the gas chamber comments.
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 seventy years, which is now a matter of history for the court.”
A populist and fiery speaker, Le Pen helped reshape the parameters of French politics in a 40-year career that, riding waves of voter discontent and exploiting discontent over immigration and job security, in some ways heralded Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House.
He reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election, but lost convincingly to Jacques Chi as voters backed the conservative mainstream rather than bringing the far right to power for the first time since Nazi collaborationists ruled in the 1940s.
Le Pen was a scourge European Unionwhich 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.
Marine Le Pen learned of her father’s death during a stopover in Kenya on her way back 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 developed a reputation for rarely spending a night on the town without an argument. He joined the Foreign Legion as a paratrooper fighting in Indochina in 1953.
In the late 1950s, Le Pen campaigned for Algeria to remain French, as an elected member French Parliament and a soldier in the then French territory. 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.
After years on the fringes of French politics, his fortunes changed in 1977 when a millionaire sponsor left him a villa outside Paris, along with 30 million francs, about $5.2 million in today’s money.
This allowed Le Pen to advance her political ambitions and agenda despite being shunned by traditional parties.
“Many enemies, few friends and plenty of honor,” he said in an interview with a website linked to the far right. In his memoirs, he wrote: “No regrets.”
COMMON TOUCH
His wife eloped with his biographer in the 1980s, posing topless in Playboy to get revenge on the man she denounced as abusive. She left with one of his spare glass eyes and only returned it when he agreed to return her cremated mother’s ashes.
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 the conservative Nicolas Sarkozy secure the presidency in 2007, and the future tough on crime and immigration now it’s more mainstream.
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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.
She won – and lost – two repeat rounds of presidential elections, but polls make her the favorite in the next presidential election, scheduled for 2027.
The rebranding did not sit well with her father, whose inflammatory statements and sniping forced her to kick him out of the party.
