France: Jean-Marie Le Pen is dead

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France's far-right National Front party known for his fiery rhetoric against immigration and multiculturalism that won him both fervent supporters and widespread condemnation, has died. He was 96.

A polarizing figure in French politics, Mr. Le Pen's controversial statements — including his Holocaust denial and his 1987 proposal to forcibly isolate people with AIDS in special facilities — have earned him multiple condemnations and strained his political alliances .

Mr. Le Pen, who reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election, eventually estranged himself from his daughter, Marine Le Pen , who renamed her National Front , ousted him and transformed him into one of France's most powerful political forces, while distancing herself from her father's extremist image.

Jordan Bardella , the president of the National Rally , as the party is now known, confirmed Mr Le Pen’s death in a message posted on the social network X on Tuesday. Mr Bardella’s unusually warm tribute highlighted Mr Le Pen’s controversial past, including his links to the Algerian War , describing him as a “tribune of the people” who “always served France” and expressing condolences to his family, including Marine.

The message appears to blur the distance the renamed party had sought to establish between its firebrand founder and its more polished, modern leadership under Marine Le Pen.

Far right

Marine Le Pen, thousands of miles away in the French territory of Mayotte , was inspecting the aftermath of destructive Cyclone Chido at the time of her father's death.

Despite his expulsion from the party in 2015, Mr Le Pen's divisive legacy endures, marking decades of French political history and shaping the trajectory of the far right .

Her death came at a crucial time for her daughter. She now faces a prison sentence and a ban from running for office if convicted in an embezzlement trial .

An iconic figure in French politics for decades, the fiery Jean-Marie Le Pen was a shrewd political strategist and gifted orator who used his charisma to captivate crowds with his anti-immigration message .

The silver-haired, overweight son of a Breton fisherman saw himself as a man with a mission: to keep France French under the banner of the National Front. Choosing Joan of Arc as the party's patron, Mr. Le Pen made Islam and Muslim immigrants his main target, blaming them for France's economic and social woes.

A former paratrooper and foreign legionnaire who fought in Indochina and Algeria, he led his supporters into political and ideological battles with a panache that became the signature of his career.

"If I advance, follow me; if I die, avenge me; if I evade, kill me," Le Pen told a party congress in 1990, reflecting the theatrical style that for decades fueled the fervor of her supporters.

Racism

Mr Le Pen, who lost an eye in a street fight in his youth and for years wore a black eyepatch, has been a constant force in French politics, impossible for politicians on either the left or the right to ignore.

In election after election, he has proven to be the party pooper , forcing his rivals to scramble to counter him, and sometimes to stoop to harvesting votes from the far right.

Convicted on numerous occasions of anti-Semitism and regularly accused of xenophobia and racism , Mr Le Pen has always responded that he was only a patriot protecting the identity of "eternal France" .

Mr Le Pen was recently exempted from prosecution on health grounds in a high-profile trial over his party's alleged misuse of European Parliament funds, which opened in September.

French judicial authorities placed Mr Le Pen under guardianship in February, at the request of his family, due to his deteriorating health, French media reported. His health had already been fragile for some time.

World War II

Mr Le Pen was notably convicted in 1990 for a radio statement made three years earlier in which he called the Nazi gas chambers "a detail of the history of World War II". In 2015, he repeated the remark, saying he did not regret it "at all" , which sparked the ire of his daughter - then party leader - and a new conviction in 2016.

He was also convicted for a 1988 remark that punningly linked a minister to Nazi crematoria, and for a 1989 comment that blamed the "Jewish international" for helping to create "this anti-national spirit . "

In another setback, Le Pen lost her seat in the European Parliament in 2002 for one year for assaulting a Socialist politician during an election campaign in 1997.

More recently, Mr Le Pen and 26 National Front officials, including his daughters Marine and Yann Le Pen, were accused of using money intended for EU parliamentary assistants 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 found unfit to give evidence.

Origins

Born on June 20, 1928 in the Breton village of La Trinité-Sur-Mer, to Jean Le Pen, a fisherman who died during the Second World War, and his wife Anne-Marie, Jean-Marie Le Pen proved to be an ambitious son, drawn very early to the extreme right.

A graduate in law and political science, he went to Paris and became at the age of 27 the youngest member of the National Assembly under the banner of the Union for the Defense of Traders and Craftsmen , led by Pierre Poujade . His career never strayed from the path of the extreme right.

In 1963, he founded with Léon Gaultier , who served in the Waffen SS , a company, SERP, which produced political speeches. With the neo-fascist group Ordre Nouveau , Le Pen founded the National Front on October 5, 1972.

It would take more than a decade for the party to emerge as a political force - in the municipal elections of September 1983, when Jean-Pierre Stirbois won 16.7% of the vote in the town of Dreux, west of Paris.

A year later, the party won 11% of the vote in the European parliamentary elections and elected 10 MEPs. The message was clear: France could no longer ignore Le Pen. The party's entry into national politics came two years later, in the legislative elections that gave Mr Le Pen's party 35 seats in the French National Assembly.

At that point, Mr Le Pen replaced his black eye patch and began to polish his straw man image.

Surprise

In 1988, he surprised the nation by winning 14% of the vote in the first round of the presidential elections. Fourteen years later, in his fifth presidential bid, he did better: he won 16.8% of the vote, coming in second behind Jacques Chirac and reaching the second round.

France trembles, Europe trembles and the National Front rejoices. But a Le Pen victory was not an option. In a rare union of forces, supporters of the right and left poured into the streets of France to massively demonstrate their solidarity with Le Pen. On May 5, 2002, Chirac was re-elected with a record score of 82% of the vote.

Over the years, Mr Le Pen's political line has never changed.

In a 2003 speech, he said he wanted the notion of "national preference" enshrined in the French constitution to limit employment, housing opportunities and other social benefits to French citizens. Immigration is "the greatest danger we face ," he said.

"Me? Racist? It's a joke, a joke ," Le Pen told The Associated Press. "But I'm not for the melting pot. I'm for defending its culture. I would be desperate if I found Brooklyn culture in France . "

Privacy

His private life was tumultuous. In 1976, an explosion destroyed the family building, but injured neither Le Pen, nor his wife, nor his three children.

The French media have relished the saga of Le Pen's divorce from his wife Pierrette Lalanne . As part of that bitter separation, she posed for Playboy in 1987, partly dressed in a risqué maid costume. The magazine quoted her as saying she was reacting to her husband's Playboy interview, in which he had said she could become a maid if she needed the money.

He married a second time in 1991, to Jeanne-Marie Paschos , known as Jany.

Mr Le Pen began preparing for his succession at a party convention in 2003, naming Marine, the youngest of his three daughters, as vice-president. In 2011, she became party president, and in 2017 and 2022, she ran herself in the second round of the presidential election. Both times, she lost to centrist Emmanuel Macron , but by increasingly narrow margins. She is considered a leading potential candidate in the next presidential election in 2027.

But her softer style and attempts to distance the party from her father's more extreme views soon brought her into conflict with him. His refusal to renounce anti-Semitic provocations clashed with her desire to rid the National Front of its pariah status.

She removed him from the party he co-founded and, in 2018, stripped him of his title of honorary president for life. A few months later, she changed the name of the National Front to the National Rally as part of her strategy to renew the party's image.

His father said it was the "hardest blow" the party had suffered since its creation. Throughout his life, Jean-Marie Le Pen refused to give in or be silenced.

"I am a moral authority for the movement ... and I am not in the habit of keeping my opinions to myself ," Le Pen told the AP in 2014, as the father-daughter feud escalated.

Mr Le Pen's health has deteriorated in recent years and he has been hospitalised several times, including following a stroke. Mr Le Pen is survived by his wife and three daughters, Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine.