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 rhetoric many saw as racist and xenophobic, has died aged 96 .
His death was confirmed by his daughter Marine Le Pen’s political party, Rally National.
Jean-Marie Le Pen spent his life fighting, whether as a soldier in France’s colonial wars, as the founder of the National Front (for which he contested five presidential elections) or in feuds with his daughters and ex-wife, who often were carried out. publicly.
Controversy was Le Pen’s constant companion. Accusations of racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia pushed the National Front after he co-founded the party in 1972.
In the early years of the AIDS crisis, Le Pen suggested isolating patients in separate facilities.
He was tried, convicted and fined in 1996 for opposing 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 “was not particularly inhumane.”
The comments provoked outrage in France, where police had rounded up thousands of Jews who were deported to the Auschwitz death camp.
“I stand by this because I believe it’s the truth,” Le Pen said in 2015 when asked if he regretted the gas chamber comment, angering his daughter Marine in the process.
In recent years, Le Pen has made Islam and Muslim immigrants her main target, blaming them for France’s economic and social problems. He once told the Associated Press that he would be “depressed if I found the culture of Brooklyn in France.”
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Marine Le Pen learned of her father’s death during a stay in Kenya while returning from the cyclone-hit French territory of Mayotte.
Jordan Bardella, chairman of the National Rally, 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 extreme right, he played a role in the public life of our country for nearly 70 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 40-year career, riding waves of voter discontent and harnessing discontent over immigration and job security.
He made it to the 2002 presidential run-off, but lost to Jacques Chirac, after voters chose to back a mainstream 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, tapping into 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 went on to join the Foreign Legion as a paratrooper fighting in Indochina in 1953.
Le Pen campaigned in the late 1950s to keep Algeria French, as an elected member of the French parliament and a soldier in the then French-ruled 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, while campaigning for a far-right presidential candidate, a tent pole snapped and hit him in the face before a rally. At that time, he had formed a company with Léon Gaultier, formerly a soldier in the Waffen-SS for Nazi Germany, which planted 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 he was bequeathed a mansion outside Paris by a millionaire backer, along with 30 million francs, which is 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 the traditional parties.
His first wife, Pierrette Lalanne, eloped with his biographer in the 1980s, posing half-naked 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.
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Le Pen continued to tap into white, working-class anger over immigration and resentment against Paris-based business and political elites, and the National Front grew in local, regional and then European elections.
Traditional parties tried to win back voters with tougher talk on immigration. This tactic helped conservative Nicolas Sarkozy secure the presidency in 2007, and being tough on crime and immigration is now more widespread.
In 2011, after maintaining a close personal rein on the Front National, Le Pen was succeeded as party chief by daughter Marine, who campaigned to shed the party’s enduring image as anti-Semitic and rebrand it as a defender of the class worker.
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Le Pen is survived by his wife Jeanne-Marie Paschos and three daughters: Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine.
Marine Le Pen has reached two presidential run-offs, losing to Macron both times. While she is a presumptive contender for the next presidential election, to be held in 2027, she also faces the possibility of a possible prison sentence and a ban from running for political office in an embezzlement case.
Yann Le Pen is also involved in that case, accused of using money intended for EU parliamentary aides to pay staff who instead carried out political work for the party between 2004 and 2016, in breach of EU rules. the 27-country bloc. Jean-Marie Le Pen was deemed unfit to testify.
