Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France's modern political far-right, who has built a half-century career debunking barely concealed racism, anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi propaganda, spoke at Garche, west of Paris, on Tuesday. He died in He was 96 years old.
Jordan Bardera, leader of Le Pen's National Front party, confirmed his death on the X program. Le Pen's family also announced in a statement to Agence France-Presse that she died in hospital.
In April 2024, a French court granted legal guardianship to Le Pen's daughters, allowing them to make decisions in Le Pen's name as she suffered a second heart attack within a year and was weakened. gave him the right to go down.
Le Pen is a reactionary who makes outrageous claims and waves her arms like a circus performer. She ran unsuccessfully for the French presidential election five times, and in 2002 she made it to the run-off, but she faced dissatisfaction with foreign countries. Riding the wave of human exclusion, it gave rise to new signs of fascism. He denounced Jews, Arabs, Muslims, and other immigrants, people he deemed not “pure” French.
Le Pen's youngest daughter, Marine Le Pen, succeeded Le Pen as head of the National Front in 2011, riding the tide of populist anger against mainstream politics. She lost three French presidential elections. In 2012, he won 17.9 percent of the vote, finishing third behind President François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy. In 2017, he lost to centrist Emmanuel Macron with 33.9%. In 2022, he lost again to Macron with 41.5%.
But that year's election also saw the party, renamed the National Rally, send a record number of delegates (89 in total) to the House of Commons, seeking to normalize the party and in some ways soften its message. This proved that Le Pen's efforts were successful. .
By then, the party had become the largest opposition party and was no longer an outcast widely seen as a threat to the republic. In 2023, a national assembly supported Mr Macron's immigration restriction bill, an embarrassment for the French president.
After Macron called a snap election in 2024, Rally National and its allies surged to 140 members of the lower house of parliament, giving the far-right even more power at the heart of the French system.
Political analysts say more and more voters are increasingly supporting Le Pen's right-wing message, which seeks to exploit middle-class economic anxiety and resentment toward immigrants, a theme her father has long pushed.
Le Pen has sought to soften the harmful comments of her father, who she expelled from the party in 2015, by offering to join civil unions for same-sex couples, accept unconditional abortion and withdraw from the platform on the death penalty. And she publicly rejected Le Pen's anti-Semitism.
Le Pen announced the party's name change at a national rally in 2018, but decided to keep the red, white and blue flame logo. The rebrand was a further effort to move away from policies associated with her father, a long-serving member of the European Parliament. (Le Pen was indicted as part of an investigation into her party's embezzlement of European Parliament funds between 2004 and 2016, but was not convicted. However, the threat of disqualification loomed over her daughter. )
Le Pen probably doesn't want any reforms from her daughter. In 2016, he founded and became chairman of the Joan of Arc Committee, a new far-right party named after Joan of Arc that embodies her long-standing ideology.
He claimed that “races are unequal,” that anyone with AIDS is “a form of leprosy” and that “Jews are plotting to take over the world.” He called America a “mongrel nation,” dismissed Hitler's gas chambers as a “minor detail” of history, and said the Nazi wartime occupation of France was “not particularly inhumane.”
In fact, during the Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1944, 76,000 Jews living in France were deported to extermination camps with the cooperation of France's Vichy government. Only 2,500 people survived. In 1944, a Nazi convoy entered the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, rounding up and slaughtering 642 residents in one of the worst atrocities of the French War. As the war drew to a close, thousands more civilians were killed by German forces.
Millions of people reacted to Le Pen's comments. He was challenged by historians and condemned throughout French politics, including mainstream conservatives, and was convicted at least seven times for inciting racial hatred and distorting the historical record.
But her daughter's success has made many analysts aware of some of Le Pen's views, particularly the impact on immigration. He always had a strong following, especially in the south of the country. His prominence was not only due to the shockwaves of his oratorical work, but also during a period of economic downturn and rising inflation, crime, and unemployment due to growing fear from Africa and the influx of immigrants from France and other parts of Europe. It also reflected the political shift to the right. middle east.
Le Pen's most notable success in the presidential election came in 2002, when she defeated the Socialist Party candidate, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, in the first round, and then came second in the general election, losing to incumbent President Jacques Chirac. . . However, he received nearly 18 percent of the vote.
His supporters were not a bunch of anti-Semitic neo-fascists. Many are just blue-collar workers, shopkeepers and unemployed young people in a country where a tight labor market, poor school performance, housing shortages and glib politicians have fueled frustration and anger. These were people facing a bleak future.
Le Pen was a street fighter when he was younger. Even with his receding hair and frostiness, he retained the combative appearance of a brawler. Strong shoulders and a jutting chin, narrow eyes behind turtle-rimmed glasses, and a stern mouth meant for hostility. He raised his fist to deliver the bad news. But there was a range of voices: piercing, seductive, whispering, accusatory.
He first appeared on the political scene in 1956, winning a parliamentary seat as a member of the anti-tax movement led by Pierre Poujard. From 1972, when he formed an alliance of extremist groups and founded the National Front party, until his retirement in 2011, he was recognized as the leader of the far right in French politics, with his vocal and sometimes violent supporters. was the main opposition in France. Mainstream conservatives in this country.
France needs a cleansing because his platform strays from what he calls France's Gallic and Roman Catholic roots of family, homeland, teachings, and respect for the living world. It flowed from the central idea that He therefore opposed the European Union, all income taxes, immigration of “foreigners,” especially Arabs and Muslims, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, and abortion.
Le Pen defended law and order, calling for the return of the guillotine and 200,000 new cells, a strong national defense, traditional culture and the primacy of “common people”. He proposed quarantining people with HIV and claimed that the French press was corrupt and that “elite” politicians were “on the payroll of Jewish organizations.”
Although he shared neo-Nazi rhetoric, attracted supporters from reactionary elements, and spoke frequently and crudely about racial characteristics, he insisted he was not a racist, fascist, or anti-Semite. . Some of his early National Front colleagues were Nazi collaborators during the war.
A French court convicted Le Pen of Holocaust denial in 1987 for saying that Nazi gas chambers were a “detail” of history. Ten years later, he repeated this comment and was convicted in a German court. He was convicted of inciting racial hatred against Muslims in 2003, 2005, 2008 and 2011. He was found guilty in 2012 of condoning war crimes after saying in a 2005 newspaper interview that “the German occupation was not particularly inhumane.” His numerous convictions resulted in many heavy fines, but no prison terms.
Jean-Marie Le Pen was born on June 20, 1928 in the Brittany seaside village of La Trinité-sur-Mer to Jean Le Pen and Anne-Marie Hervé. His father, a fisherman, was killed in 1942 when his boat was blown up by a mine. Her mother was a local seamstress. The boy was raised as a Roman Catholic and attended a Jesuit school in Vannes and a lycée in Lorient.
Le Pen received a law degree from the University of Paris, where she became active in right-wing politics, took part in street brawls against communist students, and was repeatedly arrested. He claimed to have lost his left eye in the election brawl, but it was only damaged. He later lost his eyesight due to illness.
Le Pen fought as a paratrooper with the Foreign Legion in 1954 against the communist-ruled Viet Minh in Indochina. He was later accused of torturing members of the Algerian National Liberation Front as an intelligence agent in Algeria during the country's war of independence. He was not charged and denied the witnesses' claims, but lost a lawsuit against the publications that quoted them.
Le Pen became one of the youngest members of parliament in 1956, but lost her seat in 1962 when the colony achieved independence after campaigning against France's withdrawal from Algeria.
In 1960, he married Pierrette Lalanne. In addition to Marine, they had two daughters, Marie-Caroline and Jan, but they divorced in 1987. In 1991, he married Jeanne-Marie Paschot. Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available.
Le Pen's family's Paris apartment was destroyed by a bomb in 1976, but no one was home, no one was seriously injured, and the incident remained unsolved, until Le Pen was targeted by political opponents. There was also speculation that it might be. His right-wing ideas aroused such fierce opposition that over a million people took to the streets against him. In 1977, after the death of his political supporter Hubert Lambert, he unexpectedly inherited $7 million and a chateau near Paris. Le Pen also had homes in Paris and her hometown of La Trinité-sur-Mer.
He ran for president in 1974, 1988, 1995, 2002, and 2007. The results have been unremarkable, with the exception of an astonishing performance in 2002 in which the party won 16.9% of the vote and forced a run-off in the second round, bringing the total vote share to 17.8%. did.
However, his daughter Marin matched his best performance on the first try. Although she downplayed criticism of Jews, she attacked Muslim immigrants for failing to absorb French values.
In her 2018 memoir, Son of the Nation, the first of two volumes (from birth to her founding of the National Front in 1972), Le Pen defended the Vichy government, which collaborated with the Nazis. In World War II, he accused Charles de Gaulle, a wartime general who later became president, of “contributing to the reduction of France.” It became a bestseller in France.
Adam Nossiter and Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.
