Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of France’s far-right National Rally (RN) party, has has died aged 96, his family has said.
Le Pen, who led the party from 1972 to 2011 when it was called National Front (FN), had previously been taken to hospital with suspected heart problems. Le Pen, who had been in a care facility for several weeks, died at midday Tuesday “surrounded by his loved ones”, the family said in a statement. Sebastien Chenu, a senior party official, also made an announcement.
Le Pen repeatedly courted controversy and legal action with his views on the Holocaust, which he described as a “mere detail” in the history of the Second World War, and his lauding of France’s wartime government at Vichy that collaborated with the country’s Nazi occupiers. Le Pen’s supporters saw him as a charismatic figure who would speak up for the everyman, but he was widely condemned as a far-right bigot who was convicted several times by the courts for his remarks. Le Pen amassed 11 convictions.
The coviction over the Holocaust “detail” remark came in 1990, three years after he made it on radio. In 2015, he repeated the quote, saying he “did not at all” regret it, leading to a new conviction in 2016. He also was convicted for a 1988 remark linking in a play on words a Cabinet minister with the Nazi crematory ovens, and for a 1989 comment blaming the “Jewish international” for helping seed “this anti-national spirit.” Le Pen lost his European Parliament seat in 2002 for a year for assaulting a Socialist politician during a 1997 election campaign.
Le Pen shocked France when he unexpectedly reached the presidential election run-off vote against Jacques Chirac in 2002. That led voters to vote heavily for his opponent Mr Chirac to block the far-right from power, with Mr Chirac securing 82 per cent of the vote.
An unrepentant extremist when it came to the issues of immigration, race and gender, Le Pen sought to portray himself as as “ni droite, ni gauche, français” – not right, not left, but French – but when the nation’s voters were given the choice to put him in power, or turn away, they resoundingly voted to keep him from the office of the president.
Le Pen would run for the presidency again in 2007, the fifth time he did , but by then his political pull had waned. Le Pen, then the oldest candidate to ever contest the presidency, came fourth.
He was succeeded as party chief by his daughter, Marine Le Pen, in 2011. He was honourary president of the party until 2015. Although Marine has sought to try and soften the party’s image, renaming it the RN and excluding her father from it. She called the process ridding the party of its “demonised” image as she tried to expand its electoral appeal.
Marine has since run for the presidency three times and reached the second-round run-off twice, turning the party into one of the country’s main political forces.
Le Pen’s divisive legacy endures, marking decades of French political history and shaping the trajectory of the far right.
His death came at a crucial time for his daughter. She now faces a potential prison term and a ban on running for political office if convicted in the embezzling trial currently underway. She denies the charges.
Jean-Marie also faced charges in the same case – centred around allegations of misuse of European parliamentary funds – but he did not attend the trial because of his poor health. The case involves more than 20 FN and RN officials, also including another of Le Pen’s daughter’s Yann. The officials have been accused of using money destined for EU parliamentary aides to pay staff who instead did political work for the party between 2004 and 2016.
Prosecutors are seeking to recover more than three million euros (£2.5m). The RN has already paid back €1m (£834,000) – which it has said is not an admission of guilt. All officials deny the charges.
A fixture for decades in French politics, Le Pen was seeen as a gifted orator. The son of a Breton fisherman and a former paratrooper and Foreign Legionnaire who fought in Indochina and Algeria, he viewed himself as a man with a mission — to keep France French under the banner of the National Front. Picking Joan of Arc as the party’s patron saint, Le Pen made Islam, and Muslim immigrants, his primary target, blaming them for the economic and social woes of France.
“If I advance, follow me; if I die, avenge me; if I shirk, kill me,” Le Pen said at a 1990 party congress, reflecting the extreme style that for decades fed the fervor of followers.
French judicial authorities placed Le Pen under legal guardianship in February at the request of his family as his health declined.
