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PARIS — Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of France’s far-right National Front, known for his fiery rhetoric against immigration and multiculturalism that won him both fervent supporters and widespread condemnation, died Tuesday. He was 96 years old.
A polarizing figure in French politics, Le Pen has been repeatedly condemned for anti-Semitism, discrimination and inciting racial violence. His statements – including Holocaust denial, racist denunciations of Muslims and immigrants, and his 1987 proposal to forcibly isolate people with AIDS in special facilities – shocked his critics and strained his alliances policies.
Le Pen regularly retorted that he was simply a patriot protecting the identity of “eternal France”.
Le Pen, who had reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election, eventually separated from his daughter, Marine Le Pen, who renamed his party Front National, expelled him and transformed it into the one of the most powerful political forces in France while distancing itself. of the extremist image of his father.
Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, as the party is now known, confirmed Le Pen’s death in a post on the social media platform X. Bardella’s unusually warm tribute shed light on 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 offered his condolences to his family, including Marine.
This message appears to blur the distance that the renamed party had sought to establish between its incendiary founder and its more refined and modern leadership under Marine Le Pen.
French President Emmanuel Macron, a centrist, expressed “his condolences to (Le Pen’s) family and friends” in an unusually short statement released by the presidential palace.
“A historic personality of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for almost 70 years, which now belongs to the history of judging,” we can read in the press release.
Marine Le Pen, thousands of kilometers (miles) away in the French territory of Mayotte, was surveying the aftermath of destructive Cyclone Chido at the time of her father’s death.
Despite her exclusion from the party in 2015, Le Pen’s divisive legacy endures, marking decades of French political history and shaping the trajectory of the far right.
His death comes at a crucial time for his daughter. She now faces prison time and a ban on running for political office if convicted in an embezzlement trial.
A fixture in French politics for decades, the fiery Jean-Marie Le Pen was a cunning political strategist and gifted orator who used his charisma to captivate crowds with his anti-immigration message.
The portly, silvery son of a Breton fisherman saw himself as a man charged with a mission: to keep French France under the banner of the National Front. Having chosen Joan of Arc as the party’s patron saint, 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 in 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 slip away, kill me,” Le Pen declared at a party congress in 1990, reflecting the theatrical style that fueled the fervor of his supporters for decades.
Le Pen, who lost an eye in a street fight in his youth and for years wore a black eye patch, was a constant force in French politics, impossible to ignore for politicians on the left or right .
Election after election, he has proven himself to be a troublemaker, forcing his rivals to scramble to counter him, and sometimes to stoop to garner far-right votes.
Le Pen had recently been exempted from prosecution on health grounds during a high-profile trial over his party’s alleged embezzlement of European Parliament funds, which opened in September.
French judicial authorities placed Le Pen under legal guardianship in February at the request of her family as her health deteriorated, French media reported. He had been in poor health for some time.
Le Pen was notably condemned in 1990 for a radio remark made three years earlier in which he described the Nazi gas chambers as “a detail in the history of the Second World War”. In 2015, he reiterated this remark, saying he “did not regret it at all”, triggering the anger of his daughter – then party leader – and a new conviction in 2016.
He was also convicted for a 1988 remark linking, in a play on words, a minister to Nazi crematoria, and for a 1989 comment accusing the “Jewish International” of helping to sow “this anti-national spirit “.
In another setback, Le Pen lost her seat in the European Parliament in 2002 for a year for attacking a socialist politician during a 1997 election campaign.
More recently, Le Pen and 26 National Front officials, including her daughters Marine and Yann Le Pen, were accused of using money intended for European parliamentary assistants to pay staff who instead carried out political work for the party between 2004 and 2016, in violation of the law. regulations of the 27-nation bloc. Jean-Marie Le Pen was deemed unfit to testify.
Born on June 20, 1928 in the Breton village of 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 attracted very early by to the far right.
With his degrees in law and political science, Le Pen moved to Paris and at the age of 27 became the youngest deputy in the National Assembly under the banner of the Union for the Defense of Traders and Artisans, led by Pierre Poujade . His career never strayed from the path of the far right.
In 1963, he and Waffen SS veteran Léon Gaultier founded a company, SERP, which produced political speeches. With the neofascist group Nouvel Ordre, 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 votes in the European parliamentary elections and had 10 deputies. The message was clear: France could no longer ignore Le Pen. The party’s entry as a force in national politics came two years later in legislative elections that gave Le Pen’s party 35 seats in the French National Assembly.
By then, Le Pen had replaced the black eyepatch and begun polishing up her scrappy image.
In 1988, he surprised the nation by receiving 14% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election. Fourteen years later, in his fifth bid for the presidency, he surpassed that figure, with a score of 16.8%, placing second behind Jacques Chirac and reaching the two-man runoff.
France shuddered, Europe trembled and the National Front jubilant. But there would be no victory for Le Pen. In a rare joining of forces, supporters from the right and left took to the streets of France in a massive demonstration of solidarity against him. On May 5, 2002, Chirac was re-elected to power with a record score of 82% of the vote.
Over the years, Le Pen’s political line has never wavered.
In a 2003 speech, he stated that he wanted the notion of “national preference” enshrined in the French Constitution to limit employment, housing opportunities and other social assistance to French citizens. Immigration is “the greatest danger we face,” he said.
“Me? Racist? It’s a gag, a gag,” Le Pen once told the Associated Press. “But I’m not for the melting pot. I’m for the defense of its culture. I would despair if I discovered the culture of Brooklyn in France.
His private life was tumultuous.
An explosion destroyed the family building in 1976 but injured neither Le Pen nor his wife and three children.
The French media delighted in recounting the saga of Le Pen’s divorce from his wife Pierrette Lalanne. Reflecting this bitter separation, she posed for Playboy in 1987, partly dressed in a risque maid costume. The magazine quoted her as saying she was responding to her husband’s Playboy interview in which he said she could become a housekeeper if she needed the money.
He married a second time in 1991 to Jeanne-Marie Paschos, known as Jany.
Le Pen began laying the groundwork for his succession at a party congress in 2003, appointing Marine – the youngest of his three daughters – as vice president. In 2011, she became party president and reached the presidential runoffs herself in 2017 and 2022. Both times, she lost to centrist Emmanuel Macron, but by a shrinking margin. She is considered one of the main potential candidates for the next presidential election in 2027.
But her softer style and her attempts to distance the party from more extreme views soon brought her into conflict with her father. His refusal to renounce anti-Semitic provocations is at odds with his attempt to rid the National Front of its pariah status.
She removed him from the party he co-founded and in 2018 withdrew his title of honorary president for life. A few months later, she changed the name of the National Front to National Rally as part of her strategy to renew the party’s image.
His father called it the “heaviest blow” the party had faced since its inception.
All his life, Jean-Marie Le Pen refused to give in, or to remain silent.
“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 gained steam.
As Le Pen’s health deteriorated in recent years, he was hospitalized several times, including after suffering a stroke.
Le Pen is survived by his wife and three daughters, Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine.
Ganley, who is retired from The Associated Press, contributed to this report.
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