- Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of France's far-right National Front party, has died at the age of 96.
- Le Pen has run for president five times. In 2002, he advanced to the runoff election, but lost in a landslide to conservative conservative Jack Chee.
- Le Pen was succeeded by his daughter Marine as leader of the National Front. According to opinion polls, she is the front-runner in the next presidential election, scheduled for 2027.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the far-right Front National, who exploited working class concerns about immigration and globalization and made a career out of provocative statements that many considered racist and xenophobic. passed away at the age of 96.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Marine Le Pen's political party, Rassemblement Nationale.
Jean-Marie Le Pen has spent his life fighting, whether it's as a soldier in the French colonial wars, fighting five presidential elections as a founder of the far-right National Front, or feuding with his daughter and ex-wife. It is often carried out violently in public.
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Controversy has always been a part of Le Pen's life. Accusations of racism and anti-Semitism have dogged the National Front since Le Pen co-founded the party in 1972.
He contested war crimes charges in 1996 after declaring that Nazi gas chambers were “just a part” of World War II history and that the Nazi occupation of France was “not particularly inhumane.” He was tried, found guilty, and fined.
The comments sparked outrage in France, where police were rounding up thousands of Jews who had been deported to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of France's far-right National Front party, has died at the age of 96. (Reuters/Charles Platiaux/File photo)
Asked in 2015 if he regretted his gas chamber remarks, he said: “I stand by it, because I believe it to be true.”
Regarding Le Pen's death, President Emmanuel Macron said: “He was a historical figure of the far right who played a role in the public life of our country for nearly 70 years. This is now a matter for history to decide.” .
A populist and fiery orator, Le Pen has spent her four-decade career riding a wave of voter discontent, capitalizing on discontent over immigration and job security to, in some ways, undermine Donald Trump's White House. He ushered in his rise to the House and helped rewrite the framework of French politics.
He advanced to a runoff in the 2002 presidential election, but lost in a landslide to Jack Chee as voters favored mainstream conservatives rather than bring the far-right to power for the first time since Nazi collaborators ruled in the 1940s. was defeated.
Le Pen sees the European Union as a scourge, a supranational project that usurps power from nation-states and exploits the same resentment felt by many Britons who later voted to leave the EU. was.
Marine Le Pen learned of her father's death while transiting in Kenya after returning from the cyclone-hit French overseas territory of Mayotte.
foreign army
Born in Brittany in 1928, Le Pen studied law in Paris in the early 1950s and developed a reputation for not getting into a fight during a night on the town. He joined the Foreign Legion as a paratrooper in 1953 and fought in Indochina.
In the late 1950s, Le Pen campaigned for Algeria to remain part of France as a member of the French parliament and as a military officer in what was then a French colony. Although he publicly justified the use of torture, he denied committing any such acts.
In his memoirs, he said that while campaigning for a far-right presidential candidate in 1965, he lost an eye when a tent pole snapped before a rally and he whipped him in the face.
After years on the fringes of French politics, his fortunes changed in 1977 when a millionaire benefactor bequeathed him a mansion on the outskirts of Paris and 30 million francs (about $5.2 million in today's money). .
This has allowed Le Pen to advance her own political ambitions and policies despite being shunned by traditional political parties.
“I have many enemies, few friends, and much honor,” he said in an interview with a far-right-linked website. “I have no regrets,” he wrote in his memoirs.
common touch
His wife eloped with her biographer in the 1980s and posed half-naked for Playboy magazine to take revenge on the man she accused of being violent. She left with one of his spare glass eyes and returned it only when he agreed to return her his mother's cremated ashes.
Ms. Le Pen continued to appeal to white working-class anger against immigrants and resentment against Paris-based business and political elites, and the National Front advanced in local, regional and European elections.
Traditional parties tried to win back voters with a tough debate on immigration. The tactic helped conservative Nicolas Sarkozy secure the presidency in 2007, and tough stances on crime and immigration are now mainstream.
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In 2011, after Le Pen continued to tighten her personal reins at the National Front, her daughter Marine took over as party leader. Mr Marine campaigned to shed the party's persistent image of anti-Semitism and rebrand it as a champion of the working class.
Although she has reached and lost two presidential runoffs, polls show her to be the frontrunner in the next presidential election, scheduled for 2027.
This rebranding did not sit well with his father, and his father's inflammatory statements and sniping forced him to expel him from the party.
