French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen dies at 96
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right French politician who founded the National Front party, has died at the age of 96.Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally as the party is now known, confirmed Mr Le Pen’s death in a post on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday.A polarising figure in French politics, Mr Le Pen’s controversial statements, including Holocaust denial, led to multiple convictions and strained his political alliances.Mr Le Pen, who once reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election, was eventually estranged from his daughter, Marine Le Pen.Ms Le Pen renamed his National Front party, kicked him out and transformed it into one of France’s most powerful political forces while distancing herself from her father’s extremist image.Despite his exclusion from the party in 2015, Mr 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 an embezzling trial currently under way.A fixture for decades in French politics, the fiery Jean-Marie Le Pen was a wily political strategist and gifted orator who used his charisma to captivate crowds with his anti-immigration message.The portly, silver-haired son of a Breton fisherman 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, Mr Le Pen made Islam, and Muslim immigrants, his primary target, blaming them for the economic and social woes of France.A former paratrooper and Foreign Legionnaire who fought in Indochina and Algeria, he led sympathisers into political and ideological battles with a panache that became a signature of his career.“If I advance, follow me; if I die, avenge me; if I shirk, kill me,” Mr Le Pen said at a 1990 party congress, reflecting the theatrical style that for decades fed the fervour of followers.Mr Le Pen had recently been exempted from prosecution on health grounds from a high-profile trial over his party’s suspected embezzlement of European Parliament funds that opened in September.He had 11 prior convictions, including for violence against a public official and antisemitic hate speech.French judicial authorities placed Mr Le Pen under legal guardianship in February at the request of his family as his health declined, French media reported.He had been in frail health for some time.Mr Le Pen was notably convicted in 1990 for a radio remark made three years earlier in which he referred to the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail in World War II history”.In 2015, he repeated the remark, saying he “did not at all” regret it, triggering the ire of his daughter — by then the party leader — and 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”.In another setback, Mr Le Pen lost his European Parliament seat in 2002 for a year for assaulting a Socialist politician during a 1997 election campaign.More recently, Mr Le Pen and 26 National Front officials, including his daughters Marine and Yann Le Pen, 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, in violation of the 27-nation bloc’s regulations.Jean-Marie Le Pen was deemed unfit to give evidence.
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