Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of France’s far-right National Rally party, and father to French political leader Marine Le Pen, has died. He was 96.
Le Pen founded National Rally, then called National Front, in 1972 as a right-wing populist movement and led the party until 2011. He stood for president five times, most successfully in 2002 when he shocked France by defeating Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin in the first round of voting, Jacques Chirac in the second round, the first time a far-right candidate had gotten that far. Le Pen was soundly defeated, with Chirac winning more than 82 percent of the vote.
A controversial figure his entire political life, Le Pen was convicted and fined several times for contesting and downplaying the crimes of the Holocaust, in violation of French law. He once infamously described the Holocaust, as a “mere detail” in the history of World War II, and repeatedly praised France’s wartime government at Vichy that collaborated with the Nazi occupying force. He was convicted and fined several times for contesting crimes against humanity including, in 2014, for suggesting the Ebola virus could be a solution to the global over-population.
In 2016, he was convicted of provoking hatred and ethnic discrimination for a public statement that the Roma in Paris were “rash-inducing.”
Last year, Le Pen faced charges, along with his daughter and other members of the National Rally party, for allegedly embezzling money from the European parliament. For health reasons, Jean-Marie Le Pen was excused from attending court to face the charges.
Le Pen had three daughters with his first wife Pierrette. The youngest, Marine, succeeded him as head of the National Rally in 2011. Jean-Marie was made the lifetime honorary president of the party. But his daughter, in an effort to clean up her party’s image and make it more appealing to French mainstream voters, tossed him out in 2015. Jean-Marie challenged the expulsion in court but was finally kicked out in 2018.
Jean-Marie Le Pen is credited with pioneering a form of far-right extremist politics in Europe that many have seen as a model for such populist politicians including Viktor Orban in Hungary, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Nigel Farage in the U.K., or incoming U.S. President Donald Trump. His daughter Marine successfully repackaged his father’s anti-immigrant, populist message for a broader audience and has been phenomenally successful. In France’s 2022 presidential election, she received 41.45 percent of the vote in the second round, the highest share of the vote for a nationalist candidate in French history, only narrowly losing to Emmanuel Macron.
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