Jean-Marie Le Pen, former French far-right leader, dies at 96

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right National Front party in France, has died at the age of 96. He was known for his fiery anti-immigrant and multicultural rhetoric, which earned him a dedicated following while also drawing widespread condemnation. Le Pen was a highly controversial figure in French politics, and his remarks, including denying the Holocaust and proposing in 1987 to forcibly isolate AIDS patients in special facilities, led to multiple convictions and strained his political alliances.

Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential election in 2002 but eventually broke with his daughter, Marine Le Pen. Marine Le Pen renamed the National Front party he founded, expelled him from the party, and simultaneously transformed it into one of the most influential political forces in France, attempting to distance herself from her father's extremist image. Jordan Bardella, the current president of the National Rally, confirmed Le Pen's death on social media platform X on Tuesday. Bardella's eulogy was unusually enthusiastic, highlighting Le Pen's controversial past, including his connection to the Algerian War, calling him a "tribune of the people" and stating that he "always served France," while also expressing condolences to his family, including Marine.

This post seems to blur the party's efforts to distance itself from its radical founder and move in a more mature and modern direction under Marine Le Pen's leadership. At the time of her father's death, Marine Le Pen was thousands of kilometers away in the French overseas territory of Mayotte, inspecting the damage caused by Hurricane "Chido." Although Le Pen was expelled from the party in 2015, his divisive political legacy remains, marking decades of French political history and shaping the trajectory of the far-right.

Le Pen's death comes at a critical time for his daughter. If she is convicted in a misappropriation of funds trial, she could face imprisonment and a ban from running for political office. A fixture in French politics for decades, Jean-Marie Le Pen was a cunning political strategist and a gifted orator who used his charisma to attract crowds with his anti-immigrant message. The stocky, gray-haired son of a Breton fisherman saw himself as a man on a mission to preserve the purity of France in the name of the National Front. He chose Joan of Arc as the party's patron saint and targeted Islam and Muslim immigrants as the main sources of attack, blaming them for France's economic and social woes.

Le Pen, a former paratrooper and Foreign Legion soldier who fought in Indochina and Algeria, led his supporters into political and ideological battles with a style that became a hallmark of his career. "If I advance, follow me; if I die, avenge me; if I retreat, kill me," Le Pen said at a party congress in 1990, reflecting the dramatic style that has fueled the enthusiasm of his followers for decades. Having lost an eye in a street brawl in his youth and wearing a black eye patch for years, Le Pen was an undeniable force in French political life, one that politicians on both the left and right could not ignore.

In election after election, he proved to be a spoiler, forcing his rivals to scramble to counter him, sometimes even stooping to gain far-right votes. Le Pen was repeatedly convicted of anti-Semitism and was often accused of being xenophobic and racist, but he always countered that he was simply a patriot protecting the identity of "eternal France." Le Pen was recently excused from the high-profile trial for his party's alleged misappropriation of European Parliament funds, which began in September, due to health reasons. French media reported that the French judiciary placed Le Pen under legal guardianship in February at the request of his family due to his deteriorating health.

Le Pen's most famous conviction came in 1990 for calling Nazi gas chambers a "detail of history in World War II" in a radio address three years earlier. He repeated the statement in 2015, saying he "did not regret it at all," which infuriated his daughter, who was then the party leader, and led to his conviction again in 2016. He was also convicted for a 1988 remark that used wordplay to link a cabinet minister to Nazi crematoria, and was condemned for a 1989 comment accusing the "Jewish international" of helping to sow "this anti-national spirit." In another setback, Le Pen lost his seat as a member of the European Parliament for a year in 2002 for attacking a Socialist politician during a 1997 campaign.

More recently, Le Pen and 26 National Front officials, including his daughter Marine and Yann Le Pen, were accused of using funds intended for European Union parliamentary assistants to pay the salaries of employees who did political work for the party between 2004 and 2016, violating the rules of the 27 EU member states. Jean-Marie Le Pen was deemed unfit to testify. Jean-Marie Le Pen was born on June 20, 1928, in the village of La Trinité-sur-Mer in Brittany. His father, Jean Le Pen, was a fisherman who died in World War II, and his mother was Anne-Marie. Jean-Marie Le Pen proved to be an ambitious son and was drawn to the far-right from an early age.

Le Pen, who held degrees in law and political science, went to Paris and became the youngest member of the National Assembly at the age of 27, representing the Union of Shopkeepers and Artisans led by Pierre Poujade. His career never strayed from the far-right path. In 1963, he and Léon Gaultier, who had served in the Waffen-SS, founded a company called SERP, which specialized in producing political discourse. Le Pen, along with the neo-fascist organization New Order, founded the National Front on October 5, 1972. It took the party more than a decade to become a political force – in the September 1983 municipal elections, 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 vote in the European Parliament elections and gained 10 seats. The message was clear: France could no longer ignore Le Pen. The party's entry into national politics as a force came two years later in the legislative elections, with Le Pen's party winning 35 seats in the French National Assembly. By then, Le Pen had removed his black eye patch and begun to refine his rough image. In 1988, he shocked the nation by winning 14% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election. Fourteen years later, in his fifth presidential bid, he won more than 16.8% of the vote, finishing second to Jacques Chirac and advancing to the two-person runoff.

France was shocked, Europe trembled, and the National Front was triumphant. But Le Pen's victory did not come. In a rare show of unity, right-wing and left-wing supporters joined forces to oppose him, holding massive solidarity demonstrations in the streets of France. Chirac was re-elected on May 5, 2002, with a record 82% of the vote. Over the years, Le Pen's political line never wavered. In a 2003 speech, he said he wanted to write the concept of "national priority" into the French constitution to limit employment, housing opportunities, and other social aid for French citizens. "Immigration is the greatest danger we face," he said.

"Me? A racist? That's a joke," Le Pen once told the Associated Press. "But I'm not for the melting pot. I'm for defending my culture. If I found the culture of Brooklyn in France, I would be desperate." His private life was turbulent. In 1976, an explosion destroyed the apartment building where the family lived, but Le Pen, his wife, and three children were not injured. The French media reveled in the story of Le Pen's divorce from his wife, Pierrette Lalanne. Reflecting that bitter separation, she posed for Playboy magazine in 1987, partly clad in a maid's outfit. The magazine quoted her as saying it was a response to her husband's remarks in a Playboy interview that she could work as a housekeeper if she needed money.

He married for the second time in 1991, to Jany Le Pen, nee Paschos, known as Jany. Le Pen began laying the groundwork for his successor at a party congress in 2003, appointing his youngest of three daughters, Marine, as vice president. She became the party leader in 2011 and personally reached the presidential runoff in 2017 and 2022. Both times she lost to centrist Emmanuel Macron, but the gap was narrowing. She is considered a major potential contender in the next presidential election in 2027. But her more moderate style and efforts to distance the party from its most extreme views soon put her at odds with her father. He refused to stop his anti-Semitic provocations, clashing with her attempts to shed the National Front's pariah status.

She expelled him from the party he co-founded and stripped him of his lifetime honorary presidency in 2018. Months later, she changed the name of the National Front to the National Rally as part of her strategy to reshape the party's image. Her father called it the "heaviest blow" the party had faced since its founding. Throughout his life, Le Pen refused to concede or be silenced. "I am the moral authority of the movement...I don't have a habit of hiding my views," Le Pen told the Associated Press in 2014, as the rift between father and daughter grew. In recent years, Le Pen's health deteriorated, leading to multiple hospitalizations, including after a stroke.

Le Pen is survived by his widow and three daughters, Marie-Caroline, Yann, and Marine.