Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of France’s populist far-right politics, died Tuesday at the age of 96 in a care facility after a short illness, his family said. File photo by Eco Clement/UPI | License Photo
Jan. 7 (UPI) — The founding father of France’s far-right movement, Jean-Marie Le Pen, died Tuesday in a care facility after a short illness, his family said. He was 96 years old.
Le Pen founded the National Front in 1972 and led it for four decades during which he made five unsuccessful runs for the presidency and served eight terms in the European Parliament before ceding control to his daughter, Marine Le Pen, who later ousted him from the party in 2018 over his extremist rhetoric, rebranding it as National Rally in an effort to clean up its image and boost its electoral appeal.
Le Pen started the National Front as a means to bring disparate nationalist elements under the umbrella of a single party, exploiting fears over mass immigration by millions of migrants from France’s former colonies, mainly in North Africa, to fuel its rise from fringe appeal to mainstream electoral success.
Father and daughter went on trial last year on charges they and other senior NR party figures embezzled European Parliament funds with a fake jobs scheme. Jean-Marie Le Pen did not have to attend court due to poor health.
Jean-Marie and Marine, who hopes to make her own run for president in 2027 for a fourth time, were among high-ranking party officials prosecutors accused of hiring aides to work on party internal business instead of representing the constituents of its two-dozen or so MEPs in the 720-seat legislative body.
Entering politics as a National Assembly member in 1956 after serving in the French Foreign Legion as a paratrooper in what is now Vietnam and later Algeria, Le Pen was a controversial figure who repeatedly dismissed the Holocaust as a “mere detail” of World War II and reviled Charles De Gaulle, instead hailing France’s Vichy Government which collaborated with the Nazis.
As an intelligence officer in Algeria’s eight-year struggle for independence from France, Le Pen allegedly participated in torturing captive Algerian fighters, saying in a newspaper interview, “I’ve nothing to hide. We tortured because it had to be done.” He later retracted the claim, mounted unsuccessful legal action and denied further accusations, alleging he was the victim of a leftist “government plot” to ruin him.
He was fined three times for repeating the Holocaust “mere detail” jibe and convicted for other offenses related to denying crimes against humanity related to Nazi Germany‘s wartime occupation of France. In 2014 he said the deadly Ebola virus could be a solution to over-population in the world and in 2016 he was convicted of “provoking hatred and ethnic discrimination” over comments about Roma people.
