France: Jean-Marie Le Pen: The “Devil of the Republic” is dead

Jean-Marie Le Pen was the poltergeist of French politics. For decades, the right-wing extremist influenced the debate with sharp provocations, polemicized against immigrants and bullied political opponents. The list of his previous convictions ranges from inciting racial hatred to trivializing Nazi crimes. In almost 40 years at the head of the Front National party, which is now called Rassemblement National, he turned the former splinter group into a serious political force. He has now died at the age of 96.

The politician was considered the “devil of the republic”, a talented and therefore dangerous agitator. In the last years of his life, however, he increasingly lost political importance after his daughter Marine Le Pen broke with him. His repeated failures did not fit into their strategy of giving the right-wing populists a more moderate appearance in order to appeal to new groups of voters.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born in 1928 as the son of a Breton fisherman and a seamstress. After studying law and politics, he fought for the Foreign Legion in the Indochina War. He was accused several times of torturing prisoners in the Algerian War, but he himself rejected this. However, he lost a libel lawsuit against the newspaper “Le Monde” in 2003.

Long right wing career

Le Pen was drawn to politics early on – and he was on the far right from the start. In 1956 he became a member of the National Assembly for the first time. He co-founded the National Front in 1972 and led it for decades with a strong hand against the “establishment” in Paris. Decades before Donald Trump’s “America first,” he campaigned with the slogan “The French first.”

He had posters printed: “One million unemployed means one million immigrants too many.” In 1996, he announced that he believed in “racial inequality.” One of his most famous outbursts is that he repeatedly trivialized the gas chambers in the Nazi death camps as a “detail” of the history of the Second World War. He was convicted several times for this.

Shock success in the 2002 presidential election

The thoroughbred politician achieved his greatest coup when he came second in the 2002 presidential election and ran against Jacques Chirac in the runoff. France still speaks of the “shock of April 21st” today. Le Pen – nicknamed the Menhir – benefited from the disunity of the left at the time. In the second round of voting, even Chirac’s die-hard opponents grudgingly voted against the conservative.

Even after his daughter Marine Le Pen took over the presidency of the FN in 2011, Le Pen did not want to give up his harsh statements. He did not understand the fact that the party finally expelled him in 2015 because of his gas chamber statement and then also eliminated his position as honorary chairman: he repeatedly publicly taunted his successor. He described the renaming of the FN as Rassemblement National as a “shameful erasure” of the FN’s identity.

Nevertheless, he and Marine Le Pen became close again, at least in person – she visited him during a hospital stay and also on his 90th birthday. “Despite our political differences, she remains my daughter,” an unusually conciliatory Jean-Marie Le Pen told Paris Match magazine at the time.