Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front (FN), has died at the age of 96. Historical figure of the French extreme right and president of the party between 1971 and 2011, he had been hospitalized several times in recent years, the most serious in February 2022, after suffering a stroke.
The father of the current leader of the party (renamed National Rally since 2018), Jean-Marie Le Pen was a five-time candidate for the presidency of the French Republic, managing to reach the second round in 2002. At that time there was a unanimous call from the rest of the political forces to vote against the extreme right, a republican front which opposed the National Front, and which led to a large victory for Jacques Chirac. However, Le Pen was the main person responsible for bringing the hardest extreme right to the front line of politics in France.
His rise to the extreme right
Jean-Marie Le Pen was born on June 20, 1928 in the Breton town of La Trinité-sur-Mer, into a family of fishermen. His father died in 1944 when the boat he was working on sank after the impact and detonation of a sea mine. Le Pen then received the status of ward of the Nationgranted by the State to the children of those who died or were seriously injured during World War II.
After completing law studies, Jean-Marie Le Pen enlisted in the French Army, with which he participated in the colonial wars in Indochina (1953) and Algeria (1957), in parachute units. Through his military contacts he met Pierre Poujade, promoter of a popular – and ephemeral – extreme right movement in the 1950s, with which in 1956 Le Pen obtained a deputy seat in the National Assembly, which he would lose in the following elections. elections in 1962.
Ten years later, in 1972, a neo-fascist group called New Order turned to the former deputy and veteran of the Algerian war to be the face of a new party, Le Front national pour l’unité française, with which they hoped to bring together the different tendencies. of the French extreme right, which had achieved marginal results in the last electoral elections. It didn’t take long for Le Pen to remove Alain Robert, leader of the New Order, and gain control of the party.
The beginnings of the National Front coincided with another fundamental event in the life of the Le Pen family: in 1976, the millionaire Hervé Lambert, a supporter of the party, made Jean-Marie Le Pen his only heir. Overnight Le Pen found himself with a considerable personal fortune – the exact amount is unknown still today – and with the private mansion of Montretout, in the town of Saint-Cloud, on the outskirts of Paris. An inheritance that the Lambert family contested for years in court.
Although in the first electoral events in which they participated, the results of the FN did not reach 1% of the votes, the legislative elections of 1978 marked an important change in the discourse and one of the first advances of the extreme right in France, after a decade marginalized from political life. In particular with the slogan “one million unemployed is one million too many immigrants”, conceived by one of the founders of the party – and one of the first French politicians to defend denialist theses about the Holocaust –, François Duprat.
Two attacks mark these founding years of the party: in 1976, a bomb exploded in the family home of the Le Pens, destroying part of the building and 12 others in the same neighborhood, as well as several parked cars. If the president of the National Front tried to present himself as the victim of a politically motivated attack, Today historians point because the dispute related to the Lambert inheritance is the most probable motive.
Two years later, in 1978, in the week before the second round of the legislative elections, François Duprat was murdered when a bomb exploded in his car. The perpetrators will never be identified either, although in this case it is suspected that it was revenge by other far-right groups.
Growth of the National Front
The 1980s saw the consolidation of Le Pen and her party in the French political and media landscape. Despite his speech against the European project, he was elected deputy on several occasions to the Strasbourg Parliament (the first in 1984), where he claimed to go to “defend France against Europe; against the abuses of the European Union.”
In the legislative elections of 1986 – the first in France to be decided by a proportional vote and not in two-round elections – the FN won 35 seats in the National Assembly. The majority of them would lose with the return to the previous system and the party would not have its own parliamentary group again until last year (with 89 deputies), although the entry into Parliament is remembered as one of the historical milestones of the Lepenist party.
Jean-Marie Le Pen’s political life was marked by controversies and statements that earned him several judicial sentences: in a radio interview he stated that the gas chambers used by the Nazis were a simple “detail of history,” in 1996 he defended “natural race inequality,” in 2005 declared that the German occupation during World War II “was not particularly inhumane.”
In 2014, speaking about an alleged “migratory invasion” from Africa, he declared that “Mr. Ebola “It could solve the problem of population explosion in three months.” In April 2000, he was dismissed from his mandate as regional councilor of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, following a conviction for assault against the socialist candidate in his constituency in the 1997 legislative elections.
Political heritage
“Lepenism is a pure national populism,” the historian Nicolas Lebourg, one of the main French specialists on the extreme right, recently analyzed in a broadcast series dedicated to Le Pen on public radio. “For a national populist, the elites and institutions are the ones that lead the country to chaos. And there is a savior, who emerges from the nation, who must take power and go above the corrupt and parasitic elites and directly lead the people, through a referendum. Now, the only difference between Le Pen and other national populists is that he managed to last.”
Although for a long time Marine Le Pen, who succeeded her father as head of the party in 2011, claimed to “assume the entire ideological inheritance”, her ‘normalization’ strategy has led her to distance herself in recent years from her comments and even to break relations with his father. A change in form, although not in substance, since its program is still based on the inscription of national priority in the Constitution.
“The National Front has built its brand and its political offer on the question of national identity,” says Lebourg. “As a nationalist party, an ethnicist vision of identity is at the center of its program and its ideology. That is the common thread and there is no variability in this regard in the National Group.”
Source: www.eldiario.es
