Who died this Tuesday at the age of 96, Jean-Marie Le Pen has gone down in the history of French and European politics for having resurrected the extreme right and for immigration being one of the main concerns of the electorate for years.
Founder of the National Front (FN) and father of the leader of the party that succeeded him (National Rally, RN), Marine Le Pen, he was also an inspirer of European ultranationalist and xenophobic movements, to such an extent that they lead governments such as that of Italy.
Born on June 20, 1928 in La Trinité-sur-Mer (Brittany), to a fisherman father and a farmer mother, Le Pen had a long political career, culminating in 2002, when he challenged Jacques Chirac for the presidency after passing to the second electoral round.
His health had begun to fail for some time and, in fact, he had been away from the front line for years due to the political breakup with his daughter Marine in the middle of the last decade, with whom he later made peace.
In more than half a century of political activity, patriarch Le Pen’s racist, denialist and anti-Semitic statements brought him several judicial convictions, which is why he frequently occupied the front pages of newspapers, a notoriety that he knew how to use to his advantage.
National Front leader Jean Marie Le Pen with his wife, Jany, on May 1, 2002, at his party’s annual rally in Paris.
The FN that he founded in 1972 was a marginal and extremist formation that gave rise to the RN, transformed by Marine Le Pen into the first party in France in number of votes (more than eleven million) in the European and legislative elections held in 2024. .
As a result of this strength, Le Pen daughter has competed in two presidential finals (in 2017 and 2022), losing in both cases to Emmanuel Macron.
Immigration as a repulsive message
Patriarch Le Pen’s greatest achievement was making stopping immigration a priority on the political agenda. Le Pen influenced from his position as national deputy (1956-62 and 1986-1988) and MEP (1984-2019), since he never held a government position.
He came close to power in 2002, when he overcame the socialist Lionel Jospin and went to the second round of the French presidential elections, in which he was clearly defeated by the conservative Chirac.
His second place in the first round created a political earthquake, and millions of French people took to the streets to protest against his ideas.
Of that mobilization against the extreme right, which also manifested itself in its political isolation through the so-called “cordon sanitaire” (to prevent any other party from agreeing with the FN), there remains less and less, in a country in which many of the ideas of Le Pen have already been normalized.
The wave of jihadist attacks in France between 2015 and 2017 further increased the feeling of insecurity that helped the ultra ideology of the founder of the FN to climb positions.
His diatribes against foreigners, especially Muslims, convinced millions of French people, especially in the south of the country, where hundreds of thousands of black feet (blackfeet), the French expelled from Algeria when that country became independent in 1962.
Le Pen’s ideas also permeated northern France, where the rampant deindustrialization of the 80s and 90s left an army of unemployed, partly seduced by a national-populist discourse, which relegated that of the communists’ class struggle.
Removed since 2015 from the honorary presidency of the FN by his own daughter Marine due to statements that minimized the gas chambers of the Holocaust, Jean-Marie Le Pen criticized the “sweetened” way in which Marine addressed immigration or Europe, in an attempt to what in France is called “dediabolizing” the movement and broadening its electoral base.
“We must return to the fundamentals, to virility,” the patriarch advocated in a 2021 interview.
Attacked and tumultuous divorce
Economically liberal – he was considered the ‘French Ronald Reagan’ – and socially conservative, the far-right guru studied Law in Paris and entered politics in the 1950s within the movement of Pierre Poujade, who defended small businesses versus large stores.
At the age of 27, he was the youngest deputy in France and, shortly after, he enlisted as a volunteer in the colonial war in Algeria in which, as a paratrooper, he was accused of having practiced torture.
In 1973, Le Pen’s FN participated in its first legislative elections. As treasurer he had a former Nazi SS officer and, among his lieutenants, collaborators with the German occupation and Holocaust deniers.
On November 1, 1976, he suffered an attack at his Parisian residence. His wife, Pierrette, and his three daughters – Marine Le Pen was 8 years old – emerged unscathed. In the 1980s, cement businessman Hubert Lambert bequeathed his fortune to Jean-Marie Le Pen, with which he bought his current mansion in Saint-Cloud, on the outskirts of Paris.
After Pierrette’s tumultuous divorce – she posed nude in 1986 in Playboy, claiming that the separation had left her penniless – Le Pen remarried Jeannine Marie Louise Paschos in 1991.
Among his nine grandchildren is the well-known former deputy Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, now in the European Parliament, who encouraged her aunt Marine to go to a more radical party, Reconquista, but who in recent months has returned to the fold.
Source: www.huffingtonpost.es
