PARIS — Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s far-right National Front who was known for fiery rhetoric against immigration and multiculturalism that earned him both staunch supporters and widespread condemnation, has died. He was 96.
A polarizing figure in French politics, Le Pen’s controversial statements, including Holocaust denial, led to multiple convictions and strained his political alliances.
Le Pen, who once reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election, was eventually estranged from his daughter, Marine Le Pen, who renamed his National Front party, kicked him out and transformed it into one of France’s most powerful political forces while distancing herself from her father’s extremist image.
Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally as the party is now known, confirmed Le Pen’s death in a post on social media platform X on Tuesday. Bardella’s unusually warm tribute highlighted Le Pen’s polemical past, including his ties to the Algerian war, describing him as a “tribune of the people” who “always served France” and expressing condolences to his family, including Marine.
The post appeared to blur the distance the rebranded party had sought to establish between its firebrand founder and its more polished, modern direction under Marine Le Pen.
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Marine Le Pen, thousands of kilometers (miles) away in the French territory of Mayotte, was inspecting the aftermath of destructive Cyclone Chido at the time of her father’s death.
Despite his exclusion from the party in 2015, Le Pen’s divisive legacy endures, marking decades of French political history and shaping the trajectory of the far right.
His death came at a crucial time for his daughter. She now faces a potential prison term and a ban on running for political office if convicted in the embezzling trial currently underway.
A fixture for decades in French politics, the fiery Jean-Marie Le Pen was a wily political strategist and gifted orator who used his charisma to captivate crowds with his anti-immigration message.
The portly, silver-haired son of a Breton fisherman viewed himself as a man with a mission — to keep France French under the banner of the National Front. Picking Joan of Arc as the party’s patron saint, Le Pen made Islam, and Muslim immigrants, his primary target, blaming them for the economic and social woes of France.
A former paratrooper and Foreign Legionnaire who fought in Indochina and Algeria, he led sympathizers into political and ideological battles with a panache that became a signature of his career.
“If I advance, follow me; if I die, avenge me; if I shirk, kill me,” Le Pen said at a 1990 party congress, reflecting the theatrical style that for decades fed the fervor of followers.
Le Pen, who lost an eye in a street fight in his youth and for years wore a black eyepatch, was a constant force in French political life, impossible for politicians of the left or right to ignore.
In election after election, he proved the spoiler, forcing rivals to scramble to counter him, and sometimes stoop to harvest far-right votes.
Convicted numerous times of antisemitism and routinely accused of xenophobia and racism, Le Pen routinely countered that he was simply a patriot protecting the identity of “eternal France.”
Le Pen had recently been exempted from prosecution on health grounds from a high-profile trial over his party’s suspected embezzlement of European Parliament funds that opened in September.
French judicial authorities placed Le Pen under legal guardianship in February at the request of his family as his health declined, French media reported. He had been in frail health for some time.
Le Pen was notably convicted in 1990 for a radio remark made three years earlier in which he referred to the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail in World War II history.” In 2015, he repeated the remark, saying he “did not at all” regret it, triggering the ire of his daughter — by then the party leader — and a new conviction in 2016.
He also was convicted for a 1988 remark linking in a play on words a Cabinet minister with the Nazi crematory ovens, and for a 1989 comment blaming the “Jewish international” for helping seed “this anti-national spirit.”
In another setback, Le Pen lost his European Parliament seat in 2002 for a year for assaulting a Socialist politician during a 1997 election campaign.
More recently, Le Pen and 26 National Front officials, including his daughters Marine and Yann Le Pen, have been accused of using money destined for EU parliamentary aides to pay staff who instead did political work for the party between 2004 and 2016, in violation of the 27-nation bloc’s regulations. Jean-Marie Le Pen was deemed unfit to testify.
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Ganley, who retired from The Associated Press, contributed to this report.
