PARIS – Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France's far-right National Front party, famous for his fiery anti-immigration and anti-cultural rhetoric, won him loyal supporters and was shunned by the rest of the country. He was 96 years old.
A figurehead in French politics, Le Pen's controversial statements, including Holocaust denial, led to many convictions and disrupted her political alliances.
Le Pen, who reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election, ended up estranged from her daughter, Marine Le Pen, who renamed her party the National Front, ousted her and turned it into one of France's most powerful political forces while distancing herself. in the dangerous image of his father.
Jordani Bardella, the president of the National Rally as the group is known, confirmed the death of Le Pen in a post on social media X on Tuesday. Bardella's unusually warm tribute highlighted Le Pen's tumultuous history, including her relationship with the Algerian war, describing her as a “leader of the people” who “always served France” and offering condolences to her family, including Marine.
The post appeared to blur the distance the rebranded party sought to create between its firebrand founder and its more polished, modern approach under Marine Le Pen.
Read more: The power of Le Pen
Marine Le Pen, thousands of kilometers (km) away in the French territory of Mayotte, was surveying the aftermath of the devastating Cyclone Chido when her father died.
Despite her expulsion from the party in 2015, Le Pen's divisive legacy lives on, marking decades of French political history and shaping the trajectory of the far right.
His death came at a critical time for his daughter. He now faces jail time and a ban from running for political office if he is convicted of the ongoing fraud case.
For decades in French politics, the flamboyant Jean-Marie Le Pen was a shrewd and eloquent political strategist who used her compassion to draw crowds with her anti-immigration message.
The handsome, silver-haired son of a Breton fisherman saw himself as a man with a mission – to keep France French under the flag of the National Front. Choosing Joan of Arc as the party's patron saint, Le Pen made Islam, and Muslim immigrants, her main target, blaming them for France's economic and social woes.
A former paratrooper and Foreign Legionnaire who fought in Indochina and Algeria, he led his sympathizers in political and ideological battles with the panache that became the signature of his career.
“If I go forward, follow me; if I die, take revenge; if I avoid, kill me,” said Le Pen at a party conference in 1990, demonstrating the theatrical style that had been playing tricks on supporters for decades.
Le Pen, who lost an eye in a street fight in his youth and for many years wore a black eyepatch, was a constant influence in French political life, impossible for politicians of the left or the right to ignore.
In election after election, he proved to be jealous, forcing opponents to oppose him, and sometimes to bend to favor far-right votes.
Convicted many times of anti-Semitism and often accused of bigotry and bigotry, Le Pen always argued that she was simply a patriot defending the identity of “eternal France.”
Le Pen had recently been freed from prosecution on health grounds in a high-profile case of her party's alleged embezzlement of European Parliament funds that opened in September.
French judicial authorities placed Le Pen under formal arrest in February at the request of her family as her health continued to falter, French media reported. He had been in poor health for a long time.
Le Pen was convicted in 1990 for a radio speech she gave three years earlier in which she called the Nazi gas chambers “a detail in the history of World War II.” In 2015, he repeated these words, saying that he “didn't regret it at all,” which led to the anger of his daughter – then the leader of the group – and a new conviction in 2016.
He was also convicted in 1988 for comments linking in a play on words a Cabinet minister to Nazi crematoriums, and for comments in 1989 accusing the “Jewish nations” of helping to seed “this anti-national spirit.”
In another case, Le Pen lost her seat in the European Parliament in 2002 for a year by beating a Socialist politician during the 1997 election campaign.
Recently, Le Pen and 26 National Front officials, including her daughters Marine and Yann Le Pen, were accused of using funds intended for EU parliamentary assistants to pay staff who did political work for the party between 2004 and 2016, in violation of the law . rules of the bloc of 27 nations. Jean-Marie Le Pen has been deemed unfit to testify.
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Ganley, who is retired from the Associated Press, contributed to this report.
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