Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the French far-right National Front party, dies at 96

The French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen died this Tuesday at the age of 96, according to what his family told AFP. Le Pen was the founder of the French far-right National Front party, since 2011 run by his daughter Marine and renamed the National Regroupment (RN). The party, founded in 1971 and from which his daughter, Marine, excluded him, has not stopped expanding its base, and has become a key force that conditioned the fall of Michel Barnier’s brief Government and that threatens to overthrow it again. the current one by François Bayrou. After decades of ostracism, the RN has become a dominant force in French politics and is closer than ever to achieving power, something Jean-Marie never achieved.

Jordan Bardella, current president of the RN, confirmed the death in a message on X (the old Twitter). “Committed to the uniform of the French army in Indochina and Algeria, tribune of the people in the National Assembly and the European Parliament, he always served France and defended its identity and sovereignty,” Bardella has written.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was a candidate for the presidency of the Republic on five occasions. But it was in 2002 when he went further. Then, he caused a political earthquake in France in 2002, when he unexpectedly made it to the second round of the presidential elections, leaving out the socialist Lionel Jospin. Although he was defeated by a very wide margin by the then president, Jacques Chirac, who garnered 82% of the votes, the emergence of a candidate considered far-right and who in his career had flirted with anti-Semitic ideas caused a deep shock in large parts of the country. strata of French society.

For decades, France has followed the entanglements—the abrupt entrances and exits from the scene, the grudges and quarrels, the divorces, the envies—of its most famous political clan: the Le Pens. The patriarch, an old lion of the French extreme right, took advantage of his 90th birthday, in 2018, to reconcile with two of his three daughters. She had not spoken to Marie-Caroline, the eldest, for 20 years when she married Philippe Olivier, close to the dissident Bruno Mégret, who had been a collaborator of Jean-Marie. He never forgave him.

With the little girl, Marine, the dispute was more recent, but it had developed minute by minute in public view, since Marine was Jean-Marie’s heir in command of the National Front. They had been estranged for two years, after repeated attempts, which ended successfully, to kick the father out of the party. Jean-Marie’s uncontrollable outbursts had become a liability.

In 1987, Patriarch Le Pen declared that the gas chambers used by the Nazis were “a detail of the history of the Second World War”, which is why he was sentenced by justice, one of the many sentences for his controversial statements. throughout his long career. His autobiography, published in 2018, reflects that he had become a figure in contemporary French history: the man who recovered a tradition of the French extreme right – anti-Semitic, racist, authoritarian and collaborationist during the Nazi occupation – that seemed extinct after the Second World War.

In an interview published in Morning Express that same year, he did not deny the torture perpetrated by the French armed forces during the Algerian war, which lasted between 1954 and 1962. He did not call them torture, but rather “muscular interrogations.” He then assured that, as a paratrooper in the war, he did not participate in these interrogations, but not out of principle but because there was no opportunity. “If I should have put myself in a position to save the European and Muslim civilians of Algeria [mediante las torturas]yes, without a doubt [habría participado]”, he noted.