Jean-Marie Le Pen, French Far-Right Leader, Dies At 96 | EUROtoday

PARIS (AP) — Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founding father of France’s far-right National Front who was identified for fiery rhetoric towards immigration and multiculturalism that earned him each staunch supporters and widespread condemnation, has died. He was 96.

A polarizing determine in French politics, Le Pen’s controversial statements, together with Holocaust denial, led to a number of convictions and strained his political alliances.

Le Pen, who as soon as reached the second spherical of the 2002 presidential election, was ultimately estranged from his daughter, Marine Le Pen, who renamed his National Front celebration, kicked him out and remodeled it into one in all France’s strongest political forces whereas distancing herself from her father’s extremist picture.

Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally because the celebration is now identified, confirmed Le Pen’s dying in a put up on social media platform X on Tuesday. Bardella’s unusually heat tribute highlighted Le Pen’s polemical previous, together with his ties to the Algerian conflict, describing him as a “tribune of the people” who “always served France” and expressing condolences to his household, together with Marine.

The put up appeared to blur the space the rebranded celebration had sought to determine between its firebrand founder and its extra polished, fashionable path below Marine Le Pen.

Marine Le Pen, hundreds of kilometers (miles) away within the French territory of Mayotte, was inspecting the aftermath of harmful Cyclone Chido on the time of her father’s dying.

Despite his exclusion from the celebration in 2015, Le Pen’s divisive legacy endures, marking many years of French political historical past and shaping the trajectory of the far proper.

His dying got here at a vital time for his daughter. She now faces a possible jail time period and a ban on working for political workplace if convicted within the embezzling trial at the moment underway.

A fixture for many years in French politics, the fiery Jean-Marie Le Pen was a wily political strategist and gifted orator who used his charisma to captivate crowds together with his anti-immigration message.

The portly, silver-haired son of a Breton fisherman seen himself as a person with a mission — to maintain France French below the banner of the National Front. Picking Joan of Arc because the celebration’s patron saint, Le Pen made Islam, and Muslim immigrants, his main goal, blaming them for the financial 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 turned a signature of his profession.

“If I advance, follow me; if I die, avenge me; if I shirk, kill me,” Le Pen stated at a 1990 celebration congress, reflecting the theatrical fashion that for many years fed the fervor of followers.

Le Pen, who misplaced an eye fixed in a road battle in his youth and for years wore a black eyepatch, was a continuing drive in French political life, inconceivable for politicians of the left or proper to disregard.

In election after election, he proved the spoiler, forcing rivals to scramble to counter him, and generally stoop to reap far-right votes.

Convicted quite a few occasions of anti-Semitism and routinely accused of xenophobia and racism, Le Pen routinely countered that he was merely a patriot defending the identification of “eternal France.”

Le Pen had not too long ago been exempted from prosecution on well being grounds from a high-profile trial over his celebration’s suspected embezzlement of European Parliament funds that opened in September.

French judicial authorities positioned Le Pen below authorized guardianship in February on the request of his household as his well being declined, French media reported. He had been in frail well being for a while.

Le Pen was notably convicted in 1990 for a radio comment made three years earlier during which he referred to the Nazi fuel chambers as a “detail in World War II history.” In 2015, he repeated the comment, saying he “did not at all” remorse it, triggering the ire of his daughter — by then the celebration chief — and a brand new conviction in 2016.

He additionally was convicted for a 1988 comment linking in a play on phrases a Cabinet minister with the Nazi crematory ovens, and for a 1989 remark blaming the “Jewish international” for serving to seed “this anti-national spirit.”

In one other setback, Le Pen misplaced his European Parliament seat in 2002 for a yr for assaulting a Socialist politician throughout a 1997 election marketing campaign.

More not too long ago, Le Pen and 26 National Front officers, together with his daughters Marine and Yann Le Pen, have been accused of utilizing cash meant for EU parliamentary aides to pay employees who as a substitute did political work for the celebration between 2004 and 2016, in violation of the 27-nation bloc’s rules. Jean-Marie Le Pen was deemed unfit to testify.