Jean-Marie Le Pen, who helped spark the rise of the far right in France, has died at the age of 96

Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the far-right National Front party, who exploited working-class concerns about immigration and globalization and built his career on rhetoric that many viewed as racist and xenophobic, has died at the age of 96.

The National Rally party, led by his daughter Marine Le Pen, confirmed his death.

Jean-Marie Le Pen spent his life fighting, whether as a soldier in France’s colonial wars, as a founder of the National Front (for which he ran in five presidential elections) or in feuds with his daughters and ex-wife, which often took place. in public.

Controversy was Le Pen’s constant companion. Accusations of racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia dogged the National Front after he co-founded the party in 1972.

In the early years of the AIDS crisis, Le Pen suggested that patients should be isolated in separate facilities.

He was tried, convicted and fined in 1996 for contesting war crimes after declaring that the Nazi gas chambers were “merely a detail” of the history of World War II and that the Nazi occupation of France “was not particularly inhumane”.

These comments sparked outrage in France, where police arrested thousands of Jews who were deported to the Auschwitz death camp.

“I stand by this, because I believe this is the truth,” Le Pen said in 2015 when asked if he regretted the gas chamber comment, angering his daughter Marine in the process.

In recent years, Le Pen has made Islam and Muslim immigrants her primary target, blaming them for France’s economic and social problems. He once told the Associated Press that he “would despair if Brooklyn culture existed in France.”

“A matter for history to judge”: Macron

Marine Le Pen learned of her father’s death during a stopover in Kenya on her return from France The hurricane struck the French overseas department of Mayotte.

Jordan Bardella, head of the National Rally party, praised him because he “always served France and defended its identity and sovereignty.”

Commenting on Le Pen’s death, President Emmanuel Macron said: “A historical figure from the far right. He played a role in the public life of our country for nearly 70 years, and it is now a matter that will be judged by history.”

A populist and fiery orator, Le Pen helped rewrite the norms of French politics during a career spanning 40 years, riding waves of voter discontent and harnessing resentment over immigration and job security.

He reached the 2002 presidential runoff, but lost in a landslide to Jacques Chirac, with voters choosing to support conservatism rather than return the far right to power for the first time since the rule of Nazi collaborators in the 1940s.

Le Pen was the scourge of the European Union, which he considered a supranational project that usurped the powers of nation-states, exploiting the kind of dissatisfaction felt by many Britons who later voted to leave the European Union.

Born in Brittany in 1928, Le Pen studied law in Paris in the early 1950s, then joined the Foreign Legion as a paratrooper fighting in Indochina in 1953.

Le Pen campaigned in the late 1950s to keep Algeria French, as an elected member of the French Parliament and a soldier in the territories then administered by France. He has publicly justified the use of torture, but has personally denied using such practices.

He said in his memoir that he lost an eye in 1965 when a tent pole broke while campaigning for a far-right presidential candidate and struck him in the face before a rally. By then, he had formed a company with Léon Gauthier, who had been a soldier in the Waffen-SS of Nazi Germany, which planted the seeds for the formation of the National Front.

After years on the sidelines of French politics, Le Pen’s fortunes changed in 1977 when he inherited a mansion outside Paris from a millionaire supporter, along with 30 million francs, about five million euros ($7.4 million Canadian) in today’s money.

This has allowed Le Pen to advance his political ambitions and agenda despite being shunned by traditional parties.

His first wife, Pierrette Lalanne, eloped with his biographer in the 1980s and posed half-naked in Playboy magazine to take revenge on a man she denounced as violent. She left Lupin with one of his spare glass eyes and only returned it when he agreed to return it to her mother’s cremated ashes.

Ineligible to testify in recent corruption investigations

Le Pen continued to exploit white working-class anger over immigration and dissatisfaction with Paris’s business and political elites, and the National Front rose in local, regional and then European elections.

Traditional parties have sought to win back voters through tougher rhetoric on immigration. This tactic helped conservative Nicolas Sarkozy secure the presidency in 2007, and being tough on crime and immigration is now more prevalent.

In 2011, after establishing tight personal control over the National Front, she was succeeded as party president by her daughter Marine Le Pen, who campaigned to shed the party’s enduring image as anti-Semitic and rebrand it as a defender of the working class.

Le Pen is survived by his wife, Jean-Marie Bachous, and his three daughters: Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine.

Marine Le Pen reached the two run-off rounds in the presidential elections. Losing to Macron both times. Although she is a presumptive candidate for the next presidential election, scheduled for 2027, she also faces the possibility of a prison sentence and a ban from running for political office in an embezzlement case.

Yann Le Pen is also implicated in the case, as he was accused of using funds intended for EU parliamentary aides to pay the salaries of 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 ineligible to testify.