Jean-Marie Le Pen buried Saturday, the RN buries “the warrior”

“A venerable age had taken the warrior but had given us back our father”: with a sober tribute to Jean-Marie Le Pen, his daughter Marine on Wednesday turned the page on a tumultuous relationship, without a word, like the other leaders of the RN, on the slippages of the founder of his party.

“A lot of people he loves are waiting for him up there. Many people who love him are mourning him down here. Fair winds, fair seas, Dad!”, the three-time presidential candidate wrote on X, 24 hours after the death of her father, at the age of 96.

The leader of the RN deputies learned the news this Tuesday afternoon from the press when returning from a trip to Mayotte.

Informed of her death by journalists on the plane

“We were on the plane, in Nairobi where we made a technical stopover”, and it was there “that the journalists present on the flight informed us of the death”, explained the vice-president of the National Rally Louis Aliot .

Relations between Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen had deteriorated over the years after the daughter’s accession in 2011 to the head of the National Front (FN), a party co-founded and led for 39 years by the father, of whom he had ended up being excluded in 2015 following new anti-Semitic statements.

Ties were renewed in June 2018 on the occasion of the patriarch’s 90th birthday. In January 2022, Marine Le Pen indicated that in the event of victory in the presidential election, her first phone call would be to him.

Privacy on the sidelines of demonstrations

The funeral of Jean-Marie Le Pen will take place on Saturday in private in his hometown of La Trinité-sur-Mer (Morbihan) where Marine Le Pen often spends her summer holidays in the family home.

A setting which should remain conducive to contemplation, said Mr. Aliot, despite demonstrations by opponents in several cities on Tuesday evening to celebrate the death of the former far-right tribune.

“They are not going to come and demonstrate at a funeral. And if they do, I suppose the State will make sure to keep them away,” declared the mayor of Perpignan, who vilified “the bitch, always the same, in the street, the leftist scum.”

“Death, even the enemy has the right to respect,” reacted government spokesperson Sophie Primas, using the formula used by… Jean-Marie Le Pen during the death of Jacques Chirac.

“Shameful scenes of jubilation”

“Shameful scenes of jubilation” for the Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau but which “did not shock” the boss of LFI deputies Mathilde Panot, criticizing those who “call themselves Charlie in the morning” and are “shocked by a youth who continue to “annoy the National Front” in the evening.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was “a torturer in Algeria, who insulted people of the Jewish and Muslim faith, a man with multiple convictions,” she recalled.

So many aspects passed over in silence in the tributes paid since Tuesday by the various RN officials.

Posthumous rehabilitation

“Immense patriot, visionary” for Sébastien Chenu, “Tribun of the people” for Jean-Philippe Tanguy, rave press release from Jordan Bardella’s party on the one who “held in his hands the little flickering flame of the French nation”…

This posthumous rehabilitation within his political family, “it’s quite normal because the RN of 2025 is there because there was the FN before”, explains to AFP Jean-Yves Camus, political scientist specializing in extreme right.

“They cannot say anything else, it is a historical reality, the rise and consolidation of the party are due to Jean-Marie Le Pen who imposed immigration in the debate. And within the party, there are still people, certainly fewer and fewer, who campaigned before 2011,” he underlines.

Can this rehabilitation, denounced by the RN’s adversaries as proof that the party has only apparently demonized itself, have a political impact?

“No, Jean-Marie Le Pen had disappeared from the political landscape. For young activists, it’s a closed story, they come for Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. And RN voters do not hear this argument, it does not work,” replies Mr. Camus.

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