Jean-Marie Le Pen is dead, the founder of the FN was 96 years old

POLITICS – A page in French political history is definitively turning. A page from the extreme right especially. Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front, which became the National Rally, died this Tuesday, January 7, his family told AFP. This veteran of the Indochina and Algerian wars (where he is accused of having practiced torture), five-time presidential candidate, was 96 years old.

Elected deputy for the first time in 1956 (until 1962) in the wake of Pierre Poujade, it was in 1972 that the Breton, born in La Trinité-sur-Mer (Morbihan) took the leadership of the very young National Front, party from the small nationalist group New Order. From the start, the tone and its strategy are set: “A million unemployed is a million too many immigrants,” he says. A very complicated first decade followed, illustrated by the starving score (0.75%) that he obtained in 1974 for his first presidential attempt. He even had to give up that of 1981, due to lack of sponsorship.

But the 1980s marked the beginning of the political conquest of Jean-Marie Le Pen and the National Front. The local success of the 1983 municipal elections (victory in Dreux, in particular) was followed by the breakthrough in the 1984 European elections (11%) but above all the resounding entry into the National Assembly during the 1986 elections. Taking advantage of the organization of the vote proportionally, he leveraged his 9.7% by obtaining 37 deputies.

At his side will include Bruno Gollnisch, Jacques Bompard, Bruno Mégret, Jean-Pierre Stirbois and Yann Piat. “We are expecting deputies with shaved heads. We will discover thoughtful and resolute elected officials. We are expecting adventurers. We are going to see a responsible group which is not a group of enthusiasts”he then declared in an interview with Point in March 1986, laying the foundations for the strategy of « normalisation » today adopted by Marine Le Pen.

Controversies and an earthquake

This success at the polls is accompanied by media controversies which have earned him long-term trials, some following him for several decades. Thus, as a guest on RTL in September 1987, he minimized the gas chambers and referred to them as “ a detail of the story » of the Second World War.

This did not prevent him from obtaining a double-digit score (14.4%) six months later during the 1988 presidential election. After having obtained a similar success in 1995 (15%), the one who established in the Paca region achieved its main success in 2002 when, on April 21, he surprisingly reached the second round of the election, eliminating the socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin.

Even if his personality and his anti-immigration speech are crushed by Jacques Chirac in the second round (barely 18% of the votes), this election is an earthquake for France and its political class. His fifth and final participation in the presidential election in 2007 was a failure (10.4%) which pushed him in 2011 to give the keys to his party to his third daughter Marine, not without difficulty since he was excluded in 2015.

The last press release concerning him on the RN website dates from March 2018. The National Front, which was going to change its name, welcomed the verdict rendered by the Court of Appeal, confirming its exclusion from the party ahead of the Lille Congress . “ However, this jurisdiction persists in maintaining Jean-Marie Le Pen as honorary president », deplored the training of Marine Le Pen. To definitively put an end to the cumbersome patriarch, the members voted during this Congress to modify the statutes, removing the honorary presidency and renaming the party National Rally.

A slayer of the European Union, it was in the European Parliament that Jean-Marie Le Pen ended his political career. Elected in Strasbourg almost continuously since 1984, “ The Menhir » ended his last term in 2019, the year he was indicted in the so-called National Front parliamentary assistants affair, which is now making headlines.

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