Jean-Marie Le Pen, co-founder of the National Front, died this Tuesday at the age of 96.
Forced into retirement around ten years ago by his daughter Marine Le Pen who had removed him from the party, the former presidential candidate tried to compensate for his loss of political influence with a power of nuisance which has led him to court numerous times.
His end of life was also marked by health problems.
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Jean-Marie Le Pen, figure of the French far right, is dead
A major political figure of the last forty years, Jean-Marie Le Pen died this Tuesday, January 7 at the age of 96. For ten years already, the co-founder of the National Front had withdrawn from national political life, pushed out by his daughter Marine who succeeded him at the head of the party in 2011. A sidelining which the former presidential candidate had difficulty accepting, trying to compensate for the loss of his political influence with a provocative and polemical media occupation, in addition to increasing the number of legal proceedings. All against a backdrop of fragile health and being placed under guardianship.
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Had Jean-Marie Le Pen ended up forgiving Marine Le Pen for the political strategy deployed since she took charge of the party to make it more acceptable, smoother, “demonized”? The last years of the life of the former presidential candidate were marked by very heated disputes via media between him and his daughter, beginning in 2015 when Jean-Marie Le Pen reiterated his comments on the gas chambers. “detail” of the Second World War, and claims that his party counts among its members “fervent Pétainists”.
This is too much for Marine Le Pen, in search of respectability, who believes that her father has just signed her “political suicide”. Between the two, long legal procedures began, which notably confirmed the exclusion of Jean-Marie Le Pen from the party, but also his right to remain honorary president of the National Front… until his daughter have the post of honorary president removed from the FN statutes. The father does everything to put obstacles in the way of his daughter and to threaten her with surprise interventions at party events, as he did on May 1, 2015 by inviting himself on stage before Marine Le’s speech. Pen, Place de l’Opéra in Paris.
Jean-Marie Le Pen is never stingy with unsympathetic comments about his offspring, going so far as to say that he “shame that the president of the FN bears (her) name”or that he has “pity her”in the first volume of his memoirs published in 2018.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, fervent opponent of de-demonization
Basically, the ex-president of the FN cannot digest the change in political strategy made by Marine Le Pen. He never understood or accepted the demonization undertaken by his daughter, arguing that it is necessary “remain faithful to the fundamentals of the National Front”. “I think we need to talk to France about the real problems” : l’immigration, insecurity”he said after the defeat of Marine Le Pen in the second round of the 2017 presidential election. In June 2021 he believes that the RN has “suffered a failure” in the first round of the regionals due to the “delepenization” of the party. “The FN was interesting in that it presented itself as an alternative to the whole system.” “By trying to become the right of the right, and to be admitted into the concert – without being in this case – of the political parties of the Fifth Republic, the RN has not done much,” he criticizes.
When the National Front renamed itself National Rally, it spoke of “treason” and“political assassination”. He is “disastrous that we abandon the name National Front, because it is an inimitable and essential landmark”he argues. According to him, “nothing good could come from such abandonment, neither for the movement itself nor for the service of the French”. And to proclaim: “Only adversaries and competitors will benefit from this betrayal.”
Because he did not want to see his ideas disappear, Jean-Marie Le Pen tried to keep his ideas alive until the end. In 2016, he launched committees called “Joan of Arc, to the rescue”, whose objective is “to influence as much as possible the march of the National Front”. He continues to give conferences, he wants to invest candidates in the 2017 legislative elections so that they can express themselves “the current of national and patriotic values”and wants to appear on the RN list in 2018 to be re-elected to the European Parliament. Without success.
A “logbook” fertile for controversies
Also, he continues to publish every week on his site and his social networks a video “Logbook” in which he talks about everything and nothing, interviewed by his closest collaborators such as Lorrain de Saint Affrique. A place of repeated slip-ups, which allows him to continue to exist through controversy, as when he suggests making a “batch” artists hostile to the FN, including the singer Patrick Bruel. He also appears regularly on TV Libertés, a far-right channel, where he creates a buzz, particularly when he appeared wearing a Venetian mask. At the end of September, Mediapart revealed images of Jean-Marie Le Pen at home in the company of a Lyon rock group close to the neo-Nazi sphere. Marine Le Pen had filed a complaint for abuse of weakness against the group.
The last years of his life were also marked by trials which followed one another at a frantic pace. He is tried – and condemned – for the “details” history, discriminatory remarks against the Roma or even homophobic remarks linking homosexuality and pedophilia. He is also indicted for defamation after saying that “90% of news items originate either from an immigrant or a person of immigrant origin”.
At the end of September, he should have appeared alongside his daughter and the twenty FN defendants in the case of assistants to European parliamentarians for “embezzlement of public funds” et “complicity”. But due to his state of health, the court concluded that he would not be able to attend the trial. “There is a physical and especially psychological alteration” which makes “incompatible” his appearance in court, the experts indicated.
Stroke and heart attack
A few months earlier, Jean-Marie Le Pen had been placed “under legal protection”activated at the family’s request by the court after a medical expertise establishing the incapacity of Jean-Marie Le Pen. She made her three daughters her agents, allowing them to carry out various acts in their father’s name, alone or in concert.
Health problems began more than five years ago for the former far-right party executive. In March 2022, after several hospitalizations in recent years for a bad flu or a state of general fatigue, he was hospitalized after having had a “mild form of stroke”. A little over a year later, he was after a “mild heart discomfort”. At over 90 years old, he never really recovered.
