On April 21, 2002, the accession to the second round of the presidential election of Jean-Marie Le Pen, president of the National Front, was a real bolt from the blue. Millions of French people took to the streets between the two rounds, to say no to the far right, which was finally crushed in the second round. The shock is immense.
Twenty-three years later, even though the most provocative French politician has just died at the age of 96, at the Garches hospital (Hauts-de-Seine), the extreme right in France is at the gates of power. The French are no longer demonstrating against the party led for 40 years by Jean-Marie Le Pen and which achieved more than 41% in the second round of the 2022 presidential election in the wake of his daughter, Marine.
Man of excess more than power
Born almost a century ago in Brittany in a modest environment, Jean-Marie Le Pen, ward of the Nation, has always cultivated patriotism and grew up politically within the Poujadist movement. Educated, brilliant and eloquent, he has spent more than sixty years in politics and will have had time to see his ideas take a lasting hold in political life, to the point of being taken up for some, notably on immigration, by the parties. of government.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, a man of excess rather than power, never dreamed of being at the Élysée. Driven by a visceral anti-Gaullism, condemned on multiple occasions for its racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic excesses, “the Menhir” hated moderation and built its legend on excess, in accordance with the tradition of the extreme right.
2015: the break
These escapades led his daughter, Marine Le Pen, to exclude him from the party he had founded. It was ten years ago after months of political and family tensions. Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had handed over the party to his line, could not support the work of normalizing the party to the flame, to make it a government party.
An image sums up their confrontation: on May 1, 2015, in front of the Paris Opera, the president of the FN is preparing to speak in front of her supporters for what was then the Joan of Arc Festival. Then Jean-Marie Le Pen appears, in a red parka. Arms raised and pride slung over his shoulder, he was cheered by the crowd before disappearing. A final snub which resulted in his suspension, then his exclusion a few months later.
Hostile au RN
Without Jean-Marie Le Pen, the FN then becomes the RN in 2018 and everything is done to erase the sulfurous legacy of the patriarch. Marine Le Pen refuses the classification to the extreme right and prefers to the right-left divide, the one which pits the people against the elites.
In ten years, the RN, freed from the cumbersome image of Jean-Marie Le Pen, has been eating away at the traditional right, to the point of outclassing it during the last presidential election in 2022. Normalization displeases Jean-Marie Le Pen, but it appeals the voters. The radical ideas remain. In meetings, activists still sing “we are at home”. The activists with shaved heads and nostalgic for a xenophobic FN are ostracized, but still there, even if they are less visible. The oldest activists still claim to belong to him, even if others, more numerous, have swelled the ranks of the RN without referring to its historic leader.
Dividing until death
National preference has, in the programs, given way to national priority, a less connoted concept. The RN still does not admit all journalists to the events it organizes and criticizes the “media system”, a classic antiphon of the far right.
A divisive man who loved to be so, Jean-Marie Le Pen divides even in death. President Emmanuel Macron believes, with rare restraint, in an official press release, that his political role “is now a matter for the judgment of History”. The left notes that its ideas persist, like Jean-Luc Mélenchon: “The fight against man is over. The one against the hatred, racism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism that he spread continues.” Prime Minister François Bayou and Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau are more cautious, hailing beyond the differences a “a political figure” who will have “marked his era”. Ultimately quite classic words for a man who never wanted to be.
Swiss
