Marine Le Pen paid tribute to her father, who died this Tuesday at the age of 96. After years of tension, marked by the exclusion of Jean-Marie Le Pen from the FN, their relations had warmed up in recent years.
“Many people who love him are mourning him down here.” Marine Le Pen spoke this Wednesday, January 8 on X for the first time since the death of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, at the age of 96, on Tuesday.
“A venerable age had taken the warrior but had given us back our father. Death came to take him back from us,” she wrote. Before wishing “good winds” and especially “good seas” to his “dad”, born in La Trinité-sur-Mer in Morbihan to a fisherman father.
Excluded from the FN by his daughter
Relations between Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen had deteriorated significantly over the years, until the breakup, after the daughter’s accession in 2011 to the head of the National Front (FN), a party co-founded and led 39 years by the father.
Jean-Marie Le Pen was excluded from the National Front (which became the National Rally in 2018) in 2015 after claiming to have never considered Marshal Pétain as a “traitor” and “maintained” as the gas chambers during the Second War worldwide were a “detail of history”. He founded the FN in 1972 alongside a former Waffen-SS, Pierre Bousquet, and gradually withdrew from political life from 2011. Convicted several times for contesting crimes against humanity and provocation of racial hatred in particular, this figure of the French extreme right had become cumbersome for a party that Marine Le Pen wanted to demonize.
Jean-Marie Le Pen had contested his exclusion from the party, desired by his daughter. He denounced “a felony” and demanded that Marine Le Pen “give him back (his) name”. Before the 2017 presidential election, the father, who helped finance his daughter’s campaign, said he would vote for “Marine” in the first round of the presidential election. But then declared that she had “perhaps (…) lacked height” during her debate with Emmanuel Macron.
Their relationship had warmed up a bit in recent years. In January 2021, Jean-Marie Le Pen once again said he hoped for his daughter’s victory in the 2022 presidential election. Marine Le Pen, for her part, has spoken very rarely about her father. In January 2022, she still indicated that in the event of victory in the presidential election, her first phone call would be to him. More recently, in November 2024, the far-right leader expressed her “concerns” about her father’s state of health.
