Jean-Marie Le Pen died on Tuesday at the age of 96 and his funeral will take place on Saturday in Brittany.
Then, the question of a tribute from the National Rally to the co-founder of the National Front, its ancestor, will arise.
“It’s a challenge that won’t be easy to manage, but I don’t see how the party could avoid it,” Valérie Igounet, a historian specializing in the far right, told TF1info.
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Jean-Marie Le Pen, figure of the French far right, is dead
Jean-Marie Le Pen, co-founder of the National Front, died on Tuesday January 7 at the age of 96. After his death, the National Rally and its members unanimously praised and praised the qualities of the former deputy, without distancing themselves from his “excesses” and numerous convictions, for anti-Semitism, racism or homophobia and while he had been dismissed of the party by his daughter Marine Le Pen for these reasons in 2015.
Will his death change the party’s ambivalence with his illustrious figure? How can we pay tribute to the man who brought the extreme right and its ideas to the forefront of the French political scene? Interview with Valérie Igounet, historian, deputy director of Conspiracy Watch and author of “Black pencil: Samuel Paty, story of a teacher”.
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After the death of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Rally will have to ask itself the question of the tribute to pay him. How to manage this event?
-Valérie Igounet: It’s a challenge that won’t be easy, but I don’t see how the party could avoid it. The RN will find itself in the same situation as in 2022, for the 50th anniversary of the National Front. It was about paying tribute to the founders of the far-right party, including Jean-Marie Le Pen, but the RN had decided not to invite him to the festivities. We’ll have to find the right words. It is perilous to pay tribute to a man who was ousted for his comments, his anti-Semitism, and difficult to ignore why the man was ousted from the bet. A tribute can also be seen as the recognition of a connection with a man and certain of his ideas that we try to erase, to distance. But if the National Rally is not the National Front, the RN would be nothing without the FN, and the same “dynasty” is at its head.
How do you read the reactions of the National Rally and its members to the death of Jean-Marie Le Pen, rather laudatory, in any case ignoring certain episodes of his life, in particular his numerous convictions?
Among the members of the National Rally, there is admiration for the character, who managed to set up a leading political party in a few decades, and who in a certain way allowed them to be where they are today. ‘today. On
Does this also mean that the ideas of Jean-Marie Le Pen still live within the RN?
It is certain that the party still has “pure” Lepénistes within it. If today members of the RN deny being a continuation of the National Front, this is questionable. And if Marine Le Pen denies being a member of an extreme right party, it is certain that all the markers she puts forward, particularly on immigration, are those of the extreme right. Certainly, they pay more attention to the “bad apples” who could still be there, we saw in the last elections that they were expelled quickly and with a bang; and Marine Le Pen aspires to rid the party of its anti-Semitism. However, obviously there is a heritage, a political and ideological connection between the two parties.
