French far-right National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen dies aged 96

The founder and longtime leader of the French far-right National Front party, since rebranded as the National Rally (RN), Jean-Marie Le Pen, died on Tuesday, his family said.

He was 96.

In a statement on Tuesday, National Rally called Le Pen a “courageous and talented politician” who “was determined to serve his country without fail.”

Le Pen was a polarising political figure known for his extreme views on immigration, his trademark nationalism and his theatrical oratory skills.

He founded the National Front party in 1972. At first, the party garnered little attention and his own bid for presidency won less than 1% of the vote in 1974.

A decade later, a surge of support saw his party win 10% of the vote in the 1984 European elections, where Le Pen won an MEP seat which he would hold for more than 30 years.

Labelled by his critics as an extremist, Le Pen was convicted several times for his remarks, including denying the Holocaust and proposing to forcibly isolate people with AIDS.

In 1990, he was famously convicted for a remark he made on radio three years earlier in which he referred to Nazi gas chambers as a “detail in World War II history.” He doubled down on his comments in 2016, leading to another conviction.

Le Pen said of himself as being: “ni droite, ni gauche, français”, or “not right, not left, French”.

Tiffs and tumult

His party’s fortunes saw another turn in 2002, when he ran against Jacques Chirac in presidential elections — a race he was expected to not even reach.

Chirac won by a landslide, and Le Pen faced almost daily demonstrations against his party.

The moment, however, is seen as a turning point for the party, culminating in it becoming one of France’s leading political forces under the leadership of Le Pen’s daughter, Marine Le Pen, more than twenty years later.

Marine Le Pen replaced her father as party leader in 2015, consciously moving the party away from her father’s extreme policies to appeal to more mainstream voters.

She changed the party’s name to National Rally — a move her father described as “suicidal” and led to the pair falling out. In October 2021, he endorsed far-right politician Éric Zemmour over his daughter for the 2022 French presidential elections.

Recently, both father and daughter were accused of setting up a system for embezzling European Union money to hire staff in France through the party — an ongoing court case that Marine Le Pen is still grappling with and which has threatened to ban her from running for public office.

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In November last year Marine Le Pen defended her father after videos emerged of him singing along with a neo-Nazi band in his home, arguing that the band had taken advantage of her father’s fragility and advanced age.

On the rift between the pair, Le Pen said: “It is life. Life is not a smooth tranquil stream.”

His private life was tumultuous.

An explosion destroyed the family apartment building in 1976 but injured neither Le Pen nor his wife and three children.

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The French media relished recounting Le Pen’s divorce saga from wife Pierrette Lalanne. In a reflection of that bitter separation, she famously posed for Playboy in 1987, partly dressed in a risque maid’s costume.

The magazine quoted her as saying she was responding to her husband’s Playboy interview in which he said she could become a housekeeper if she needed money.

He married for a second time in 1991, to Jeanne-Marie Paschos, known as Jany.

Le Pen’s health had declined in recent months. In February, he was placed under legal guardianship at the request of his family due to his frail health.

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He is survived by his three daughters and his second wife, Jany, who he married in 1991.