Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the French far-right National Front party, has died aged 96.
Le Pen shook the French political establishment when he unexpectedly reached the presidential election run-off vote against Jacques Chirac in 2002.
Despite losing in a landslide, he rewrote the parameters of French politics in a career spanning multiple decades, harnessing voter discontent over immigration and job security – heralding president-elect Donald Trump’s own rise.
Throughout his career he faced accusations of racism, and his controversial statements included Holocaust denial.
After leading the then-National Front from 1972 to 2011, he was succeeded as party chief by his daughter, Marine Le Pen.
She has since run for the presidency three times and turned the party, now called the National Rally, into one of the country’s main political forces.
Jordan Bardella, current president of the National Rally, confirmed Le Pen’s death on social media.
He said: “Today I am thinking with sadness of his family, his loved ones, and of course of Marine whose mourning must be respected.”
In a statement, the National Rally paid tribute to Le Pen.
It highlighted his early years spent fighting in some of France’s colonial wars, including in Algeria, and said he was a politician who was “certainly unruly and sometimes turbulent”.
It went on to say he brought forward the issues which define modern political debate in France.
“For the National Rally, he will remain the one who, in the storms, held in his hands the small flickering flame of the French Nation,” it added.
President Emmanuel Macron also expressed his condolences in a statement, saying: “A historic figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for nearly seventy years, which is now a matter for history to judge.”
Jean-Marie Le Pen and Marine Le Pen in 2012.
Pic: Reuters
A controversial career
Born in 1928, the son of a Breton fisherman, he was an intensely polarising figure known for his fiery rhetoric against immigration and multiculturalism that earned him both staunch supporters and widespread condemnation.
He made Islam, and Muslim immigrants, his primary targets, blaming them for the economic and social woes of France.
His controversial statements, including Holocaust denial and his 1987 proposal to forcibly isolate people with AIDS in special facilities, led to multiple convictions and strained his political alliances, including with his own daughter.
Accusations of racism followed him, and he was tried, convicted and fined for contesting war crimes after declaring that Nazi gas chambers were “merely a detail” of World War Two history.
“I stand by this because I believe it is the truth,” he said in 2015 when asked if he regretted the comment.
He had 11 prior convictions, including for violence against a public official and antisemitic hate speech.
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His death comes as his daughter faces a potential prison term, and ban on running for political office, if convicted in an embezzling trial currently underway.
She was thousands of miles away in the French territory of Mayotte, inspecting the aftermath of Cyclone Chido at the time of her father’s death.
Le Pen himself was exempted from prosecution over health grounds in the high-profile trial.
