PARIS: Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right National Front party who tapped into working class concerns over immigration and globalisation and built a career on provocative rhetoric that many saw as racist and xenophobic, has died aged 96.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Marine Le Pen’s political party, National Rally (Rassemblement National). Jean-Marie Le Pen spent his life fighting, whether as a soldier in France’s colonial wars, as a founder of the far-right National Front party, for which he contested five presidential elections, or in feuds

with his daughters and ex-wife, often conducted publicly and furiously. Controversy was Le Pen’s constant companion: accusations of racism and antisemitism dogged the National Front from when he co-founded the party in 1972.

He was tried, convicted and fined in 1996 for contesting war crimes after declaring that the Nazi gas chambers were “merely a detail” of World War Two history and that the Nazi occupation of France was “not especially inhumane”.

Those comments provoked outrage in France, where police had rounded up thousands of Jews who were deported to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.

“I stand by this because I believe it is the truth,” he said in 2015 when asked if he regretted the gas chamber comment. Commenting on Le Pen’s death, President Emmanuel Macron said: “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.” A populist and fiery orator, Le Pen helped rewrite the parameters of French politics in a career spanning 40 years that, riding waves of voter discontent and harnessing discontent over immigration and job security, in some ways heralded Donald Trump’s rise to the White House.

He reached a presidential election run-off in 2002 but lost by a landslide to Jacques Chi as voters backed a mainstream conservative rather than bring the far right to power for the first time since Nazi collaborators ruled in the 1940s.

Published in Dawn, January 8th, 2025