French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen has died at the age of 96.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founding father of France’s modern political far-right, has built a half-century career on racism, anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi propaganda that vilifies immigrants and attempts to rewrite the horrors of World War II. has passed away. He was 96 years old.

His death has been confirmed On X Mr Le Pen is the current president of the party founded by Jordan Bardella. In a statement to the Agence-France Presse news agency, Mr Le Pen’s family said he died on Tuesday at a hospital in Garches, west of Paris.

In April 2024, as Mr Le Pen suffered his second heart attack in a year, a French court granted legal custody to his daughters, giving them the right to make decisions on his behalf.

An arm-waving reactionary who makes angry claims with the humility of a circus performer, Mr. Le Pen has run for the French presidency five times, making a runoff in 2002, facing waves of discontent and xenophobia and raising the specter of a new fascism. as he insulted Jews, Arabs, Muslims and other immigrants – anyone not “pure” French.

Mr Le Pen’s younger daughter, Marine Le Pen, succeeded him as leader of the National Front in 2011 and became famous for a wave of populist anger against the political mainstream. He lost three French presidential elections – in 2012, he finished third with 17.9 percent of the vote behind Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy; 33.9 percent in 2017 lost to centrist Emmanuel Macron; and was defeated again by Mr Macron in 2022 with 41.5 per cent.

But that year’s election also sent a record number of delegates to parliament from the so-called National Rally party – 89 in total – and witnessed the success of Ms Le Pen’s efforts to normalize it and soften its message in some respects.

By then it had become the leading opposition party, a party no longer seen as a threat to the republic, and in 2024 the National Rally supported Mr. Macron’s bill to limit immigrationShame on the French president.

A growing number of voters have embraced Ms Le Pen’s right-wing messages, which seek to exploit economic insecurity and resentment of immigrants among the middle classes, political analysts said.

Trying to tone down some of the toxic rhetoric of her father, whom she expelled from the party in 2015, Ms Le Pen has proposed joining civil unions for same-sex couples, accepting unconditional abortions and removing the death penalty from her platform. And he publicly rejected Mr Le Pen’s anti-Semitism.

Ms. Le Pen announced the party name changeFor the 2018 National Rally, though, it decided to keep its red, white and blue flame logo. The rebranding was a further effort to distance himself from the politics associated with his father, a long-time member of the European Parliament.Mr. Le Pen would have none of her daughter’s reforms. In 2016, she founded and became the president of the Committees of Joan of Arc, a new far-right political party that embodied her long-standing ideologies.

He insisted that “the races are unequal,” that anyone with AIDS was “some kind of leper,” and that “the Jews were conspiring to rule the world.” He called America an “angel nation,” dismissed Hitler’s gas chambers as a “detail” of history, and said the wartime Nazi occupation of France was “not particularly inhumane.”

In fact, 76,000 Jews in France were deported to death camps with the cooperation of the French Vichy government during the Nazi occupation of 1940-1944. Only 2,500 people survived. In 1944, a Nazi convoy entered the village of Oradour-sur-Glane and rounded up and murdered 642 residents in the worst atrocity of the war in France. As the war drew to a close, thousands more civilians were killed by the German Army.

Mr Le Pen’s comments repelled millions. He has been criticized by historians, condemned across the French political spectrum, including mainstream conservatives, and accused at least seven times of inciting racial hatred or distorting the historical record.

But with his daughter’s success, many analysts have recognized the impact of some of Mr Le Pen’s views, particularly on immigration. He has always had a strong following, especially in the south of the country. His popularity reflected not only the shock waves of his oratory but also the political shift to the right in France and elsewhere in Europe during periods of economic recession and rising inflation, crime and unemployment. Middle East.

Mr. Le Pen’s most notable success in the presidential race was in 2002 when he beat the Socialist candidate, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, in the primary and then finished second in the general election, defeating the incumbent. President Jacques Chirac. But he won about 18 percent of the votes.

His supporters were almost certainly anti-Semitic neo-fascists; many were simply blue-collar workers, shopkeepers, unemployed youth and others facing a bleak future in a nation frustrated and angry by tight job markets, underperforming schools, housing shortages and angry politicians.

Mr. Le Pen had been a street fighter in his youth, and as his hair turned frosty, he retained the rugged look of a brawler: chick shoulders and a jutting chin, narrow eyes behind tortoise-rimmed glasses, a delicate mouth. bad news and raised his fists to deliver it forcefully. But the voice had a range: piercing, seductive, whispering, reproachful.

He first appeared on the political stage in 1956, winning a seat in the National Assembly as a member of the anti-tax movement he led. Pierre Poujade. From 1972, when he formed an alliance of extremist groups and founded his own National Front party, until his retirement in 2011, he was the recognized leader of the far right in French politics, and his vocal and sometimes violent supporters were his main opposition. the main conservatives of the country.

His platform came from a central idea – that France needed to be purified because it had moved away from its Gallic and Roman Catholic roots in the natural order of what he called “family, country, learning and respect for the living world”. Thus, he opposed the European Union, all income taxes, immigration of “foreigners”, especially Arabs and Muslims, same-sex marriage, euthanasia and abortion.

Mr Le Pen defended law and order, calling for the reinstatement of the guillotine and 200,000 new prison cells, a strong national defence, traditional culture and the supremacy of the “common” people. He suggested isolating anyone with HIV and claimed that France’s news media was corrupt and that “elitist” politicians were “on the payroll of Jewish organizations.”

He insisted that he was not racist, fascist or anti-Semitic, although he shared the rhetoric of neo-Nazis, attracted followers from reactionary elements and spoke frequently and crudely about racial profiling. Some of his first colleagues in the National Front collaborated with the Nazis during the war.

In 1987, a French court charged Mr Le Pen with Holocaust denial after he said the Nazi gas chambers were a “detail” of history. He repeated this comment ten years later and was convicted by a German court. In 2003, 2005, 2008 and 2011, he was found guilty of inciting racial hatred against Muslims. In 2012, he was accused of condoning war crimes after saying in a 2005 newspaper interview that “the German occupation was not particularly inhumane.” His multiple convictions resulted in many heavy fines, but no jail time.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born on June 20, 1928 in La Trinite-sur-Mer, a seaside village in Brittany, to Jean Le Pen and Anne-Marie Herve. His father, a fisherman, died in 1942 when his boat was blown up by a mine. His mother was a local seamstress. The boy was raised Roman Catholic and attended a Jesuit school in Vannes and a high school in Lorient.

Mr. Le Pen studied law at the University of Paris, where he became active in right-wing politics, joined street fights against communist students and was arrested numerous times. He claimed to have lost his left eye in the election fight, but it was only injured; later he lost his sight due to illness.

As a Foreign Legion paratrooper in Indochina in 1954, Mr. Le Pen fought against the Communist-dominated Viet Minh. Later, as an intelligence officer in Algeria during the war of independence, he was accused of torturing members of the Algerian National Liberation Front. He was not prosecuted and denied the witnesses’ claims, but lost the lawsuits against the publications that cited them.

Mr Le Pen became one of the youngest members of the National Assembly in 1956, but lost his seat after the colony gained independence in 1962 after campaigning against France’s withdrawal from Algeria.

He married Pierrette Lalanne in 1960. In addition to Marine, they had two other daughters, Marie-Caroline and Yann, and divorced in 1987. In 1991, he married Jeanne-Marie Paschos. Details of his survivors were not immediately available.

His family’s Paris apartment was bombed in 1976, but no one was home, no one was seriously injured and the crime was never solved, although there was speculation that Mr Le Pen had been targeted by political enemies. His right-wing views provoked such strong opposition that more than a million people took part in street rallies against him. In 1977, after the death of his political supporter Hubert Lambert, he unexpectedly inherited $7 million and a castle near Paris. Mr Le Pen also had homes in Paris and his hometown of La Trinite-sur-Mer.

He ran for president in 1974, 1988, 1995, 2002 and 2007. Except for his surprising showing in 2002, when he won 16.9 percent of the vote, forcing a runoff and eventually raising the ballot total to 17.8 percent, the results were unremarkable.

But daughter Marine matched her best performance in her first attempt. He scorned criticism of Jews, but attacked Muslim immigrants for not adopting French values.

In 2018 memories, “Son of the nation,” the first of two promising volumes (from her birth to her founding of the National Front in 1972), in which Mr. Le Pen defended the Vichy government, which collaborated with the Nazis in World War II, and accused the war general and later. President Charles de Gaulle, to “help make France small”. It was the best-selling product in France.

Adam Nossiter contributed reporting.