In a tour of the history of the European extreme right, the name of Jean Marie Le Penwho died this Tuesday at the age of 96, already retired from public life and after more than half a century being a key figure in understanding politics in France. He did not reach the ceiling, but he did reach the bottom, ousted by those who had him as a reference at some point. Le Pen father – political and biological – had as an apprentice a Marine Le Pen who now aspires to the top also from the radical right, but for many being less extreme than her father.
And Jean Marie Le Pen played to the limit: an old-school radical who went down the drain to be president of Francebut the citizens, in general, turned their backs on him. In 1972 he founded the National Front, a pioneer party of the radical right not only in France, but also in Europe, and led it until 2011. Between those years, he was a candidate for the presidential elections in 1974, 1988, 1995, 2002. and 2007, just before stepping aside after a cyclical career.
Le Pen’s expression, serious and sour, has gone hand in hand with her expressions and ideological positions. In 1987, he declared that the gas chambers were “a detail of the history” of World War II.which generated strong indignation in France and around the world. This phrase earned him multiple judicial convictions for inciting racial hatred and Holocaust denial, with a profile that would not have much place even in the current radical right.
Le Pen, in general, was known for his xenophobic and racist positions. Furthermore, he even said that the Nazi presence in France “was not that serious” and in the mid-nineties he stated that France’s “demographic problem” could be solved if “a million white French people had three children each”, which was interpreted as a racist appeal against the immigrant population. Against migrants It was ugly that they could “come to rule in France” in a few decades “because there will be 25 million immigrants.”
Despite all this, Jean Marie Le Pen reached her political peak in the elections 2002 presidential elections. Nobody counted on it, but it reached the second round especially after the poor results of the socialist Jospin; It was the first time that the far-right reached so high in France, but it stayed on the case: In the face to face meeting with Jaques Chirac, Le Pen was left with a mere 16% of the votessince the conservative benefited from a cordon sanitaire that, somewhat weaker, still holds (but it is not known for how long).
That failure – although it was not so much for his political space because it became a first stone – ended up taking him to Brussels: Le Pen was an MEP between 2004 and 2019the year in which he definitively retired from political life; Before, in 2015, he was expelled from his own party – of which he had been honorary president since 2011 – in a decision in which, at least externally, his daughter and replacement Marine Le Pen did not participate, who also refounded the party by passing to call it National Regrouping.
Jean Marie Le Pen learned to walk in the waters of the extreme right, stale and groundbreaking, so that, for example Marine Le Pen, but also Jordan Bardella or Eric Zemmour can runespecially the first, who now aspires to what his father did not achieve. In 2027 it will be 10 years since the last elections to which the ‘father’ of the French extreme right presented himselfand it will be his daughter who can reach Elysium.
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