Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right French politician who founded the National Front party, has died at the age of 96.
Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally as the party is now known, confirmed Mr Le Pen’s death in a post on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday.
A polarising figure in French politics, Mr Le Pen’s controversial statements, including Holocaust denial, led to multiple convictions and strained his political alliances.
Yet, despite those convictions and his eventual political estrangement, the nativist ideas that propelled his decades of popularity — encapsulated in slogans such as “French People First” — remain ascendant in today’s France, across Europe and beyond.
Mr Le Pen, who once reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election, was eventually estranged from his daughter, Marine Le Pen.
Ms Le Pen renamed his National Front party, kicked him out and transformed it into one of France’s most powerful political forces while distancing herself from her father’s extremist image.
Despite his exclusion from the party in 2015, Mr Le Pen’s divisive legacy endures, marking decades of French political history and shaping the trajectory of the far-right.
His death came at a crucial time for his daughter.
She now faces a potential prison term and a ban on running for political office if convicted in an embezzling trial currently under way.
A fixture for decades in French politics, the fiery Jean-Marie Le Pen was a wily political strategist and gifted orator who used his charisma to captivate crowds with his anti-immigration message.
The portly, silver-haired son of a Breton fisherman viewed himself as a man with a mission — to keep France French under the banner of the National Front.
Picking Joan of Arc as the party’s patron saint, Mr Le Pen made Islam, and Muslim immigrants, his primary target, blaming them for the economic and social woes of France.
A former paratrooper and Foreign Legionnaire who fought in Indochina and Algeria, he led sympathisers into political and ideological battles with a panache that became a signature of his career.
“If I advance, follow me; if I die, avenge me; if I shirk, kill me,” Mr Le Pen said at a 1990 party congress, reflecting the theatrical style that for decades fed the fervour of followers.
His statements — including Holocaust denial, racist denunciations of Muslims and immigrants, and his 1987 proposal to forcibly isolate people with Aids in special facilities — shocked his critics and strained his political alliances.
Mr Le Pen routinely countered that he was simply a patriot protecting the identity of “eternal France”.
In a 2003 speech, he said he wanted the notion of “national preference” written into the French Constitution to limit employment, housing opportunities and other social assistance to French citizens. Immigration is “the greatest danger we’re facing”, he said.
“Me? Racist? It’s a gag, a gag,” Mr Le Pen once told The Associated Press.
“But I’m not for the melting pot. I’m for the defence of one’s culture. I’d despair if I found the culture of Brooklyn in France.”
Mr Le Pen had recently been exempted from prosecution on health grounds from a high-profile trial over his party’s suspected embezzlement of European Parliament funds that opened in September.
He had 11 prior convictions, including for violence against a public official and antisemitic hate speech.
French judicial authorities placed Mr Le Pen under legal guardianship in February at the request of his family as his health declined, French media reported.
He had been in frail health for some time.
Mr Le Pen was notably convicted in 1990 for a radio remark made three years earlier in which he referred to the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail in World War II history”.
In 2015, he repeated the remark, saying he “did not at all” regret it, triggering the ire of his daughter — by then the party leader — and a new conviction in 2016.
He also was convicted for a 1988 remark linking in a play on words a Cabinet minister with the Nazi crematory ovens, and for a 1989 comment blaming the “Jewish international” for helping seed “this anti-national spirit”.
In another setback, Mr Le Pen lost his European Parliament seat in 2002 for a year for assaulting a Socialist politician during a 1997 election campaign.
More recently, Mr Le Pen and 26 National Front officials, including his daughters Marine and Yann Le Pen, have been accused of using money destined for EU parliamentary aides to pay staff who instead did political work for the party between 2004 and 2016, in violation of the 27-nation bloc’s regulations.
Mr Le Pen was deemed unfit to give evidence.
French President Emmanuel Macron, a centrist, expressed “his condolences to (Mr Le Pen’s) family and friends”, in an uncharacteristically short statement issued by the presidential palace.
“A historic figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for almost 70 years, which is now a matter for history to judge,” the statement read.
Marine Le Pen, thousands of miles away in the French territory of Mayotte, was inspecting the aftermath of destructive Cyclone Chido at the time of her father’s death.
Mr Le Pen is survived by his wife and three daughters, Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine.
