Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the hard-right National Front party — now National Rally — has died at the age of 96, sources close to his daughter Marine Le Pen said on Tuesday, January 7.
Le Pen tapped into working-class concerns over immigration and globalisation, shaking up the French political establishment.
A pugnacious mix of populism, eloquence and charisma, Le Pen helped re-write the parameters of French politics in a career spanning 40 years that, in harnessing voter discontent over immigration and job security, in some ways heralded Donald Trump’s rise to the White House.
In one way or another, 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.
He stunned the world by making a 2002 presidential run-off, then losing in a landslide to Jacques Chirac as voters backed a mainstream conservative rather than bring the far right to power for the first time since the 1940s.
An unabashed nationalist, Le Pen was the scourge of the European Union which he saw as a supranational project usurping the powers of nation-states, tapping the kind of resentment that saw Britain vote to leave the European Union.
French National Rally heavyweight Marine Le Pen and her party leader Jordan Bardella have shot up the Top 50 list of France’s most favourite personalities for 2024. https://t.co/MPf1FQwrHs
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) January 6, 2025
