French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen dies aged 96

Co-founder of the National Front led the party for decades and was known for fiery rhetoric against immigration.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the co-founder of France’s far-right National Front party, has died aged 96.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Marine Le Pen’s political party, National Rally (Rassemblement National) on Tuesday.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was known for fiery rhetoric against immigration that earned him both staunch supporters and widespread condemnation.

A polarising figure in French politics, Le Pen made statements – including Holocaust denial and a 1987 proposal to forcibly isolate people with AIDS – that led to multiple convictions and strained his political alliances.

Le Pen co-founded the National Front party in 1972 and contested the French presidency five times. He sent shock waves through France in 2002 when he made it to the second round of the presidential election, which was won by Jacques Chirac.

Commenting on Le Pen’s death, French President Emmanuel Macron said: “A historic figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for nearly 70 years, which is now a matter for history to judge.”

Le Pen’s daughter, Marine, renamed his National Front party and transformed it into one of France’s most powerful political forces. She also distanced the party from her father’s extremist image.

Despite Jean-Marie Le Pen’s eventual exclusion from his own party in 2015, his divisive legacy endures.

He was a wily political strategist and gifted orator, who used his charisma to captivate crowds with his anti-immigration message.

His death came has come at crucial time for his daughter. She now faces a potential prison term and a ban on running for political office if convicted in an embezzlement trial.

Several convictions

Le Pen, who lost an eye in a street fight in his youth, was a constant force in French political life, impossible for politicians to ignore.

He was convicted numerous times of anti-Semitism and routinely accused of xenophobia and racism. Le Pen countered that he was simply a patriot protecting the identity of “eternal France”.

In 1990, he was convicted 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 a Cabinet minister with the Nazi crematory ovens, and for a 1989 comment blaming the “Jewish international” for helping seed “this anti-national spirit”.

More recently, Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughters Marine and Yann were accused of using money destined for European Union parliamentary aides to pay their own staff, in violation of the 27-nation bloc’s regulations.

He was deemed medically unfit to testify in court.