World
Who was Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Holocaust denier who reshaped the French far-right?
One of Europe’s most influential populists, Le Pen’s message of hate looks set to outlive him
January 8, 2025 17:29
One of Europe’s most influential populists, Le Pen’s message of hate looks set to outlive him
January 8, 2025 17:29The rise of the populist far-right across Europe has been one of the most concerning trends of the century.
From organisations like the BNP and EDL in the UK to the QAnon movement across the Atlantic, there has been a noticeable increase in the influence extreme groups have on the national political conversation in the West.
What is less often recognised, though, is that this revolution of the right can arguably be traced back to the 1980s in France.
In 1972 Jean-Marie Le Pen established what is now the National Rally Party (then known as the National Front) out of the neo-fascist New Order movement, a party his daughter Marine, has been involved with for decades.
The new party experienced rapid growth, jumping from a 0.2 per cent vote share in 1981’s National Assembly elections to 9.6 per cent in 1986.
This was in no small part down to Le Pen’s use of a playbook now widespread among radical populists.
His relentless focus on the issue of immigration and his success in linking it to the issue of law and order and economic stagnation in the minds of voters is the ideological basis of the modern populist right.
But this came alongside allegations of racism, xenophobia and, particularly, antisemitism.
On several occasions, Le pen’s remarks were legally ruled to be Holocaust denial, including when he referred to the gas chambers as a “detail” of history.
The comments earned him a £152,000 fine under France’s Gayssot Act, which criminalises Holocaust denial.
Similar remarks in 1996 saw Le Pen, then a member of the European Parliament, stripped of his legal immunity and fined by a German court for “minimizing the Holocaust”.
He was eventually replaced as party leader by his daughter Marine after calling then-opponent Nicolas Sarkozy “foreign” due to his Greek, Hungarian and Jewish ancestry in 2011.
Just four years later, he would be expelled from the party entirely after doubling down on his “detail” comment in an interview.
Years on the political sidelines would follow at the helm of a new party, the Blue, White and Red Rally, which never rose to the electoral heights of the now-renamed National Rally.
Le Pen passed away earlier this week, on January , as a result of complications following a heart attack he suffered last year.
But his radical method seems set to succeed him, with NR poised to make gains in the National Assembly amidst the chaotic collapse of the Barnier minority government.
New leader Jordan Bardella led the party to its highest ever vote share (33.2 per cent) last year and is tipped for a serious run at the presidency when Emmanuel Macron steps down in 2027.
And with his daughter Marine Le Pen, who has herself previously absolved the French state for the deportation of Paris’ Jews to Auschwitz, still front and centre as the party’s parliamentary leader and a manifesto avowedly opposed to most forms of immigration, it doesn’t appear that her father’s controversial platform is set to die with him.