Jean-Marie Le Pen

Portrait of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the mid-1990s (in a publicity image from the Front National party).

Jean-Marie Le Pen (born June 20, 1928) is a French politician. He is the president of the Front National party and perennial candidate for the presidential elections.

Le Pen is known for advocating controversial viewpoints and policies: including the reinstatement of the death penalty (despite being prohibited by European Union law), a revisionist approach to history, incentives to encourage women to stay at home and have children rather than work, strong restrictions on immigration to France from countries outside Europe, compulsory military service, strict censorship of the cinema and the arts as well as withdrawal or at least far greater independence from the European Union.

He has often made controversial remarks widely considered to be racist and antisemitic, such as that the killing of Jews in gas chambers was a mere detail of history. ([1])

He has run in several French presidential elections, qualifying for the second-round of the 2002 election, where he challenged current president Jacques Chirac. His victory in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections was considered not as public approval of his policies, but rather as a vote of no-confidence against the establishment.

Biography

Le Pen was born at La Trinité-sur-Mer, a small Breton harbour, as the son of a fisherman. Le Pen was orphaned as an adolescent; his father's boat was blown up by a mine. Nowadays he is a wealthy businessman, mostly because of a large inheritance received in 1977 from a political supporter.

Le Pen studied political science and law, and was at one time the president of an association of law students in Paris. His graduate studies thesis, presented in 1971 by Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jean-Loup Vincent, is entitled Le courant anarchiste en France depuis 1945 or "The anarchist movement in France since 1945".

From his first marriage (June 29, 1960 - 1985 or 1986) to Pierrette Lalanne, he has three daughters and nine granddaughters. The youngest of his daughters, Marine Le Pen, is a ranking officer of the Front National.

On May 31, 1991, Jean-Marie Le Pen married Jeanne-Marie Paschos ("Jany"). Born in 1933, JM Paschos was previously married to Belgian businessman Jean Garnier. Pascho's father was a Greek merchant, and her mother is partly of Dutch descent.

Political career

A decorated veteran of the French paratroops in Indochina (1953), Suez (1956), and Algeria (1957), Le Pen started his political career in Toulouse when he became the head of the students union. In 1953 he called Vincent Auriol, President of the Republic at the time, and by using his former status he got approval for a volunteer rescue project to carry out disaster relief after a flood in the Netherlands. Within two days there were forty volunteers from his university, a group that would go on to help victims of an earthquake in Italy. In Paris, 1956, he became the youngest member of the French National Assembly, with the party of Pierre Poujade.

In 1957, he became the General Secretary of the National Front of Combatants (FNC) as well as the first French politician to present a candidate of Muslim confession, Ahmed Djebbour, and to achieve his election. The next year, he was re-elected as deputy to the National Assembly and adhered to the parliamentary party National Centre of Independents and Peasants (CNIP), led by Antoine Pinay. In 1958 Le Pen lost his left eye during an election campain where he was savagely beaten. He now wears a glass eye in it's stead. During this period, Le Pen also actively followed issues of the war and defense budget. In 1965 Le Pen became the director of the presidential campaign of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour.

In 1972, he founded the Front National party. The electoral results of the Front National have been on the rise since the municipal elections of 1983.

In 1984 and 1999 Le Pen won a seat in the European Parliament. He was deprived of his seat by the European Court of Justice on April 10, 2003 for physically assaulting another candidate. In 1992 and 1998 he was elected to the regional council of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. His political career has been most successful in the south of France.

Le Pen ran in the French presidential elections in 1974, 1988, 1995 and 2002. In the presidential elections of 2002, Le Pen obtained 16.86% of the votes in the first round of voting. This was enough to qualify him for the second round, as a result of the poor showing by the Socialist candidate and incumbent prime-minister Lionel Jospin and the scattering of votes among fifteen other candidates. This was a major political event, both nationally and internationally, as it was the first time someone with such extremist views had qualified for the second round of the French presidential elections. There was a widespread stirring of national public opinion, and more than one million people in France took part in street rallies, slogans such as "vote for the crook, not the fascist" were heard in an expression of fierce opposition to Le Pen's ideas.

Le Pen was then soundly defeated in the second round when incumbent president Jacques Chirac obtained 82% of the votes.

In the 2004 regional elections, Jean-Marie Le Pen intended to run for office in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur région but was prevented from doing so because he did not meet the conditions for being a voter in that region: he neither lived there, nor was registered as a taxpayer there. Le Pen complained of a government plot to prevent him from running. Some argue that this event was merely a scheme of Le Pen's to avoid defeat in the election.

In recent years, Le Pen has tried to soften his image, with mixed success. He has manoeuvered his daughter Marine into a prominent position, a move that angered many inside the National Front, concerned with the grip of the Le Pen family on the party.

Criticism

See also National Front for a summary of Le Pen's political proposals.

Le Pen consistently receives about 15%-18% of the vote but he remains a very controversial figure in France. Opinions regarding Le Pen tend to be quite strong; a 2002 IPSOS poll showed that while 22% of the electorate have a good or very good opinion of Mr Le Pen, and 13% a favorable opinion, 61% have a very unfavorable opinion [2]. Indeed Le Pen and former National Front leader Bruno Mégret top the unfavorable ratings, with 74% and 75% respectively.

Le Pen and the National Front are described by much of the media and virtually all commentators except those from the Front to be far right. Perhaps unsurprisingly Le Pen himself disagrees with this label. Earlier on in his political career Le Pen described his position as "Neither left nor right, but French" (Ni droite, ni gauche, français). He later described his position as right-wing and opposed to the "socialo-communists" and other right-wing parties, which he deems are not real right-wing parties. At other times, for example during the 2002 election campaign, he declared himself "economically right-wing, socially left-wing, and nationally French". He further contends that most of the French political and media class are corrupt and out of touch with the real needs of the common people, and conspire to exclude Le Pen and his party from mainstream politics. Le Pen criticizes the other political parties as the "establishment" and lumped all major parties (PC, PS, UDF, RPR) into the "Gang of Four" (la bande des quatre — an allusion to the Gang of Four during China's Cultural Revolution).

Allegations of anti-semitism and xenophobia

Le Pen has been criticized both at home and abroad for his xenophobia and perceived anti-Semitism. These criticisms are considered to be unfounded by his supporters but are in fact based on a string of remarks that Le Pen has made over the years:-

• Le Pen has made remarks which are widely considered to be anti-Semitic; for example, on 13 September 1987 he referred to the Nazi gas chambers as "a point of detail of the Second World War."
• Le Pen once made the infamous pun "Durafour-crématoire" ("crematory oven") about then minister Michel Durafour, a Jew; the corpses of the victims of the Nazi gas chambers were incinerated in such ovens.
• In February 1997, Le Pen accused President Chirac of being "in the pay of Jewish organizations, and particularly of the notorious B'nai B'rith".
• In May 1987 he advocated isolating those infected with AIDS (whom he calls "sidaïques¹") from society by placing them in a special "sidatorium".
• On June 21, 1995, he attacked singer Patrick Bruel on his policy of no longer singing in the city of Toulon because the city had just elected a mayor from the National Front. Le Pen said "the city of Toulon will then have to get along without the vocalisations of singer Benguigui". Benguigui, a Jewish name, was Patrick Bruel's real name.
• In 2005, he claimed that the occupation of France by Nazi Germany "was not particularly inhumane".[3]. In fact the Nazis deported large sections of the French Jewish population to extermination camps, retaliated against Resistance actions by murdering civilians, tortured people suspected of being in the Resistance, and took many other civilians into forced labor.

Prosecution, allegations of torture and association with militarists

In April 2000 Le Pen was suspended from the European Parliament following prosecution for the physical assault of Socialist candidate Annette Peulvast-Bergeal during the 1997 general election. This ultimately led to him losing his seat in the European parliament in 2003.

It is also allegeded that Le Pen practiced torture in Algeria. Although war crimes committed during the Algerian War of Independence are amnestied in France, this was publicised by the newspapers Le Canard Enchainé and Libération and by Michel Rocard (ex-Prime Minister) on TV (TF1 1993). Le Pen sued the papers and Michel Rocard. This affair ended in 2000 when the "Cour de cassation" (French supreme jurisdiction) concluded that it was legitimate to publish these assertions. However, because of the amnesty and prescription, there can be no further criminal proceedings against Le Pen for the crimes he is alleged to have committed in Algeria.

Elsewhere Jean-Marie Le Pen has been criticized for his connections to figures associated with the right-wing and militarist Organisation Armée Secrète [4], including:

• Roger Holeindre, member of the political bureau of the Front National; was a member of the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS)
• Louis de Condé, leader of the National Front in Auvergne and candidate to the 2004 regional elections had been sentenced in 1963 to life imprisonment for the attempted murder of president Charles de Gaulle as part of the OAS campaign of terror attacks.

Critics on the Right

Although Le Pen supporters applaud his nationalistic pride and economic stance, Bruce Crumley in Time International magazine, (6/5/02) writes: "Denunciations of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his xenophobic National Front (FN) as racist, anti-Semitic and hostile to minorities and foreigners aren't exactly new. More novel, however, are such condemnations coming from far-right movements like the Austrian Freedom Party (FPO), which itself won international opprobrium in 1999 after entering government on a populist platform similar to Le Pen's."

Le Pen's recurrent verbal excesses have led some in his own party to distance themselves from him. Bruno Mégret left the National Front to found his own party, claiming that Le Pen kept the Front away from the possibility of gaining power. Mégret wanted to emulate Gianfranco Fini's success in Italy by making it possible for right-wing parties to ally themselves with the Front, but claimed that Le Pen's attitude and outrageous speech prevented this. Le Pen's daughter Marine leads an internal movement of the Front that wants to "normalize" the National Front, "de-enclave" it, have a "culture of government" etc.; however, she is now out of favor with Le Pen. (Le Canard Enchaîné, March 9, 2005).

Notes

¹ "SIDA" = Syndrome D'Immunodéficience Acquise, the French name for AIDS. "Sidaïque" is a word coined by Le Pen, meaning "person infected with AIDS" (the correct word in French is "sidéen" for a man and "sidéenne" for a woman). Sidaïque takes on a pejorative connotation.

See also

• Politics of France

External links

• Jean-Marie Le Pen's personal website
• Front National homepage
• About anti-Semitic remarks
• Template:Fr icon About torture in Algeria
• FYI France, "The Front National" (extensive bibliography, works in English & French & other)
• Template:Fr icon Jean-Marie Le Pen, biography and the French election in 2002 in French
• Jean Marie Le Pen - Blog
• [5] 2002 interview with Le Pen.