Jean-Marie Le Pen

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Jean-Marie Le Pen (2007)

Jean-Marie Le Pen [ lə̹ˈpɛn ] (born June 20, 1928 in Trinité-sur-Mer , Morbihan Department , Brittany as Jean Marie Louis Le Pen ) is a French right-wing extremist politician and Holocaust denier . His political style is considered right-wing populist . From 1972 to 2011 he was chairman of the right-wing extremist Front National party and stood in five presidential elections . In August 2015 he was expelled from the party for "serious misconduct".

Le Pen was a member of the European Parliament from 1984 to 2003 and from 2004 to 2019 . He was chairman of the Group of the European Right (1984–1989) and the Technical Group of the European Right (1989–1994). From 1999 to 2001 he was a member of the Technical Group of Independent MEPs and from January to November 2007 of the Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty Group ; the rest of the time he was non-attached .

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Childhood and youth

Le Pen is the son of a fisherman and a seamstress. The family comes from Brittany , where Le Pen also grew up. In 1942 he lost his father when his boat hit a mine. After his school career at a Jesuit school in Vannes and on Lycées in Lorient and Saint-Germain-en-Laye , he studied law and political science in Paris from 1947 . During his student days he was from 1949 to 1951 chairman of the student union of the law faculty, which he aligned anti-communist. At that time he was close to the monarchist-nationalist Action française . As chairman of the student union, Le Pen was ousted after threatening a priest who refused to give him communion because of "blatant drunkenness".

At the Foreign Legion

In 1953, Le Pen joined the Foreign Legion . He came to Indochina as an officer in 1954 after the end of the fighting . He served in Egypt in 1956 after the Suez Crisis and was deployed in the 1956/1957 fight against the FLN in the Algerian War. In 2000, several French newspapers accused him of torturing alleged or real members of the FLN while in Algeria . Le Pen had explained and justified this in a speech in parliament in 1957 and in an interview with Combat magazine in 1962 . The French Court of Cassation rejected a libel action brought against the newspaper Le Monde .

Political career

In 1956, Le Pen was elected as the youngest member of the populist Union de défense des commerçants et artisans (UDCA) by Pierre Poujade in the Assemblée nationale , where he represented the 1st constituency of Paris. At that time he headed the Union de défense de la jeunesse française , youth organization of the Poujadist UDCA. From October 1956 to January 1957 he interrupted his parliamentary activities to fight in the Algerian war. In view of the Suez crisis and the strengthening of the FLN in Algeria, he fell out with Pierre Poujade, since Le Pen wanted to lead the movement in a more radical nationalist and militant direction than Poujade. In May 1957, Le Pen was expelled from the UDCA. Together with Jean-Maurice Demarquet , he then founded the Front national des combattants (FNC). After the founding of the 5th Republic, Le Pen was re-elected as a member of the 3rd constituency of Paris. He joined the Indépendants et paysans d'action sociale (IPAS) group, which was affiliated with the Center national des indépendants et paysans (CNIP). The FNC remained an independent party until 1961.

After missing the re-entry into parliament in 1962, he founded the company Serp ( Société d'étude et de relations publiques ), which published historical speeches and songs. For the 1965 presidential election, he led the election campaign for the extreme right candidate, Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour , who came fourth with 5.2% of the vote. In early 1966 there was a break with Tixier-Vignancour, who accused Le Pen of having damaged his movement through tactical errors in the local elections and through the publication of Nazi songs at Serp.

He founded the right-wing extremist Front National (FN) party in 1972 and became its chairman. He led the highly personal party without interruption until early 2011.

On November 2, 1976, a bomb attack was carried out on his apartment building in the 15th arrondissement . Nobody was injured, but the twenty kilograms of explosives tore a crater in the stairwell. The perpetrator or perpetrators could never be identified.

In the European elections in June 1984 , Le Pen was elected to the European Parliament for the first time . In the following elections to the European Parliament in 1989 , 1994 , 1999 , 2004 , 2009 and 2014 , he succeeded in re-entering. From 1984 to 1989 he was Chairman of the Group of the European Right , which u. a. Members of the FN and the Italian neo-fascist MSI were members. From 1989 to 1994 Le Pen chaired the Technical Group of the European Right (DR), which consisted mainly of European parliamentarians from the FN and the German Republicans . In the following legislative periods he was mostly non-attached. By a decree of the Prime Minister, Le Pen was suspended by the European Parliament in 2000 and lost his seat in 2003.

In the French parliamentary elections in 1986 , which were held exceptionally according to proportional representation , Le Pen also moved again into the Assemblée nationale , of which he was a member until 1988. He was chairman of the Front national - Rassemblement national parliamentary group , which consisted of 35 MPs from the FN and the CNIP . Then they went back to the majority election, in which the Front National had little chance.

His greatest success so far was his entry into the runoff elections for the French presidential election against Jacques Chirac in 2002 (see below).

Le Pen with his daughter Marine (left) and his deputy Bruno Gollnisch (right), 2010

In the 2004 regional elections, the responsible prefect of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region prohibited Le Pen from standing in the constituency of Nice for formal reasons. Attempts by the Front National to portray this process as a conspiracy against Le Pen and thus to gain favor with the electorate failed. The election brought the FN only a slight increase in votes; nationwide, it achieved around 12.6% of the votes.

On January 16, 2011, his daughter Marine Le Pen succeeded him as chairman of the National Front, having prevailed the day before against the party vice-president Bruno Gollnisch with a two-thirds majority. She tried to "de-demonize" the party and distanced herself from the open racism and anti-Semitism of her father.

In May 2015, the FN suspended Le Pen's party membership after repeated anti-Semitic statements. On August 20, 2015, Le Pen was expelled from the FN for “serious misconduct”.

Political mandates

Presidential election

Le Pen in the 2007 presidential election campaign

For the first time Le Pen stood in the presidential election in 1974 and achieved 0.73% of the vote. In 1981 he failed to get the required 500 support signatures from elected representatives and was consequently not accepted as a candidate.

In the first round of the April 24, 1988 elections, he achieved 14.4% of the vote with a turnout of 81.38%. He was only around two percentage points behind the former Prime Minister Raymond Barre . In 1995 Le Pen again achieved a relatively high result of 15.3%.

Paris: Demonstration against Le Pen

After Le Pen had again had difficulties in 2002 to get 500 supportive votes from politicians for admission to the election, he surprisingly prevailed in the first ballot with 16.86% of the vote against the candidate of the socialists , Lionel Jospin , and reached the second Ballot. After nationwide protests, however, he could not prevail with 17.79% against 82.21% for the incumbent Jacques Chirac .

In the 2007 presidential election , Le Pen ran again for the FN. He moved away from the idea of ​​an absolute immigration freeze in this election campaign, claiming that the majority of the undecided would vote for him - they just didn't dare tell the pollsters. He would immediately abolish the euro , which in his opinion was the cause of a 40% increase in the cost of living, in favor of the franc. He also claimed that he would take every opportunity to prevent Turkey from joining the European Union . It would be a task for Europe to fully integrate the Slavic Orthodox European peoples into the EU. His vision is an EU with a northern arc from Brest to Vladivostok . He advocated a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity; French companies should be protected from being taken over by foreign companies and the population should be saved from globalization. With 10.44% of the votes cast in the first ballot in 2007, Le Pen came fourth behind Nicolas Sarkozy , Ségolène Royal and François Bayrou and thus did not reach the second round of the ballot.

Presidential election results at a glance

Election year 1 round 2nd round
  be right proportion of be right proportion of
1974 190.921 0.7% - -
1981 - - - -
1988 4,376,742 14.5% - -
1995 4,571,138 15.0% - -
2002 4,805,307 16.9% 5,525,906 17.8%
2007 3,834,530 10.4% - -

Le Pen and the judiciary

During his political career, Le Pen made headlines again and again through racist , anti-Semitic and , most recently, homophobic statements as well as insults and other violations of the law. By April 2007, he had been convicted of 25 final convictions, including the following offenses:

  • On December 18, 1968, Le Pen was fined 10,000 for a statement on a record cover of his company Serp ( Société d'études et de relations publiques ) for glorifying war crimes and complicity ("apologie de crimes de guerre et complicité") Francs (around 1500 euros) condemned: “The seizure of power by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party was marked by a powerful mass movement, all in all popular and democratic because it won through regular elections; a fact that is generally forgotten ... "
  • Since 1987, Le Pen has repeatedly caused a stir with statements about the gas chambers of National Socialism, for the first time in an interview with the RTL radio station : “I ask myself a few questions. I'm not saying the gas chambers never existed. I have not been able to see any myself, and I have not investigated this question in detail. But I believe that it is a detail of the history of the Second World War . ”Le Pen was then ordered on March 18, 1991 by a French court in Versailles to pay 1.2 million francs (about 183,000 euros) to the plaintiff anti -Discrimination organizations condemned. In 1997 he renewed the statement he had made ("In a 1000-page book about the Second World War, the concentration camps take up two pages and the gas chambers ten to 15 pages, I'll call that a detail") and was again sentenced to a fine . He repeated his statement in 2015; On April 6, 2016, a court ( tribunal correctionnel de Paris ) sentenced him to a fine of 30,000 euros. As a result, he was expelled from his party.
  • In 1993 and 1997 Le Pen was fined 5000 and 10,000 francs respectively for insulting the chairman of an anti-racism organization and the minister Michel Durafour .
  • Because of violence against a public official in the exercise of her official duties ("violences sur personne dépositaire de l'autorité publique dans l'exercice de ses fonctions") - a blockade against his socialist rival candidate and mayor of Mantes-la-Ville Annette Peulvast-Bergeal led to the Melee and kicks of unknown origin against the socialist - Le Pen was sentenced on November 17, 1998 to one year of ineligibility, three months on probation and a fine of 8,000 francs.
  • On November 25, 1998, the statement "I believe in racial inequality" made at an FN event in 1996 resulted in a conviction. Jean-Marie Le Pen and Bruno Maigret had to pay 10,000 francs to the Union des étudiants juifs de France .
  • In 2004 he was fined 10,000 euros for “inciting discrimination, hatred and violence against a group of people based on their origin or their affiliation or lack of affiliation to an ethnic group or nation because of an interview statement in the daily Le Monde from April 2003 , Race or religion ”. The statement read: “On the day when we in France no longer have five but 25 million Muslims, it will be them who give the orders. And the French will run close to the walls and step down from the sidewalks with downcast eyes. If they don't, they'll be told, 'Why are you looking at me like that? Are you looking for a fight? ' And you will have no choice but to forgive yourself, otherwise you will be rubbed off. ”On March 12, 2008, repeating his testimony to the weekly Rivarol (April 30, 2004 edition) resulted in a further fine of 10,000 Euro: "When I say that the French will run along the walls in the presence of 25 million Muslims, the people in the hall answer me, not without reason: 'But Mr Le Pen, that is already the case!'"
  • In November 2018, Le Pen was fined several thousand euros in Paris for making homophobic statements. A direct appeal procedure was immediately promised by his legal representative.

Le Pen also led a number of lawsuits himself, mainly against the press. After his ex-wife appeared naked in Playboy , the French satirical newspaper Le Canard enchaîné published a photo on the cover of its June 17, 1987 issue of Le Pen half-naked. In 1988 the paper had to pay 100,000 francs in damages to Le Pen.

public perception

Le Pen has often attracted public attention through sexist, racist and anti-Semitic remarks. In 2002, 74% of French people said they did not have a good opinion of Le Pen. Le Pen and the FN are classified as right-wing extremist by the established media, but Le Pen himself spread the motto “ni droite, ni gauche, français” ( neither right nor left, French ).

On November 14, 2007, there was an incident in the EU Parliament with the Austrian MEP Hans-Peter Martin . Le Pen is said to have signaled Martin " Fuck You " with a gesture when Martin, as well as the majority of the other MPs, applauded the official dissolution of the right-wing ITS faction (identity, tradition, sovereignty), because after the exit of the Grand Romania Party no longer had the required group strength of 20 MPs. Martin requested an investigation into the incident on the grounds that Le Pen had behaved “downright violently” towards him.

Regarding the attacks on Charlie Hebdo , Le Pen said: “I'm sorry, I'm not Charlie . (…) I am in no way connected to the spirit of Charlie. I will not fight to defend the spirit of Charlie, who is an anarchist-Trotskyist spirit that corrodes political morality. ”Therefore, the National Front was not invited to the Charlie Hebdo memorial march.

Family and private

Le Pen is married to Jany Paschos for the second time and has three daughters ( Marie-Caroline , Yann and Marine ) from his marriage to Pierrette Lalanne. All three are politically active. His granddaughter Marion Maréchal-Le Pen , the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen's second eldest daughter Yann, also worked in the Front National for several years. In the divorce proceedings from his first wife Pierrette, Le Pen refused to give her any maintenance payments and said that she could go cleaning if she needed money. She was then photographed in a skimpy cleaning lady costume for Playboy . Jean-Marie Le Pen is the godfather of a daughter of the right-wing extremist comedian Dieudonné M'bala M'bala .

Until the attack in 1976, the family lived in the 15th arrondissement and some time later moved from there to Montretout, a property in Saint-Cloud that Le Pen had bequeathed to a deceased wealthy supporter, the cement company heir Hubert Lambert. The building became the headquarters of the FN and is still owned by Le Pen today. His daughter Yann also lives there. Jean-Marie Le Pen lives with his second wife Paschos in Rueil-Malmaison .

Due to a traumatic cataract , Le Pen lost the ability to see in his left eye in the early 1970s. Le Pen temporarily claimed to have sustained the causative injury in 1958 while defending a friend, French Algerian MP Ahmed Djebbour . In his memoir, published in 2018, however, he wrote that he had injured the eye while setting up a marquee during the election campaign for Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour in 1965. In the 1970s he wore an eye patch , which earned him the nickname l'homme au bandeau ("man with the eye patch "). In the early 1980s, he had an eye prosthesis inserted instead , which should give him a more serious appearance.

literature

Web links

Commons : Jean-Marie Le Pen  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Philippe Cohen, Pierre Pean: Le Pen, une histoire française. Robert Laffront, Paris 2012. Chapter 2: La Corpo .
  2. ↑ Jean Chatain: Les Affaires de M. Le Pen. Messidor, Paris 1987, Chapter II: Après la "défaite" de la Liberation.
  3. ^ French article on Le Pen
  4. ^ Cohen, Philippe: Le Pen - une histoire française pp. 67-102
  5. ↑ Hamid Bousselham: Tortures par Le Pen. In: éditions Rahma , 2000 (French).
  6. ↑ James Shields: The Extreme Right in France. From Pétain to Le Pen. Routledge, Abingdon (Oxon) / New York 2007, p. 133.
  7. ^ A b Julia Amalia Heyer: France between Le Pen and Macron . Dtv Verlagsgesellschaft / SPIEGEL-Verlag , Munich / Hamburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-423-26156-2 , pp. 46, 48 and 57 ( limited preview on Google Books ).
  8. ^ A b Rudolf Balmer: Le Pen - a terribly political family . In: Nzz.ch . Retrieved February 22, 2018.
  9. ↑ The long dirty end. In: the daily newspaper , May 5, 2015.
  10. ↑ Stefan Ulrich : Jean-Marie Le Pen excluded from the Front National. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , August 20, 2015.
  11. ↑ Thomas Schürpf: The great procrastination in France. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , April 11, 2007.
  12. ↑ The hot campaign phase begins. In: Deutsche Welle , April 9, 2007.
  13. ↑ Le Figaro : Le Pen: Tout le monde court derrière moi ( Memento of April 13, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) April 12, 2007
  14. ↑ Christian Schwarz: The great unknown is Le Pen. In: St. Galler Tagblatt , April 17, 2007.
  15. ↑ Conan Eric and Gilles Gaetner: Dix ans de solitude. In: L'Express , March 12, 1992 (French), accessed on April 11, 2019: “La montée vers le pouvoir d'Adolf Hitler et du Parti national-socialiste fut caractérisée par un puissant mouvement de masse, somme toute populaire et démocratique, puisqu'il triomphera à la suite de consultations électorales régulières, circonstances généralement oubliées… “(on the cover of the LP Voix et chants de la révolution allemande - Le III e  Reich ).
  16. ↑ a b ( page no longer available , search in web archives: Le Pen raciste. In: L'Humanité , April 29, 2002. )@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.humanite.presse.fr
  17. ↑ Theo Chapuis: Quand Jean-Marie Le Pen était patron d'une maison de disques. In: Konbini - All Pop Everything! , May 10, 2015 (French), accessed April 11, 2019.
  18. ↑ Le Pen may be charged over 'gas ovens' remark. In: The Guardian , September 11, 1988.
  19. ↑ Jean-Marie Le Pen renvoyé devant la justice pour ses propos sur l'Occupation. In: Le Monde , July 13, 2006 (French).
  20. ↑ a b c d e f Les principales condamnations de Jean-Marie Le Pen ( Memento of February 23, 2009 in the Internet Archive ). In: Le Point , January 21, 2009 (French).
  21. ↑ "Je me pose un certain number of questions. Je ne dis pas que les chambres à gaz n'ont pas existé. Je n'ai pas pu moi-même en voir. Je n'ai pas étudié spécialement la question. Mais je crois que c'est un point de detail de l'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. ”Valérie Igounet: Le mot de trop? In: Derrière le Front. Histoires, analyzes et décodages du Front National , franceinfo , September 12, 2016 (French), accessed on April 11, 2019.
  22. ↑ Paris court sentenced Le Pen to a heavy fine. In: Die Zeit , April 6, 2016.
  23. ↑ Jean-Marie Le Pen condamné pour ses propos sur les chambres à gaz. In: Le Monde , April 6, 2016 (French).
  24. ↑ Le Pen fait le coup de poing à Mantes-la-Jolie ( Memento of July 3, 2005 in the Internet Archive ). In: L'Humanité , May 31, 1997 (French).
  25. ^ Condemned Le Pen. In: the daily newspaper , April 3, 2004.
  26. ^ A b European Court of Human Rights, Chamber V: complaint Jean-Marie Le Pen v. France, admissibility decision of April 20, 2010, Bsw. 18788/09. Art. 10 ECHR - Verbal attack on Muslim immigrants. In: Newsletter Human Rights 2010, 143.
  27. ↑ Le Pen condamné en appel at 10,000 euros d'amende. In: L'Express , March 12, 2008 (French), accessed April 11, 2019.
  28. ^ Jean-Marie Le Pen convicted of statements about homosexuals. In: RP online , November 28, 2018, accessed April 11, 2019.
  29. ^ Jean-Marie Le Pen convicted of statements about homosexuals. In: Tiroler Tageszeitung , November 28, 2018, accessed on April 11, 2019.
  30. ↑ LE BAROMETRE DE L'ACTION POLITIQUE ( Memento of March 18, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
  31. ↑ "Paris is the capital of the world today" In: the daily newspaper , January 11, 2015.
  32. ↑ Mons David: La dynastie Le Pen. City Éditions 2018, chapter 6 Le divorce .
  33. ↑ a b Valérie Igounet: C'était Jean-Marie Le Pen (3). France Info, July 26, 2015.
  34. ↑ Olivier Beaumont, Valérie Hacot: Pétain, la guerre d'Algérie, Marine ... Les extraits exclusifs des Mémoires de Jean-Marie Le Pen. In: Le Parisien , February 20, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Le Pen, Jean-Marie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Le Pen, Jean Marie Louis (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French politician, Chairman of the Front National, MEP, right-wing extremist and Holocaust denier
DATE OF BIRTH June 20, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Trinité-sur-Mer , Brittany