Jean-Marie Le Pen, French fiery far-right leader, dies at 96

PARIS (AP) — Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France's far-right National Front who was known for fiery rhetoric against immigration and multiculturalism that earned him both staunch supporters and widespread condemnation, died Tuesday. He was 96.

A polarizing figure in French politics, Le Pen was convicted numerous times of antisemitism, discrimination and inciting racial violence. Yet, despite those convictions and his eventual political estrangement, the nativist ideas that propelled his decades of popularity —encapsulated in slogans like "French People First" — remain ascendant in today's France, across Europe and beyond.

His statements — including Holocaust denial, racist denunciations of Muslims and immigrants, and his 1987 proposal to forcibly isolate people with AIDS in special facilities — shocked his critics and strained his political alliances. Le Pen routinely countered that he was simply a patriot protecting the identity of "eternal France."

Le Pen, who reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election, was eventually estranged from his daughter, Marine Le Pen, who renamed his National Front party, kicked him out and transformed it into one of France's most powerful political forces while distancing herself from her father's extremist image.

Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally as the party is now known, confirmed Le Pen's death in a post on social media platform X. Bardella's unusually warm tribute described Le Pen as a "tribune of the people" who "always served France" and expressing condolences to his family.

The post appeared to blur the distance the rebranded party had sought to establish between its firebrand founder and its more polished, modern direction under Marine Le Pen.

French President Emmanuel Macron, a centrist, expressed "his condolences to (Le Pen's) family and friends," in an uncharacteristically short statement issued by the presidential palace.

"A historic figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for almost 70 years, which is now a matter for history to judge," the statement read.

Marine Le Pen, thousands of kilometers (miles) away in the French territory of Mayotte, was inspecting the aftermath of destructive Cyclone Chido at the time of her father's death.

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

A former paratrooper and Foreign Legionnaire who fought in Indochina and Algeria, the fiery Jean-Marie Le Pen was a wily political strategist and gifted orator who used his charisma to captivate crowds with his anti-immigration message.

The portly, silver-haired son of a Breton fisherman viewed himself as a man with a mission — to keep France French under the banner of the National Front. Picking Joan of Arc as the party's patron saint, Le Pen made Islam, and Muslim immigrants, his primary target, blaming them for the economic and social woes of France.

"If I advance, follow me; if I die, avenge me; if I shirk, kill me," Le Pen said at a 1990 party congress, reflecting the theatrical style that for decades fed the fervor of followers.

Le Pen, who lost an eye in a street fight in his youth and for years wore a black eyepatch, was a constant force in French political life, impossible for politicians of the left or right to ignore. In election after election, he proved the spoiler, forcing rivals to scramble to counter him.

Today, the National Rally, the successor to the party he founded, has not only solidified its presence in French politics but also pushed Macron to the right on security and immigration, reflecting a broader shift in the political landscape.

Le Pen was notably convicted in 1990 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 in a play on words a Cabinet minister with the Nazi crematory ovens, and for a 1989 comment blaming the "Jewish international" for helping seed "this anti-national spirit."

In another setback, Le Pen lost his European Parliament seat in 2002 for a year for assaulting a Socialist politician during a 1997 election campaign.

More recently, Le Pen and 26 National Front officials, including his daughters Marine and Yann Le Pen, have been accused of using money destined for EU parliamentary aides to pay staff who instead did political work for the party between 2004 and 2016, in violation of the 27-nation bloc's regulations. Jean-Marie Le Pen was deemed unfit to testify.

Le Pen had recently been exempted from prosecution on health grounds from a high-profile trial over his party's suspected embezzlement of European Parliament funds that opened in September.

French judicial authorities placed Le Pen under legal guardianship in February at the request of his family as his health declined, French media reported. He had been in frail health for some time.

Born June 20, 1928, in the Brittany village of Trinite-Sur-Mer, to Jean Le Pen, a fisherman who would die in World War II, and his wife Anne-Marie, Jean-Marie Le Pen proved an ambitious son attracted early on to the extreme right.

Armed with law and political science degrees, Le Pen made his way to Paris, and at 27 became the youngest lawmaker in the National Assembly under the banner of the Union for the Defense of Shopkeepers and Artisans, run by Pierre Poujade. His career never strayed from the far-right path.

In 1963, he and Leon Gaultier, who served in the Waffen SS, founded a company, SERP, that churned out political discourses. With the neo-fascist group New Order, Le Pen founded the National Front on Oct. 5, 1972.

It would take more than a decade for the party to emerge as a political force — in a September 1983 municipal election when Jean-Pierre Stirbois won 16.7% of the votes in the town of Dreux, west of Paris.

A year later, the party won 11% in European parliamentary elections and seated 10 deputies. The message was clear: France could no longer ignore Le Pen. The party's entry as a force in national politics came two years later in legislative elections that gave Le Pen's party 35 seats in France's National Assembly.

By then, Le Pen had replaced the black eyepatch and begun polishing his scrappy image.

In 1988, he startled the nation by taking 14% of the vote in the first round of presidential elections. Fourteen years later, in his fifth bid for the presidency, he outdid that — scoring 16.8%, coming second behind Jacques Chirac and reaching the two-man runoff.

France shuddered, Europe trembled and the National Front gloated. But a Le Pen victory was not to be. In a rare joining of forces, supporters of the right and left poured into the streets of France in a massive show of solidarity against him. On May 5, 2002, Chirac was returned to office with a record 82% of the vote.

Throughout the years, Le Pen's political line never wavered.

In a 2003 speech, he said he wanted the notion of "national preference" written into the French Constitution to limit employment, housing opportunities and other social assistance to French citizens. Immigration is "the greatest danger we're facing," he said.

"Me? Racist? It's a gag, a gag," Le Pen once told The Associated Press. "But I'm not for the melting pot. I'm for the defense of one's culture. I'd despair if I found the culture of Brooklyn in France."

His private life was tumultuous.

An explosion destroyed the family apartment building in 1976 but injured neither Le Pen nor his wife and three children.

The French media relished recounting Le Pen's divorce saga from wife Pierrette Lalanne. In a reflection of that bitter separation, she famously posed for Playboy in 1987, partly dressed in a risque maid's costume. The magazine quoted her as saying she was responding to her husband's Playboy interview in which he said she could become a housekeeper if she needed money.

He married for a second time in 1991, to Jeanne-Marie Paschos, known as Jany.

Le Pen began laying the groundwork for his succession at a party congress in 2003, naming Marine — the youngest of his three daughters — to the post of vice president. In 2011, she became party president and in 2017 and 2022 reached the presidential runoff herself. Both times she lost to centrist Emmanuel Macron, but with a shrinking margin. She is considered a leading potential contender for the next presidential election in 2027.

But her softer style and attempts to distance the party from the most extreme of his views soon brought her into conflict with her father. His refusal to desist from antisemitic provocations clashed with her bid to rid the National Front of its pariah status.

She removed him from the party he co-founded, and in 2018 divested him of his title of honorary president-for-life. A few months later she changed the National Front name to National Rally as part of her strategy to renew the party's image.

Her father called it the "toughest blow" the party had faced since its founding.

Throughout his life, Jean-Marie Le Pen refused to cede, or be silenced.

"I'm a moral authority for the movement ... and I don't have the habit of keeping my opinions to myself," Le Pen told The AP in 2014 as the father-daughter feud gained momentum.

As Le Pen's health deteriorated in recent years, he was hospitalized several times, including after he suffered a stroke.

Le Pen is survived by his wife and three daughters, Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine.