Jean-Marie Le Pen

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Jean-Marie Le Pen

Jean-Marie Le Pen (born June 20, 1928, La Trinité-sur-Mer France) is a French far-right nationalist politician, founder and president of the Front National party, and a perennial candidate for the French presidency.

Le Pen focuses on immigration to France, the European Union, traditional culture, and France's high toll of unemployment. He advocates immigration restrictions, the death penalty, incentives for homemakers,^[1], compulsory military service, censorship of the arts, and euroscepticism. He has been charged of Holocaust denial several times, and has unsuccessfully sued some who have accused him of this. ^[2]

Le Pen has run for the French presidency several times, most recently in 2002, when in a surprise upset, he polled more votes in the first round than the standard bearer for the left, Lionel Jospin. He lost in the second round to incumbent president Jacques Chirac. Le Pen will run in the 2007 French presidential election; his main opponents will include Ségolène Royal, candidate for the Socialist Party, François Bayrou, candidate for the right-of-center UDF, and Nicolas Sarkozy, candidate for the right-wing UMP.

1 Biography
2 Political career
3 1972 foundation of the National Front
4 Issues
5 Notes
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Biography

Le Pen was born in a small seaside village in Brittany, the son of a fisherman. He was orphaned as an adolescent (pupille de la nation, brought up by the state), when his father's boat was blown up by a mine. Today he is a wealthy businessman, mostly thanks to a large 1977 inheritance from a political supporter.

As a young man, he first studied law. He was condemned various times for assault (coups et blessures).^[3] He became president of the Association corporative des étudiants en droit, an association of law students whose main occupation was to engage in street brawls against the "Cocos" (communists). He was excluded from this organisation in 1951, after a congress of the UNEF student trade union and having insulted, while drunk, an abbot.^[3]

After having received his law diploma, he engaged himself in the Army in the Foreign Legion in Indochina, where he arrived after the 1954 Dien Bien Phu Battle^[3] (lost by France, and which prompted the President of the Council Pierre Mendès France to put an end to the war at the Geneva Conference). He was then sent to Suez (1956), but arrived only after the cease-fire.^[3] He was then sent to Algeria (1957) as an intelligence officer. He has been accused of having engaged in torture, but he denied it, although he recognized having known of its use.^[3] After his time in the military, he studied political science and law at Paris II, and was at one time the president of an association of law students, the CORPO. His graduate thesis, submitted in 1971 by Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jean-Loup Vincent, was titled Le courant anarchiste en France depuis 1945 or "The anarchist movement in France since 1945".

His marriage (June 29, 1960 - 1985 or 1986) to Pierrette Lalanne resulted in three daughters and nine granddaughters. Their break was quite violent, with his ex-wife posing almost nude in Playboy to ridicule him.^[3] The youngest of these daughters, Marine Le Pen, is a senior member of the Front National. Marie-Caroline, another of his daughters, would also break with Le Pen, following her husband close to Bruno Mégret, who split from the FN to found the National Republican Movement (MNR).^[3]

In 1977 Le Pen inherited a fortune from Hubert Lambert, son of the cement industrial of the same name. Hubert Lambert was monarchist, alcoholic, and sick. Le Pen was included in his will, and received 30 million Francs (approximatively 5 million euros), as well as his castle in Montretout, in Saint-Cloud (owned by Madame de Pompadour until 1748).^[3]

In the early 1980s, Le Pen's personal security was assured by KO International Company, a subsidiary of VHP Security firm, known as a front organisation for the SAC (Civic Action Service), the Gaullist organisation in charge of shady actions, which employed figures from various backgrounds, including from the organized crime and from the far-right movement.^[4]^[5]

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

[edit] Political career

Le Pen started his political career as the head of the student union in Toulouse. In 1953, a year after the beginning of the Algerian War, he contacted President Vincent Auriol, who approved Le Pen's proposed volunteer disaster relief project after a flood in the Netherlands. Within two days, there were 40 volunteers from his university, a group that would later help victims of an earthquake in Italy. In Paris, 1956, he was elected to the National Assembly as a member of Pierre Poujade's UDCA populist party. Le Pen, 28 years old, was the youngest member of the Assembly.

In 1957, he became the General Secretary of the National Front of Combatants (FNC), a veteran's organization, as well as the first French politician to nominate a Muslim candidate, Ahmed Djebbour, an Algerian, who was elected in 1957 as deputy of Paris. The next year, following his break with Poujade, Le Pen was re-elected to the National Assembly as a member of the National Centre of Independents and Peasants (CNIP) party, led by Antoine Pinay. Le Pen claimed that he had lost his left eye when he was savagely beaten during the 1958 election campaign. Testimonies suggest however that he was only wounded in the right eye and did not lose it. He lost sight in his left eye years later, due to an illness. During the 1950s, Le Pen took a close interest in the Algerian war (1954-62) and the French defense budget.

Le Pen then directed the 1965 presidential campaign of far-right candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, who obtained 5.19% of the votes. He insisted on the rehabilitation of the Collaborationists, declaring that:

"Was General de Gaulle more brave than the Marshall Pétain in the occupied zone? This isn't sure. It was much easier to resist in London than to resist in France."^[3]

During the 1961 Barricades Week in Algiers, Le Pen called for the barricades to be extended to Paris, and was afterward put under custody.^[6] The following year, he lost his seat at the Assembly. He created the Serp (Société d’études et de relations publiques) firm, a company involved in the music industry, which produced both chorals of the CGT trade-union or songs of the Popular Front and Nazi marches. The firm was condemned in 1968 for "apology of war crime and complicity" after the diffusion of Third Reich songs.^[3]

[edit] 1972 foundation of the National Front

In 1972, Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the Front National (FN) party, along with former OAS member Jacques Bompard, former Collaborationist Roland Gaucher and others nostalgics of Vichy France, neo-nazi pagans, Catholic fundamentalists, etc.^[3] Le Pen presented himself for the first time in the 1974 presidential election, obtaining 0.74%.^[3] In 1976, his Parisian flat (he lived at that time in his castle of Montretout in Saint-Denis) was dynamited. The affair never was elucidated.^[3] Le Pen then didn't manage to obtain the 500 signatures from "grand electors" (grands électeurs, mayors, etc.) necessary to present himself to the 1981 presidential election, won by the candidate of the Socialist Party (PS), François Mitterrand.

Criticizing immigration and taking advantage of the economic crisis striking France, and the world, since the 1973 oil crisis, Le Pen's party managed to increase its votes in the 1980s, starting in the municipal elections of 1983. His popularity has been greatest in the south of France. The FN obtained 10% at the 1984 European elections. 34 FN deputies entered the Assembly after the 1986 elections, which were won by the right-wing, bringing Jacques Chirac to Matignon in the first cohabitation (that is, of the combination of a right-wing Prime minister, Chirac, with a socialist President, Mitterrand).

Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1974

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.

In 1997, the European Parliament stripped Le Pen of his parliamentary immunity so that he could be tried by a German court for comments he made at a December 1996 press conference before the German Republikaner party. Le Pen stated there that: "If you take a 1,000-page book on World War II, the concentration camps take up only two pages and the gas chambers 10 to 15 lines. This is what one calls a detail." ; Le Pen had made a similar statement in France in 1987, which also caused him to be condemned in virtue of the Gayssot Act on negationism. In June 1999, a Munich court found this statement to be "minimizing the Holocaust, which caused the deaths of six million Jews," and convicted and fined Le Pen for his remarks.^[7]^[8]

Le Pen ran in the French presidential elections in 1974, 1988, 1995 and 2002. He did not run for office in 1981, having failed to gather the necessary 500 signatures of elected officials. 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, thus securing the biggest majority in the history of the Fifth Republic.

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 maneuvered his daughter Marine into a prominent position, a move that angered many inside the National Front, who worry about the emergence of a possible Le Pen family dynasty.

[edit] Issues

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

Le Pen remains a very polarizing 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% an unfavorable opinion, 61% have a very unfavorable opinion[1]. 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).

The international media often cites Jean-Marie Le Pen as a symbol of French xenophobia. Le Pen is also occasionally criticized in French and foreign pop songs. Le Pen has drawn many comparisons to Adolf Hitler's early political career in the international media.

[edit] Allegations of anti-Semitism and xenophobia

Le Pen has been criticized both at home and abroad for his xenophobia and perceived anti-Semitism. These openly verbal criticisms are considered to be unfounded by his supporters, but at several times Le Pen has been convicted for such remarks.

Le Pen has made remarks which are widely considered to be anti-Semitic; for example, on 13 September 1987 he said: "I ask myself several questions. I'm not saying the gas chambers didn't exist. I haven't seen them myself. I haven't particularly studied the question. But I believe it's just a detail in the history of World War II."^[9] He was condemned to pay 1.2 million Francs (183,200 Euros).^[10]
Le Pen once made the infamous pun "Durafour-crématoire" ("crematory oven") about then minister Michel Durafour, who had said in public a few days before "One must exterminate the National Front" [2]. The corpses of the victims of the Nazi gas chambers were incinerated in such ovens.^[11]
In February 1997, Le Pen accused President Chirac of being "on the pay roll of Jewish organizations, and particularly of the B'nai B'rith".
In May 1987 he advocated isolating those infected with HIV (whom he calls "sidaïques^[12]") 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, is Bruel's real name.
In 2005, he claimed that the occupation of France by Nazi Germany "was not particularly inhumane". [3].
In June 2006, he claimed that the French World Cup squad contained too many coloured players, and was not an accurate reflection of French society. He went on to scold players for not singing La Marseillaise, saying they were not 'French'.^[13][4]

[edit] Prosecution concerning historical revisionism

In 1997, the European Parliament, of which Le Pen was then a member, removed his parliamentary immunity so that Le Pen could be tried by a German court for comments he made at a December 1996 press conference before the German Republikaner party. Le Pen stated there that: "If you take a 1,000-page book on World War II, the concentration camps take up only two pages and the gas chambers 10 to 15 lines. This is what one calls a detail." Le Pen had made a similar statement in France in 1987, which also caused him to be condemned in virtue of the Gayssot Act on negationism. In June 1999, a Munich court found this statement to be "minimizing the Holocaust, which caused the deaths of six million Jews," and convicted and fined Le Pen for his remarks.^[14]^[15]

[edit] 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.

Le Pen practiced torture during the Algerian War (1954-62), when he was a lieutenant in the French Army. Although he denied it, he lost a trial when he attacked Le Monde newspaper on charges of defamation, following accusations by the newspaper that he had used torture. Le Monde has produced in May 2003 the dagger he allegedly used to commit war crimes as court evidence. Le Pen attacked Le Monde on charges of defamation because the newspaper had accused him of having engaged in torture during the war.^[16]

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, Le Monde 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 the statute of limitations, there can be no criminal proceedings against Le Pen for the crimes he is alleged to have committed in Algeria. In 1995, Le Pen unsuccessfully sued Jean Dufour, regional counselor of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (French Communist Party for the same reason.^[17]^[18]^[19]^[20]^[21]^[22]^[23]^[24]

Le Pen has also been criticized for ties to suspect individuals, such as:

Roger Holeindre, a member of the political bureau of the Front National and a former member of the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), a terrorist movement against Algerian independence;
Roland Gaucher, a co-founder of the National Front in 1972 who was also a former Vichy regime collaborator with Nazi Germany.

[edit] Approbation on the Right

Some of Le Pen's statements led other right-wing groups, such as the Austrian Freedom Party,^[25] and some National Front supporters to distance themselves from him. Bruno Mégret left the National Front to found his own party (the National Republican Movement, MNR), 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, relations with Le Pen and other supporters of the hard line are complex.^[26] Over the years, Le Pen gained widespread popularity among neo-nazis and white nationalists throughout Europe and North America.

As Le Pen, like many other European nationalists in recent years, has made statements highly critical of American foreign policy and culture, he has received notice from American conservatives. Author Ann Coulter called him an anti-American adulterer and said his anti-immigration, anti-Muslim message "finally hit a nerve with voters" after years of irrelevance.^[27] Paleoconservative commentator Pat Buchanan contends that even though Le Pen "made radical and foolish statements," the EU violated his right to freedom of speech.^[28] He wrote:

As it is often the criminal himself who is first to cry, "Thief!" so it is usually those who scream, "Fascist!" loudest who are the quickest to resort to anti-democratic tactics. Today, the greatest threat to the freedom and independence of the nations of Europe comes not from Le Pen and that 17% of French men and women who voted for him. It comes from an intolerant European Establishment that will accept no rollback of its powers or privileges, nor any reversal of policies it deems "progressive".^[28]