For decades, Jean-Marie Le Pen was the loudest, bawdiest, most truculent politician in France.
One isn’t sure whether to employ past or present tense in writing about the ageing politician. Forty-three years after he founded the National Front (FN), his daughter Marine committed what was widely described as “patricide” on Monday night, when seven of eight members of the FN’s executive bureau voted to suspend Le Pen’s membership and called an extraordinary congress to strip him of his title as honorary president.
But as Le Pen lashed out at his “treacherous” daughter and the “courtesans” and “mercenaries” of the FN “firing squad” yesterday, there was life in the old man yet.
Humiliation
Mr Le Pen will be 87 years old next month. Under Marine’s direction, the FN’s political and executive bureaus deliberated for more than seven hours and dished out a double dose of disavowal and humiliation.
The crisis in the FN was precipitated by Mr Le Pen’s repeated provocative statements, not only about the second World War and the Holocaust. “Monsignor Ebola” could “solve the demographic explosion” in Africa, he said. Le Pen always mocked political correctness. In the end, it was his daughter’s quest for political correctness that did for him.
Mr Le Pen refused to attend the meeting of the executive bureau, telling journalists it would be “contrary to [my] dignity” to do so. Asked if his political life was over, Le Pen retorted: “They’ll have to kill me!”
Until the meeting of the FN politburo, the Le Pens had not spoken to or looked at one another for more than a month. “It’s a felony,” Mr Le Pen told Europe 1 radio yesterday, alluding to Marine’s “betrayal” over and over. “I’m shamed that the president of the National Front carries my name,” he added.
Polls show Ms Le Pen is likely to lead in the first round of the 2017 presidential election. “If such moral principles were to preside over the French state, it would be scandalous,” Mr Le Pen said, adding that “for the moment” he no longer wants his daughter to be elected. She was worse than the mainstream UMP and PS parties “because they fight you to your face, while she hits you in the back”.
Mr Le Pen stressed that he remained a member of the European parliament and a regional counsellor for Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur. “I have no intention of retiring. I’m on the offensive. I’ll fight by any means to establish justice.”
Untapped
Ms Le Pen’s “patricide” is likely to strengthen her party. The one-third of conservative UMP supporters who regard her policies as different from her father’s are an untapped reserve of potential voters. Only 7 per cent of FN supporters want Mr Le Pen to have more influence in French politics, according to a BVA poll. An Odoxa poll shows only 28 per cent of FN voters have a positive image of him, compared with 95 per cent for Marine and 92 per cent for his granddaughter Marion. The same poll shows 87 per cent of FN voters want Mr Le Pen to retire.
A decades-long page has been turned in French politics. A man who stood for the presidency of France five times, who stunned Europe by reaching the run-off in 2001, is politically a spent force. Le Pen was looking forward to celebrating the 60th anniversary of his election to the French National Assembly next year. "For more than 30 years, Jean Marie Le Pen was the man the French loved to hate," Guillaume Tabard writes in Le Figaro. "He still fascinates them."
