How the National Front Changed France | Jacobin Subscribe How the National Front Changed France Marine Le Pen has taken the National Front into the French mainstream without shedding the party’s far-right politics. by Hugh McDonnell Marine Le Pen delivering a speech in 2011. Marine Le Pen / Flickr The new issue of Jacobin, centering on development and the Global South, is out now. To celebrate its release, new subscriptions start at only $14.95. Over the summer Jean-Marie Le Pen was expelled from the National Front (FN) — the far-right party he cofounded, led for nearly four decades, and is the largest of its kind in Europe. The expulsion, which Le Pen is contesting, was the culmination of a months-long family feud between Jean-Marie and his successor and daughter, Marine Le Pen. At issue were a series of comments Jean-Marie made in April of this year. First, in an interview on the flagship current affairs show Bourdin Direct , he repeated his claim, made at various junctures in his career, that the Nazi gas chambers were “a detail” of the Second World War.

Furthermore, he insisted that all kinds of patriots are welcome in the FN — fervent Pétainists (collaborationists with Vichy France) just as much as fervent Gaullists. Shortly after, he accepted an interview with Rivarol — a publication that sports a masthead of traditional and antisemitic far-right thinkers that the current FN leadership shuns. Granting an interview with such an outlet would have rankled on its own. But Jean-Marie then doubled down on his earlier claims, reiterating that Pétainists have a place in the FN (as well as defenders of French Algeria, Gaullists, former Communists, and all patriots “who have France at heart”). The remarks, and the very bitter personal feud that ensued, make excellent copy for gossip columns and shows. But they also offer an excellent point of entry for understanding the recent history and evolution of the FN — which, under Marine, is undergoing a process of “de-demonization,” ostensibly distancing itself from toxic extremism. The Mariniste Era After becoming party leader in January 2011, Marine Le Pen passed her first big test.

In the 2012 presidential elections , she garnered 17.9 percent — surpassing her father’s personal best of 16.9 percent (in 2002) and putting the party’s disappointing 2007 showing of 10.4 percent (for which she was widely blamed) behind her. She’s since consolidated that electoral success. The FN won eleven municipalities in last March’s elections, and in the European elections two months later, the party scored a first-place finish with nearly 25 percent of the vote, netting twenty-four seats in the European Parliament. This has scored the FN additional media coverage of its castigation of EU institutions, which it holds responsible for many of France’s current woes. James Shields, a specialist on the FN, points out that “the FN gained more executive power in March 2014 than at any time in its forty-two-year history.” Purges of opponents (since the early 2000s) and increasing party membership have further strengthened Marine’s position.

The party now has considerable momentum going into December’s regional elections — widely understood to be a barometer for the 2017 presidential elections, in which Marine is seen by many as the leading contender in the first round. So what are the characteristics of this revamped and revitalized National Front? Most conspicuous is its brandishing of the republican idiom. Adherents of French republicanism profess an allegiance to the values of liberty, equality, and fraternity; separation of church and state; and liberal democracy and the rule of law. Conventional wisdom in France has long posited an unbridgeable divide between the French Republic and the National Front — its populism, dubious commitment to democracy, and racism putting it beyond the bounds of political respectability. Marine has set out to prove them wrong.

At her inaugural presidential speech, to the evident discomfort of some in the audience, she proclaimed the FN “a great republican political party” and asserted ownership of “liberty, equality, fraternity.” Instead of harking back to pre-Rousseau ideals, she stressed the need to recover the spirit of the Fifth Republic — a mythical golden age in which President de Gaulle’s France prospered domestically and commanded respect internationally — and declared that those around her were the true defenders of the republic. Like any concept, “the republic” and “republicanism” mean different things in different contexts. But since the rise of neo-republicanism in the 1980s and 1990s, it has increasingly been used as a reference point to insist on the inadequacies of France’s Muslim communities — a tendency which has been reinforced in recent years by both politicians and intellectuals . In appropriating the idea of republicanism, Marine undercut the very language used to quarantine the FN — to stigmatize it as beyond the pale — and created an effective narrative vehicle to propel its reactionary message.

Frontists were no longer rednecks but guardians of secularism (laïcité) , the separation of church and state, and defenders of beleaguered European minorities and victimized groups. As Marine put it — alluding to the “Muslim threat” — “in certain districts of cities it’s not good to be a woman, a homosexual, a Jew, or even French or white.” The success of the party’s renovation was partly due to its opponents — particularly former President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has aggressively melded republican language with Frontist-style discourse, even renaming his party, once known as the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), The Republicans. In adopting some of the far right’s rhetoric, Sarkozy helped legitimize the FN, allowing it to enter the select category of respectable “democratic” and “republican” parties. The victory of François Hollande and the Socialist Party (PS) in the 2012 elections seemed to promise a change, with the center-left party lamenting the mean-spirited state to which the “republican tradition of secularism” had been reduced. But their opposition was rather qualified.

Hollande vowed, prior to his election, to champion republican values by insisting on unisex timetables in public pools, after outraged reports that one local authority had reserved an hour class per week for a group of obese women, some of whom were Muslim. And perhaps most striking was Hollande’s reference to “Français de souche” — roughly translated as “ethnic French,” a term that even Marine Le Pen has studiously avoided. Furthermore, Arnaud Montebourg, a key figure in the Socialist Party, has referred to a “consensus” between the Socialists, the UMP, and the FN on immigration. This is something of an exaggeration — no other party matches Marine’s commitment to renege on freedom of movement across Europe’s frontiers, cut net immigration to ten thousand annually, and “encourage” unemployed “foreigners” to leave — but does accurately capture a clear trend in contemporary French politics. As for France’s prized intellectuals, it is ironic that some have lent ideological legitimacy to the FN while heaping scorn on it.

One particularly instructive example is the feminist journalist Caroline Fourest, who has argued in a book and documentary on the FN’s president that Marine Le Pen’s republicanism is inauthentic — that she in fact stands for the negation of its tenets, of which Fourest is a proud adherent. Yet in addition to her tendentious but award-winning blurring of radical Islamism and French Muslims, Fourest was fined in court last year for her slurs against a young Muslim woman who was attacked in a Paris suburb, suggesting she either made up the story or was beaten up by her own family and then made a false report. In the same vein, alluding to the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Fourest claimed that a rally against Islamophobia in Paris in March was “spitting on the dead of January 7.” The abyss that Fourest takes for granted between herself and Le Pen seems at least partially illusory. Apart from this favorable context, what lies behind this refurbishment of the FN’s image and what is its significance?

De-Demonization In a recent interview on BBC Hardtalk , an interviewer asked Jean-Marie Le Pen whether the rift in the party stemmed from jealousy over his daughter’s success and opposition to her efforts to detoxify the party. This explanation didn’t make sense, the elder Le Pen replied, because his daughter had been president of the FN since 2011. He might have added that this ideological course had been embraced since she first entered the spotlight in the 2002 presidential elections. In the interim, she had climbed to the top echelons of the party, thanks to her father’s machinations, against considerable opposition within the FN ranks. One reason many in the party disliked Marine was their aversion to Jean-Marie’s patrimonial maneuvering. But they were also more than skeptical about Marine’s promotion of de-demonization. No one in FN circles would deny that the FN is portrayed poorly in the media, or that the party is electorally hobbled as a result. Not a single FN militant would object to de-demonization in this sense — fighting impingements on the party’s ability to circulate its patriotic message. But de-demonization is a tricky affair.

The translation of “dédiaboliser” as “detoxify” in the BBC interview is illuminating. Detoxification connotes that the body in question is toxic and it is this that must be rectified. Dédiabolisation is more slippery — it is unclear whether that body has the “devilish” qualities that are to be removed, or whether, it is simply that their enemies’ misrepresentations must be corrected. It this ambiguity that provokes tension within the party over the term. As the president, Marine Le Pen has to walk a tightrope between burnishing the party’s image and jettisoning or renouncing its substance. The importance of political discourse in the FN — often performative rather than substantive — only makes the question of image rehabilitation more delicate. Projects looking to improve the FN’s image have always had rigid parameters — appropriate respect and dues to the party’s old guard was expected and demanded, above all to Jean-Marie himself, who considers the FN his personal property. Indeed, Marine was delivered to the summit of the party precisely on that basis.

Given Jean-Marie’s advanced age, it was considered acceptable that his daughter run the estate on his behalf — and even apply a personal touch while doing so — but never to forget who owned the house. Another hurdle in the de-demonization project is the FN’s orientation toward political power. Over time, the party has oscillated between aspiring to power and distancing itself from it, but party culture has always dictated that a certain balance be maintained. At times, this tension has come to a head. In 1999, the party split into two factions, one of whom supported Le Pen senior, the other who favored his number two, Bruno Mégret. The feud turned on Mégret’s conviction that Jean-Marie contented himself with provocation and had turned the FN into his personal patrimony. Mégret wished to rebrand the party, widen its appeal, and draw in supporters from the mainstream right.

The upshot of the contretemps is that de-demonization today risks vindicating Mégret’s position if it doesn’t hew to prescribed norms — an eventuality to which Jean-Marie loyalists are all the more sensitive to given the central role that former Mégretistes occupy in the top echelons of the FN today. There’s some resentment in the party among those who see the high-ranking Mégretistes as dubious renegades, and it is striking that Marine has been at pains to deny any parallel between her trajectory and that of Mégret. Marine herself is not oblivious to the importance of managing the FN’s precarious balance. She is prepared to throw a bone to those nostalgic for the days of her father’s leadership, as demonstrated by her calculated remarks in 2010 comparing Muslims praying in the street to the German occupation of France in World War II. (She was charged with incitement to racial hatred for making the comments.) But in at least two ways, her leadership has failed to convince Jean-Marie and the party’s old guard that she is giving sufficient weight to their expectations, priorities, and preoccupations.

Some pockets of the FN, particularly longtime members, think Jean-Marie’s daughter has moved the party line too far toward integration with the mainstream and too far away from opposition or provocation. One former secretary general, for instance, has complained that the FN has today become a vote-catching party, an electioneering pigsty. Like all the other parties . . . within the FN, everyone takes their position according to the state of opinion. That’s exactly the opposite of Jean-Marie Le Pen. He was capable of defending his ideas even if they weren’t popular. His daughter defends what is popular whatever the ideas. Marine’s ambition to transform the FN into a formation capable of taking power is a path that arguably carries a burden of justification within the party; after all, those who prefer outsider status and resist modification and possible dilution of the Front’s axioms and loyal personnel can point to the achievement of the Lepenization of the political mainstream from without. Indeed, it would be difficult to come up with another European political party that has exerted so much weight on public discourse from a position of perennial opposition.

And as Shields argues , “it is a fact insufficiently acknowledged that Le Pen voters have been critical in determining the outcome of every presidential election in France since 1988.” Tellingly, in the notorious April interview, Jean-Marie also pronounced himself in “total disagreement” with Marine’s claim that Lepenist controversies and provocations overshadowed the work of the FN. He insisted that, on the contrary, it was a means to get its ideas exposure, intervene in debates, and shape public opinion. The stakes involved in proving FN’s respectable, republican credentials are particularly high when it comes to antisemitism. As FN vice-president Louis Aliot explained : De-demonization only relates to antisemitism . . . When distributing leaflets in the street, the only glass ceiling I saw, it wasn’t immigration or Islam. It’s antisemitism that stops people voting for us. There’s only that. From the moment you get rid of this ideological barrier you free up the rest. Ever since I’ve known her, Marine Le Pen agrees with that. She can’t understand why and how her father and the others can’t see that that’s the obstacle.

Key party figures like FN National Treasurer Wallerand de Saint-Just have also stressed the undesirability of this far-right tendency and accepted that “French people of the Jewish faith are perfectly integrated into our society.” Conversely, the FN has advertised itself to French Jews as their “ best shield against Islamic fundamentalism .” Such overtures create a problem, however. Had the new FN leadership simply abstained from antisemitism, even proscribed it within the party’s ranks, they would have been unmolested in doing so. That is to say, they would not have come under internal party pressure to increase antisemitic gestures. However, publicly eschewing such bigotry, rather than discreetly letting it go by the wayside, essentially meant deeming Jean-Marie a hindrance if not an embarrassment — acknowledging that his honorary presidential role (which he unfailingly mentions) was in fact doled out to humor him while putting him out to pasture, rather than invest him with any power. Seen in this light, appearing in the pages of Rivarol and discussing Pétain and the Nazi gas chambers was no coincidence.

Another pivotal figure in the Le Pen family feud is the thirty-four-year-old Florian Philippot, the FN’s vice-president and the brains behind the party’s strategy and communications. Philippot has been a particular target of Jean-Marie — who has leveled homophobic insults at Philippot and besmirched him as a socialist, a Chevènementist, a Gaullist, a provocateur — and the founder’s senior loyalists. Some have even mobilized to get rid of him , believing Phillipot has manipulated Marine into veering leftwards. Indeed, Philippot is the figurehead of a group of Chevenèmentistes within the party — people whose worldview was molded by the politics of Jean-Pierre Chevènement, the former education minister, defense minister, and interior minister who by the 1990s was a dissident Socialist and the personification of neo-republicanism. If the republican turn within the FN can’t be laid solely at the feet of its ex-Chevènementiste recruits, they considerably added to its momentum. More precisely, there are several ways in which Philippot contravenes the acceptable bounds of de-demonization.

First and foremost, he has ignored the unwritten understanding that appropriate dues be paid to the party — especially its elders. Conspicuously bypassing any time in bread-and-butter party work, Philippot shot to the front of the party line, a move that was concocted by his introduction to MLP by Paul-Marie Coûteaux, another Chevènementiste to whom she was close. When he joined the FN in October 2011, Philippot made a point of stressing that he had never voted for Jean-Marie, and that he wouldn’t have worked for the FN with the party’s founder at the helm, particularly because of its economic program. To top it off, there is a widely perceived sense , expressed by Jean-Marie himself, that he would only have received a light punishment for his comments earlier this year but for Philippot’s power in the party. Even before this, Philippot’s perceived arrogance was accentuated by his profile as the archetypal technocratic elite against which the party had always railed. He is a graduate of the highly selective École Normale d’Administration — a breeding ground for the country’s administrative and political top brass.

If in leapfrogging to the number two spot Philippot is seen not to have paid his dues, the same goes for his circle, which is regarded as having been granted an excessive number of top positions. While Jean-Marie may say that Gaullists have a place in the FN, Philippot’s outspoken admiration for de Gaulle does not sit well — again, an affront that is perceived along generational lines. A core, founding element of the FN revolved around right-wing activists whose political teeth were cut on the Algerian war of decolonization, and who hold de Gaulle in contempt, seeing him as the liquidator of the French empire. As Roger Holeindre, a cofounder of the FN, remarked in May , “for a guy like me who served in Algeria, being represented by a Gaullist faggot is a bit much.” The Party of Its Founder Marine Le Pen’s FN has had significant success recasting itself as a regular political party.

Polls in 2012 showed 51 percent of respondents judging the FN to be “a party like the others”; a sharp drop in the share of respondents who considered the FN “a danger” (53 percent); and a rise in the percentage of those with a “good opinion” of the FN leader (35 percent). The party has had particular success in attracting a female electorate that had been turned off by Jean-Marie’s leadership. Part of this improvement is a result of the party’s careful tending to its image; these days disappointed skinheads are turned away at public FN demonstrations and gatherings, and militants caught expounding racist, antisemitic, or homophobic comments are strictly disciplined. Two of the best-known expulsions are Yvan Benedetti — who pronounced himself (jokingly, he claimed) as “anti-Zionist, antisemite, and anti-Jew” — and Alexandre Gabriac, photographed doing a Nazi salute. The growth of social media has made people like Benedetti and Gabriac a major headache for modernizing far-right party leaders.

Benedetti and Gabriac, for their part, say their ouster was really about purging loyalists to Bruno Gollnisch — a resolute acolyte of the senior Le Pen who is bitterly opposed to de-demonization. Though, of course, the two rationales are not mutually exclusive. The Front hasn’t made a clean break with its old guard — figures like Gollnisch are still represented in the top ranks — but Shields points out , they are now surrounded by a host of younger delegates for whom the past does not have the same significance. In addition, it’s important not to exaggerate these divisions at the political level, regardless of how fraught they may be at the personal level. A recent quantitative and qualitative study by Cécile Alduy and Stéphane Wahnich examined five hundred speeches, texts, declarations, and interviews with Jean-Marie and Marine between 1987 and 2013. They conclude that for all the refurbishments and additions to the FN repertoire, it remains the party of its founder. Marine’s deft semantic strategies — which at once reach out to new voters and appeal to the predilections of the existing electorate — simply conceal this continuity.

Furthermore, the removal of especially extremist figures from official positions does not mean the informal external connections don’t remain — the culture of the far right is distinctly porous. Purges can only go so far without collapsing the party’s entire infrastructure. In other words, one misses vital aspects of the FN if one restricts examination to its formal members and structures. Of all the pressure groups outside the party apparatus trying to influence the FN’s political line, the most active at the moment is Bloc identitaire (BI). This organization includes both unknown young entryists and high-profile figures like Philippe Vardon, an unofficial leader of BI. Kept at arms length by Le Pen senior, BI differs from the FN in promoting French regional identities as part of a broader ethnically based European civilization (in contrast to the FN’s centralized nation-state line). But it converges with the Front in its critique of globalization, and its rejection of immigration and “Islamization.” Though the number of its adherents is unremarkable, BI punches above its weight through agit-prop operations devised for media impact — a 2012 occupation of a mosque roof in Poitiers, public distribution of soups containing pork, and providing unsolicited “anti-scum” security on the metro.

BI is also closely associated with the apocalyptic “great replacement” theory. Ethnic Frenchmen and women, the thinking goes, are being submerged under the demographic weight of non-European immigrants. Suggested solutions usually include expelling unacceptably dark sections of French society. While sympathizing with their concerns, Marine Le Pen distances herself from the ideas of the identitaires even as she welcomes their participation in the FN on an individual basis. Although Philippot has criticized the racialist basis of “the great replacement,” other party bigwigs are influenced to varying degrees by the outlook of the identitaires. For her part, twenty-five-year-old party star Marion Maréchal-Le Pen — the granddaughter of Jean-Marie and the Fifth Republic’s youngest-ever deputy — takes a compromise position, allowing that a population replacement is under way, but arguing it can be resolved by sealing the borders and assimilating immigrants. In fact, there are distinct echoes of “the great replacement” rhetoric in recent FN language regarding the refugee crisis, which has provided a useful rallying point and distraction for the party from the demoralizing Le Pen family feud.

The humanitarian pretenses of the new FN — Marine positions herself in the lineage of the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher, for instance — were dropped in an instant. Instead MLP expressed her physical disgust at the inhabitants of the infamously dire refugee camp Le Jungle, reserving her concern for the local police, who regularly harass the camp’s refugees. In addition to the identitaires, there are other elements, either within the FN or connected to it, that belie the party’s claim to squeaky-clean respectability. For instance, the revolutionary nationalists, represented by the likes of Christian Bouchet — a sort of éminence grise of the tendency’s thought and historiography, who the FN selected in 2013 to lead its list for municipal elections in Nantes, France’s sixth largest city. So too with David Rachline — one of the current FN stars as the twenty-seven-year-old mayor of Fréjus and senator for the Var département in southeast France.

The revolutionary nationalist current subscribes to a differentialist variant of racism, stressing the importance of separation and purity rather than supremacy, exalting Arab nationalism, and vociferously railing against American imperialism and “Zionism.” The latter signifies here not a principled rejection of settler colonialism, racism, and human rights abuses, but rather a shorthand for rehashed antisemitic notions of a worldwide Jewish plot. In this, they are closely aligned with figures like Alain Soral and famous comedian turned full-time racist Dieudonné M’bala Mbala, one of whose daughters is godfathered by none other than Jean-Marie. A sub-strata of revolutionary nationalists who also have a home in the FN are those militants who emerged from the GUD student movement (Groupe union défense), which was launched in 1968. Its former leader, Frédéric Chatillon, is a childhood friend of Marine Le Pen and has recently landed in legal trouble, accused in his capacity as head of the communications agency Riwal of filing fraudulent claims for election campaign materials given to FN candidates.

An intimate of Chatillon and fellow GUDiste from the 1990s, Axel Loustau, is also a stakeholder in Riwal and a treasurer of Jeanne — a micro-party that functions as part of the FN financing structure, and which has also come under investigation. Loustau’s far-right credentials include violent actions during the 2013 Manif pour tous demonstration against gay marriage and threats against journalists. To say the least, the alleged financial improprieties, dubbed “GUD business,” are decidedly inconsistent with the FN’s constant railing against venal, self-interested political elites. Gauchisation As part of his continual denunciations of Philippot and his socio-gaullisme, Jean-Marie never misses a chance to decry the gauchisation (leftward drift) of the FN’s discourse. FN representatives are also constantly tarred with comparisons to the Parti de Gauche ’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon, considered to be at the far left of the electoral political spectrum. The charge of a left turn is not restricted to polemical assaults on the party; it also informs the analysis of many journalists and scholars.

James Shields notably argues that the party has developed “a left-leaning agenda of anticapitalism and social welfare provision.” But this characterization is a misconception. There is certainly plenty in the party’s discourse that would not look out of place in a left program. Rising inequality, precarity, sustained high unemployment levels, a financial system unmoored from the needs of the general population — all are topics that appear in Marine’s public addresses (to be solved by protectionism and a strong state supporting reindustrialization, employment, and growth). Particular scorn is reserved for the neoliberalism of Socialist and conservative governments alike. Moreover, Marine’s book outlining her political vision is peppered with references to left or progressive figures: FDR, Paul Krugman, Jacques Sapir (who has recently recommended that all anti-euro forces join with the FN, which, he assures us, has undeniably changed), Serge Halimi, Pierre Bourdieu, Karl Polanyi, Lenin, Marx. There’s additional ammunition for those positing a leftward shift. Various figures in the party have left backgrounds. And the FN has scored well among demographic groups who historically support left parties.

In the 2012 presidential election, Marine received 33 percent of the working-class vote, and in the 2014 European elections, the FN’s 25 percent first-place tally broke down as follows: 43 percent among manual workers, 38 percent among low-skilled non-manual workers, 37 percent among unemployed voters, and 30 percent of those from low-income households. But winning traditional left constituencies is not the same as being left-wing. Nonna Mayer notes the low number of FN voters who self-identify as left-wing and argues that the strongest characteristics of FN voters remain ethnocentrism and authoritarian attitudes. Like her father, Marine’s supporters are least concerned about social inequalities and injustices, which they see contemptuously as left-wing causes mainly benefiting immigrants. And for all the comparisons to Mélenchon, he and the FN could not have differed more over the recent Air France layoffs and subsequent workers’ reaction. For his part, Mélenchon assailed the media’s outrage at the ripping of an Air France executive’s shirt rather than the violence of laying off 2,900 workers.

In contrast, the FN mumbled about government irresponsibility in letting the situation arise, whilst Philippot complained about unions politicizing the situation. The FN itself, of course, does not claim to be left-wing, but instead neither left nor right. A more precise way of putting it is that the FN has adopted a two-track economic policy in an attempt to appeal to two core elements of its base at once. Marine articulates the statist protectionist track aimed at declining industrial areas, particularly in the north and east. And Marion Maréchal-Le Pen — viewed, in contrast to most of the youth figures in today’s FN, as a potential Trojan horse for Jean-Marie — is the spokesperson for the low tax, minimal-state liberalism that appeals to the party’s middle-class demographic in the southeast. In recent weeks, with attacks on its purported leftism (particularly from Sarkozy’s Republicans) taking a toll, FN discourse has been leaning hard toward the latter line in an attempt to reassure bosses and management.

Looking Ahead “This,” Marine Le Pen declared earlier this year, “is the Front’s moment.” And indeed, both Marine and the party as a whole are in a strong position ahead of regional elections next month and presidential elections in 2017. Yet it remains to be seen how much energy will be expended on the protracted Le Pen feud, and how it will impact the FN’s electoral strength and political culture. It may be that the party continues to triumph in a political environment that — in light of the gloomy economic picture in France and Europe, as well as the renewed impetus for the language of war and suspicion the tragic attacks in Paris have provided — now accepts many of its presuppositions. On the other hand, de-demonization could deliver sharply declining returns, the FN could come up against the limits of insurgent populist parties, or seemingly slight internal fractures could develop into noticeable gulfs. But uncertainty is no reason for complacency. Even in the nadir of its electoral fortunes, even when its momentum was seemingly neutralized or reversed, the FN has still shown itself adept at shaping French public life for the worse. If you like this article, please subscribe or donate .

11.23.15 Jean-Marie Le Pen and daughter Marine split Front National over 'anti-Semitic joke' | Daily Mail Online Share this article Share Thousands of French Jews were sent to German concentration camps during the war, where most were murdered. A spokesman for SOS Racism, a leading Paris civil rights group, described M Le Pen's pun as 'the worst kind of anti-Semitic filth'. Marine Le Pen (pictured, right, in 2011) said her father (left) had made a 'political error' but that the 'meaning given to his comments is a malicious interpretation' He said the group would file a legal complaint against M Le Pen, who already has numerous convictions for racism and anti-Semitism, this week. France's Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples, also said it would lodge a complaint, calling M Le Pen 'an authentic anti-Semite'. M Le Pen handed over the reins of the FN to his daughter, Marine, in 2011, and she has pledged to soften its image.

When asked about one of his party's critics - the Jewish singer Patrick Bruel (pictured) - Mr Le Pen said he would be part of a 'batch next time', while hinting at the word 'oven' Although M Le Pen retains significant influence, and Mlle Le Pen remains very loyal to him, other party members attacked him today. FN vice-president Louis Aliot, who lives with Mlle Le Pen, said it was 'a bad phrase' which was also 'politically stupid and disappointing'. Gilbert Collard, an FN-affiliated MP, said it was time for the party founder to 'accept [M Le Pen's] retirement'. Mlle Le Pen said the comment had been misinterpreted, but added that for an experienced politician like her father 'not to have foreseen how this phrase would be interpreted is a political mistake the Front National is [now] paying for.' Earlier M Le Pen had said: 'If there are people in my camp that have interpreted my comments in this way, they are nothing but imbeciles.' He denied being anti-Jewish, saying the words he used had 'no anti-Semitic connotation', except for 'political enemies or idiots'.

He made it clear that the offending video had now been removed from the web. M Le Pen, who once described the Nazi gas chambers as a 'detail' of history, was runner up in the French presidential elections of 2002. Read more: France's far-right leading family is in a family feud FacebookEmail Twitter Google+ LinkedIn Pinterest France's far-right leading family is in a family feud LISBON, Portugal — Family ties are looking a little strained within the father-and-daughter team heading up France's radical right-wing. "Marine Le Pen wants me dead," Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 86-year-old Post to Facebook France's far-right leading family is in a family feud LISBON, Portugal — Family ties are looking a little strained within the father-and-daughter team heading up France's radical right-wing. "Marine Le Pen wants me dead," Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 86-year-old Check out this story on USATODAY.com: CancelSend A link has been sent to your friend's email address. Posted! A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.

8 To find out more about Facebook commenting please read the Conversation Guidelines and FAQs France's far-right leading family is in a family feud Paul Ames, GlobalPost Published 12:32 p.m. ET April 13, 2015 | Updated 12:54 p.m. ET April 13, 2015 French far-right Front National leader Marine Le Pen is kissed by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, after being re-elected as president of the party during its 15th congress in Lyon, central France, on Nov. 30, 2014. Marine Le Pen has launched an all-out offensive against her father, the party founder, saying on April 8, 2015, she will oppose his candidacy in upcoming elections and condemning as "political suicide" his repeated comments that the Nazi gas chambers were a "detail in history." (Photo: Laurent Cipriani, AP) LISBON, Portugal — Family ties are looking a little strained within the father-and-daughter team heading up France's radical right wing.

"Marine Le Pen wants me dead," Jean-Marie Le Pen, 86, the founder and honorary president of the National Front party, said last week in Paris. Daughter Marine Le Pen has run the party since her father stepped down in 2011. "Jean-Marie Le Pen has entered on a downward spiral heading to ... political suicide," she said in a statement last week, announcing disciplinary proceedings and urging him to retire. The family feud, triggered by the older Le Pen's latest incendiary comments on race, immigration and World War II, has dominated French politics this past week. The press has drawn analogies with Shakespeare's King Lear — where the aging monarch is driven mad as his daughters scheme to gain control of his estate. A third player in the Le Pen family drama — the National Front's rising star, 25-year-old lawmaker Marion Marechal-Le Pen — has sided with auntie Marine, having previously been a firm favorite of grandpa. "Only those close to you can betray you," complained the Le Pen senior. Since taking charge of the party, Marine Le Pen has distanced herself from some of her father's hard-line positions. That has helped her win over voters disaffected with mainstream politicians.

She led the Front to first place in elections to the European Parliament a year ago and made significant gains in local elections last month. Marine Le Pen's grand plan is to further expand the Front's support base so she can mount a challenge for the French presidency in 2017. But Dad is in the way. The daughter's efforts to reach out to more moderate voters — a process the French press calls the "detoxification" or "de-demonization" of the National Front — have been undermined by her father's outbursts. In recent interviews, Le Pen senior repeated previous comments that the Nazi gas chambers were a mere "detail of history" and defended Marshal Philippe Petain, head of the French government that collaborated with Nazi occupiers during World War II. He went on to call for an alliance between France and Russia to defend the "white world" and claimed that France was "ruled by immigrants," singling out politicians with foreign roots, including Spanish-born Prime Minister Manuel Valls. "Valls has been French for 30 years, I've been French for 1,000 years," Jean-Marie Le Pen told the far-right magazine Rivarol.

"Has this immigrant really changed?" Marine Le Pen has responded by seeking to remove her father as the party's candidate in elections later this year for president of the southern region that includes the city of Marseilles and the French Riviera. There are calls within the party for him to retire or risk expulsion. In a typically combative mood, Jean-Marie Le Pen has vowed to fight on. He warns attempts to marginalize him risk "dynamiting" the party. Without him as the figurehead, he suggests, the Front will implode. His daughter has other headaches. The Paris daily Le Monde revealed Friday that Marine Le Pen and two other leading members of her party are being investigated for financial irregularities relating to campaign funding. The revelations could have a serious impact on the clean-hands image she presents to voters disenchanted by sleaze scandals affecting the governing Socialists and the main center-right opposition party led by former president Nicolas Sarkozy. Political experts are divided on the electoral impact of the father-daughter spat for a party that's big on family values. Some believe Marine Le Pen will emerge strengthened if she succeeds in ridding the party of her father's extremist views. Others feel she risks alienating hardcore National Front supporters who revere her father.

"If the NF wants to make a lasting mark on French political life, it has to shed its extreme-right past," Socialist lawmaker Malek Boutih told Le Figaro newspaper. "Marine Le Pen's strategy is reaching a turning point: Will she drop the extreme wing, the core of NF activists? Is strong enough for that?" Marine Le Pen's dilemma is shared by the leaders of other far-right parties in Europe that are forced to choose between reaching out to mainstream voters or remaining loyal to their radical core. Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch anti-immigration Freedom Party, has seen his support decline since he was filmed leading party activists in a chant demanding fewer Moroccans in the country at a rally last year. The leader of Italy's Northern League party Matteo Salvini told supporters the authorities should send in bulldozers to "raise to the ground" beneath gypsy camps in the country. His comments won lots of social-media praise from neo-Nazis and other radical activists, but earned Salvini a potentially costly condemnation from the Vatican. Jean-Marie Le Pen has survived family feuds before.

When he divorced Marine's mother, Pierrette Le Pen, in the 1980s, the far-right leader reportedly refused to pay alimony, suggesting she could earn money working as a cleaner. His ex responded by posing for French Playboy in an all-revealing maid's outfit. The episode earned Jean-Marie Le Pen widespread ridicule, but his political career soon rebounded. The article originally appeared on the website of GlobalPost. Its content was created separately to USA TODAY. MORE FROM GLOBAL POST Marine Le Pen: Her heart still belongs to Daddy | Peter Beaumont | From the Observer | The Guardian The Observer profile Marine Le Pen: Her heart still belongs to Daddy She says she will modernise France's Front National, once led by her father, Jean-Marie, but her critics say that she has inherited his bigotry and intolerance Share on Messenger Close Seven years ago, Marine Le Pen, youngest daughter of the French racist demagogue Jean-Marie , spoke at the conference of the Front National in Nice about her plans to transform her father's party.

She aimed, she declared, to make it more attractive to "young people and women", to "normalise" a party associated – through her father's pronouncements – with outright bigotry, Holocaust-denial and antisemitism. To "de-demonise" it as Marine would later say. Make it less "tacky". Marine was speaking in the wake of the political upset the previous year when her father shocked France's political establishment by gaining the second-highest number of votes in the first round of the 2002 presidential election behind Jacques Chirac , ejecting the socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, from the second round of voting. Now Jean-Marie is retiring, shuffling off the stage of the party he founded in 1972. And the chic and telegenic Marine is the runaway favourite to take over the family franchise for xenophobic politics at a party congress in Tours that begins on 15 January. Her emergence as the favourite is a mark of her success since that conference in Nice in 2003 in overturning the old guard of her party, represented by the only other aspirant for her father's job, Bruno Gollnisch.

In the last few months, Marine, who has said she intends to widen the appeal of her party from the right to "all French people", has pursued a relentless campaign. She has travelled the length and breadth of France to persuade the party's faithful she should lead it. And the French political classes, who have long treated her party as something foul smelling, have been compelled to take notice of her. Twice in the last year, she has been invited on to France's flagship politics programme A vous de juger (You, the Judge), while she has been interviewed by Time, Newsweek and the New York Times. All have been interested in a single question: whether the twice-divorced single mother – who named one of her daughters Jehanne, the original name of Joan of Arc, the symbol of her father's movement – has transformed the Front National. It is a moot point. Under the tutelage of the 42-year-old lawyer, town councillor in Hénin-Beaumont and Eurosceptic MP, the party has jettisoned the kind of neofascist views her father once represented when he complained about too many blacks in the French national football team or described the gas chambers at Auschwitz as a "detail of history".

Instead, in common with other political leaders on Europe's far right, Marine Le Pen has latched on to a rising, right-wing, populist sentiment that describes Islam as predominantly the enemy within, a view shared, according to a recent poll, by 42% of French people. Marine Le Pen has spliced that message to a second, far more personal narrative of the kind that has been deployed so effectively by such figures as Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement in the US – playing on her image as the political outsider, loathed by the establishment but in touch with the concerns of ordinary people. While extremely private about her present relationship, Le Pen has had no qualms about playing heavily on her own history (divorced mother of three) to show how "modern" her experience is in comparison with that of her father and his cronies, rooted in the same social concerns of the largely working-class electorate to whom Marine appeals. She has spoken, too, about the misery of her parents' divorce when she was 19.

That concluded with her mother, Pierrette, fleeing to the United States with her father's biographer and posing for a spread in Playboy wearing only an apron and wielding a mop, revenge for Jean-Marie's angry declaration that she "should clean houses" rather than demand alimony from him. In recent interviews, Marine has presented herself as her father's unwilling heir who has found herself "in politics, when most of my life I tried to escape from that". She has made much, too, of how being her father's daughter has made her a victim, describing the bomb attack at the family home in Paris in 1976 when she was eight years old and how both as a student and a young lawyer no one wished to be associated with the woman called Le Pen. It is a formula that appears to be succeeding, according to a survey last month which placed Marine's approval rating at 27% (although only 13% would actually vote for the party), far more than Papa Le Pen could ever muster. But like her claimed transformation of the party, her positioning as the reluctant inheritor of her father's legacy, which she described as like catching "a political virus", is little more than a public relations exercise.

In reality, Marine has long been a leading activist in her father's party which she joined in 1986 aged 18, for a while heading its youth wing, appropriately named Generations Le Pen, appearing on French television in a party capacity for the first time in 2002. During the 1990s, Marine was also one of two leaders with Gollnisch of a faction named Tout sauf Mégret (Anybody but Mégret) which was opposed to Le Pen's deputy, Bruno Mégret, who was then plotting against her father. In 2007, indeed, she managed her father's electoral campaign. Some political analysts have noted that her real aim is to bring the party into coalition with the mainstream right and closer to the centre of power, just as Geert Wilders has managed to do in Holland. And it is, perhaps, just that which marks the biggest difference with her father, a figure usually more happy grandstanding at the edges of the political debate. All of which leads to the question, what does this allegedly "more moderate" and "softer" face of French extremism really represent?

While Marine insists that the existence of the gas chambers is a non-negotiable fact of history, and that her party is less extreme than the Tea Party, she has not, however, disavowed her father's most repellent statements, instead defending them. Challenged by the Independent last year about her father's comments that immigration was a Jewish conspiracy designed to bring down France, the best Marine could manage was that her father "used a few provocative remarks to make himself heard when the political and media classes would give no space to our ideas". In an interview in the far-right magazine Rivarol six years ago, Marine was no less evasive, defending her refusal to join the "witch hunt" against her present rival Gollnisch for doubting the existence of the gas chambers, while describing him as a French "patriot". While she has stopped public utterance, at least, of a handful of the most obnoxious of ideas that infected her father's party, Marine's Front National still stands for many of the same things.

Anti-immigration, hostile to the European Union (which she compared to the Soviet Union), it favours trade protection over globalisation and a policy of "national preference" ring-fencing jobs, benefits and public housing for French citizens over outsiders. But it is over the issue of Islam that Marine has shown herself truly her father's daughter, prompting widespread outrage last month when, on A vous de juger, she compared Muslims praying in the streets to the "Nazi occupation", an outburst calculated, some say, to reassure hardliners thinking of voting for Gollnisch. Marine, like her fellow travellers in Europe's increasingly vocal and numerous far right, denies she is "anti-Islam" or even racist. Instead, she wheels out the most popular of the far right's current straw men: that she is simply against those Islamic "radicals" who would impose sharia on the French majority. And while few see Marine as a serious political contender in her own right, her recent success in reaching outside the core of Front National support has already had a profound impact on the country's politics. Marine Le Pen has so alarmed conservative Nicolas Sarkozy – currently enjoying abysmal ratings – that he has tacked ever further to the right.

The rising popularity of the Front National has been blamed for Sarkozy's clumsy "war on crime" that saw the expulsion of thousands of Roma last year, while a third of the members of his own party, the UMP, would now not oppose an electoral alliance that has been for decades unthinkable. With presidential elections due in 2012, Marine has warned she will make her country's political classes "tremble". Some seem to be trembling already. French far right party punishes Jean-Marie Le Pen's allies | Fox News French far right party punishes Jean-Marie Le Pen's allies Published May 02, 2016 Facebook 0 Twitter 0 Email Print France's far-right National Front party leader Marine Le Pen addresses her supporters as part of a May Day party lunch in Paris, France, Sunday, May 1st, 2016. On background is a portrait of Joan of Arc — the party's patron saint . Jean-Marie Le Pen, a founder and the decades-long leader of France's far-right National Front, declared Sunday that his daughter, Marine Le Pen, the party president who has expelled him, will lose next year's presidential race if she fails to unify the party.

(AP Photo/Kamil Zihnioglu) (The Associated Press) PARIS – Marine Le Pen's far right National Front has punished two leading party figures for attending a Paris rally led by her father. The party announced Monday that Bruno Gollnisch and Marie-Christine Arnautu were removed from the anti-immigration party's decision-making political bureau because of their "unacceptable" participation in an event led by people "violently hostile" to the National Front. Marine Le Pen expelled her father, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, from the National Front last year for comments diminishing Nazi gas chambers. The Le Pens held dueling May Day rallies on Sunday, both railing against foreigners in France. Jean-Marie Le Pen warned that his daughter wouldn't achieve her dream of the presidency if she doesn't re-unite the party. Advertisement Marine and Jean-Marie Le Pen fight over French National Front - BBC News Marine and Jean-Marie Le Pen fight over French National Front By Jamie Coomarasamy Presenter, Newshour 22 May 2015 Image copyright Reuters Forget Ed and David, Bill and Hillary, George, George W and Jeb.

For anyone fascinated with dynastic politics, the relationship between Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen is the gift that keeps on giving. And it's been particularly generous in recent weeks. The 86-year-old founder of France's National Front (FN) has rarely been out of the headlines - or the thoughts of his daughter, the party's current leader. But not in a good way. "I had a knot in my stomach every time I heard that Jean-Marie Le Pen was giving an interview," Marine Le Pen told Le Parisien last week. "I'm sleeping better now than I have for some time." It took an act of political parricide for her to murder sleeplessness. Earlier this month, Marine Le Pen suspended her father from the party he founded in 1972 and stripped him of his post of honorary president. Image copyright Reuters Image caption Marine Le Pen and her father in 1974 She'd already admonished him last year, after he included a well-known Jewish singer in what he called an "ovenload" of artists, but when he recently repeated his notorious comment (for which he'd been prosecuted) that the Nazi gas chambers were "a detail of history", she decided that enough was enough.

In reaction, her father threw his toys out of the pram, suggesting that his daughter should change her surname and threatening not to vote for her in the 2017 election. He appears to have changed his mind about that for now, but he might change it again. It's been hard to keep up. He's also announced that he's forming a new faction within the party. Underneath the fast-moving family drama is a longer-term question: can the FN maintain its march from the fringes of the French political system to the very centre of the French Republic? Can an insurgent force become the party of power, not through a revolution, but through the ballot box? To a certain extent, of course, it already has. I was a student in France in the mid-1980s, when the FN made its first breakthrough in national elections. Media captionHugh Schofield reports on the feud between Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine Two years after securing 10 seats in the European Parliament, the party won almost 10% of the vote in the 1986 French parliamentary elections - and 35 seats in the National Assembly.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was no longer a sinister-looking fringe candidate with an eye patch, but an eye-catching politician, giving tub-thumping speeches that warned of the threat from mass immigration. The French establishment closed ranks against him; keeping him at a distance, treating him like an unpleasant smell that was best ignored. It didn't work. Inconveniently for the established parties, more and more French voters began to find his analysis and his populist, patriotic appeals rather attractive. Neither the storm created by his gas chamber and other anti-Semitic comments nor a power struggle, which split the party in two, brought an end to his career. In 2002, I was the BBC's Paris Correspondent during what was Jean-Marie Le Pen's high watermark: his unexpected second place in the first round of the presidential election. As in the UK this year, pollsters and, mea culpa, journalists did not identify what the French electorate was thinking. Clothes pegs The least shy of leaders had attracted what might now be called "shy" Front National voters.

Two weeks later, Socialist supporters - deprived of a left-wing candidate in the run-off - placed clothes pegs (some metaphorical, some real) on their noses and voted for the centre-right candidate, Jacques Chirac; a politician who had once complained of the "the noise and smell" of immigrant households. The FN was unable to build on this success. Mr Le Pen's vote dropped in 2007, and in 2010, he announced he was standing down as party leader. Enter, stage right, his youngest daughter, Marine, who was elected to succeed her father in 2011. She soon set about a process of "detoxification"; weeding out the party's more xenophobic elements in order to broaden its appeal. Image copyright European Photopress Agency Image caption Marion Marechal-Le Pen has been an MP since 2012 and is the honorary chairman of the FN Out went her father's circle, in came a new generation; indeed, new generations. Her 25-year-old niece - Marion Marechal-Le Pen - is the party's rising star. At 22, she became the youngest elected MP in modern French history.

Although opposition to mass immigration and "Islamification" are still high on the party's list of policies, when I met her in her office, towards the end of 2011, Marine Le Pen was keen to emphasise other threats to the French way of life: globalisation, the EU and the euro. Paternal politics It was this approach, she assured me, in her breezily confident manner, that would see her elected president the following year. She wasn't, but her strategy bore fruit. In the 2012 election, Marine Le Pen came third, but with a higher percentage of the vote than her father got in 2002. In last year's European elections, the FN topped the polls - the party's first victory in a national election. So, was this a moment for paternal pride? Not exactly. "Detoxifying" the party may have made it more electable, but it also represents a repudiation of Mr Le Pen leadership.

Image copyright AFP Full name Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen Youngest daughter of FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen In 1976, she survived a bomb attack on the family as they slept in their beds Trained as a lawyer She joined the FN in 1986, joined its executive committee in 2000 and was a vice-president for eight years from 2003 Became president of the FN on 16 January 2011 She stood in the 2012 French presidential election, finishing in third position behind Francois Hollande and incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy So, the man who made his reputation by railing against threats from abroad has increasingly turned his fire on the enemies within, the advisers he blames for leading his daughter astray. As he made clear in a recent interview in the Financial Times, he doesn't see toxicity as a poison to be removed but as the very lifeblood of the party. "If you stop being the devil, if you 'detoxify', then you become the right wing of the centre right," he said.

"There is no longer a raison d'etre for the FN." Or perhaps, more worrying for him, there is no longer a raison d'etre for Jean-Marie Le Pen. Just look at the poll numbers. According to a recent survey by the BVA polling company, Jean-Marie Le Pen's support among the party faithful has dwindled to single figures, even as his daughter's has soared past 90%. And it doesn't stop there. Last month, she was named one of Time magazine's 100 people of the year . As the party has become part of the mainstream, it has begun treating its founder as the French establishment has always done: an annoying smell it would rather do without. Except the FN hasn't really become part of the establishment.

Image copyright AFP He was FN's first leader when it was founded in 1972 He has run for president five times In 2007, he finished fourth, at the age of 78 years and nine months - making him the oldest candidate for presidential office in French history He led the party until January 2011, when his daughter Marine took over Outspoken and controversial, he is often nicknamed the "Menhir", due to his "granitic nature" On 4 May, he was suspended from FN after failing to attend a party disciplinary hearing for describing the gas chambers used in concentration camps during the Holocaust as a "detail" of history Holds a seat in the European Parliament and a post as a regional councillor in the south of France When I was in Paris in January, reporting on the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo and Jewish supermarket attacks, I was struck by the way that Marine Le Pen was still being sidelined from the national conversation. As more than a million people marched through the streets of Paris on the Sunday after the attacks, in a show of republican solidarity, she was notable by her absence. The politician who might come top in the first round of the 2017 presidential election hadn't been invited.

Perhaps she prefers it that way. The outsider status has served her well so far. And perhaps she's not been entirely unhappy with her father's interventions, which paint her in a more mainstream light. Intentionally or not, Jean-Marie Le Pen is part of the policy of "detoxification" he apparently despises. France's National Front party expels founder Jean-Marie Le Pen | World news | The Guardian Jean-Marie Le Pen France's National Front party expels founder Jean-Marie Le Pen Far-right veteran excluded from party after high-profile feud with his daughter and party leader, Marine, who decided his views were too extreme French far-right National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen arrives for a news briefing at the end of a hearing of the executive committee of the party in Nanterre, near Paris.

Photograph: Christian Hartmann/Reuters Agence France-Presse in Paris Thursday 20 August 2015 15.02 EDT Last modified on Thursday 20 August 2015 15.33 EDT Close This article is 1 year old Jean-Marie Le Pen, France’s elderly far-right veteran, has been excluded from the party he co-founded, the Front National (FN), after a high-profile feud with his daughter and party leader, Marine . The party said 87-year-old Le Pen would be “notified shortly” of the decision, which came after the FN’s executive committee questioned him for hours and voted to exclude him over inflammatory comments that had proved too much for his daughter, pushing him out of a party he led for close to four decades. A gifted orator with a taste for controversy, Le Pen had for years been an irritating thorn in the side of his daughter, who took over the party from him in 2011 and had tried to steer it away from the overt racism and anti-semitism of its past.

The final straw came in April when the elder Le Pen rehashed familiar comments about gas chambers being a “detail” of history and said France should get along with Russia to save the “white world”. Marine Le Pen openly split with her father, saying he was committing “political suicide”, and later suspended him from the party. But the octogenarian firebrand showed little interest in going quietly, successfully challenging his suspension in court and barging onto the stage during a major FN rally in May. In a sign of how deep the rift with his daughter had become, he told a local newspaper on Sunday that he would not vote for her in 2017’s presidential elections.

Question: Jean-Marie and daughter Marine Le Pen are leading figures in French extreme?
Answer: Politics