French far-right leader Marine Le Pen pays tribute to her politically polarizing father

PARIS — French far-right leader Marine Le Pen paid tribute Wednesday to her father Jean-Marie, calling the founder of the National Front, who has died aged 96, a “warrior” in politics as their relationship was marked by notoriously harsh disputes amid her efforts to make the party more mainstream.

In a post on social media platform X, Le Pen wrote: “A venerable age had taken the warrior away but given us back our father," suggesting she was able to reconcile with him.

Jean-Marie, who has three daughters, including Marine, the youngest, was a polarizing figure, convicted multiple times of antisemitism, discrimination and inciting racial violence.

“Many people he loved are waiting for him up there. Many who love him mourn him here below,” Le Pen wrote. “Fair winds and following seas, Papa!”

Jean-Marie Le Pen's death was announced on Tuesday when his daughter was on her way back from the French territory of Mayotte, in the Indian Ocean, which was hit by a devastating cyclone in December.

Marine Le Pen's legal issues

Marine Le Pen is widely considered as one of France's top contenders for the next presidential election scheduled in 2027. She was runner-up to President Emmanuel Macron twice in previous elections.

Yet her political future in part depends on the verdict to be rendered by a Paris court on March 31 over charges of embezzlement of European Parliament Funds. The court could declare her ineligible to seek public office if she was to be found guilty.

Le Pen and other party officials are accused of having used money intended for European Union parliamentary aides to pay instead staff who worked for the party between 2004 and 2016, violating the 27-nation bloc’s regulations.

Anti-far right gatherings

Thousands of demonstrators gathered on the Republic Plaza in Paris on Tuesday evening to celebrate the death of the far-right politician. The crowd could be seen dancing and chanting: “Happy New Year, Jean-Marie is dead.”

Similar gatherings took place in other French cities, including Lyon and Marseille.

French anti-racist group SOS Racisme said Jean-Marie Le Pen spent his life promoting the far right through “racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and Holocaust denial.” The group also paid tribute in a statement to “generations of activists who have given their time, youth and energy to fight the National Front and its ideas.”

Father-daughter public disputes

In an interview in 1987, Jean-Marie referred to the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail in World War II history.”

He repeated the remark in 2015, saying he “did not at all” regret it, triggering the ire of his daughter, by then the party leader, seeking to distance herself from her father’s extremist image. That year, he was kicked out of the party, later renamed the National Rally, as part of the younger Le Pen's efforts to transform it into one of France’s most powerful political forces.

At the time, Jean-Marie publicly denounced a “felony” and asked his daughter to “give back her name," arguing she should not use “Le Pen” anymore. He also launched legal proceedings to challenge his exclusion that ultimately failed.

“I had such profound disagreements on that topic with my own father that I had to exclude him from the movement,” Marine Le Pen told BFM television in May 2024. "It was complicated for me emotionally, but I did it."

Jean-Marie Le Pen's funeral will take place on Saturday in his birth town of La Trinite-sur-Mer, in the western Brittany region.