Jean-Marie Le Pen, Co-Founder of National Front, Is Ousted From French Far-Right Party

Jean-Marie Le Pen on Thursday in Nanterre, France. 

His expulsion followed a long feud with his daughter Marine,

 who now leads the National Front. CreditChristian Hartmann/Reuters

NANTERRE, France — Jean-Marie Le Pen, a co-founder of France’s 

far-right National Front, was expelled from the party on Thursday 

after he repeatedly angered its current leader, his daughter Marine, 

by reviving the party’s anti-Semitic past, which she is eager to shed.

The party’s executive board voted to kick him out after hearing three hours 

of arguments from Mr. Le Pen, 87, a former paratrooper who for years has 

symbolized the most retrograde strain of French politics, including hatred 

of immigrants and nostalgia for the days of colonial rule in Algeria.

Under his daughter’s leadership, the National Front has broken into the political mainstream, and Mr. Le Pen has increasingly become an embarrassment to her, 

especially after repeating his familiar views on the Holocaust. 

He has repeatedly told interviewers that the gas chambers were a 

“detail of history” and has said the wartime collaborator Marshal Philippe Pétain 

was not a “traitor.”

The Le Pens have been tussling in public for five months, with Ms. Le Pen 

saying in April that she was “in profound disagreement” with her father after 

his latest remarks on the Holocaust. 

France has been treated since then to a father-daughter political feud of rare 

virulence, one that at first riveted the French public but more recently has 

seemed to irritate it.

At a special meeting Ms. Le Pen called in May, party leaders suspended her 

father’s membership, but his lawyers later persuaded a judge to 

order him reinstated. 

She won an important round in July when party activists, in a mail ballot, 

voted by 94 percent to eliminate his title of honorary party president; that ballot, 

too, was annulled by a judge.

Mr. Le Pen told a French television station last week that he was “deeply shocked, 

hurt, and the victim of a political witch-hunt,” and would not support his daughter 

in the 2017 presidential election. His lawyer, Frédéric Joachim, told French radio 

that the “National Front, in killing its own founder, has in a certain way 

committed suicide.”

The party issued a terse statement on Thursday, saying simply that its executive 

board had “deliberated and decided, by the required majority, on the exclusion 

of Jean-Marie Le Pen as a member of the National Front.”

Mr. Le Pen had vigorously contested the move in advance, saying the board was 

not qualified to judge him because they are “paid” by the party. 

He arrived at the party headquarters here in the western suburbs of Paris 

in a black limousine with tinted windows, and stumbled in front of a crowd 

of waiting journalists before disappearing into the bland three-story building.

Mr. Le Pen regularly ran for president under the party’s banner, and managed 

to slightly outpoll the Socialist candidate in 2002, but he never spoke for more 

than a noisy fringe in France. He proudly advertised his friendships with some 

of the most notorious surviving collaborators fromWorld War II, relationships 

that marginalized him and his party.

His daughter, by contrast, has led the party to impressive scores in elections 

for the European Parliament last year and municipal elections this year.

As he stepped out of the car on Thursday, Mr. Le Pen muttered that 

“only foot soldiers” would be present at the meeting. 

His daughter did not attend, nor did her chief aide, Florian Philippot, 

whose top-flight education and toned-down rhetoric have made him seem 

the antithesis of Mr. Le Pen and his friends. Her father’s expulsion marks 

an important step in Ms. Le Pen’s four-year effort to “de-Satanize” the party.

On Thursday, Bruno Gollnisch, an old ally of Mr. Le Pen, stood outside the 

party headquarters and angrily told journalists that he saw nothing in 

Mr. Le Pen’s recent statements that was incompatible with the National Front.

Later Mr. Gollnisch, a member of the European Parliament, told reporters 

the board’s decision to expel Mr. Le Pen was “pitiless” and “unjustified,” 

and called it “the manifestation of an incredible ingratitude.”

http://www.nytimes.com