Le Pen, Jean-Marie

Le Pen, Jean-Marie (1928- ), French politician, leader of the far-right French political party, the National Front. Le Pen was born on June 20, 1928, in La Trinité-sur-Mer, Brittany, the son of a fisherman. Educated by the Jesuits at Vannes, he went to Paris to study law, becoming president of a right-wing student group while an undergraduate. After finishing his studies, he joined the French Foreign Legion and was sent to Indochina in 1954 and to Algeria in 1957. He was elected to the National Assembly in 1958. At first associated with a loosely knit group led by Pierre Poujade and intended to represent small shopkeepers, businessmen, and artisans wary of fiscal structures that threatened their livelihoods, Le Pen remained in the Assembly until 1962, when he lost his seat in that year’s parliamentary elections. He became founding president of the National Front in 1972, but it was only in 1983 that his party scored a sufficiently notable success in municipal elections to become a prominent, if highly controversial, element in French political life.

Le Pen was elected to the European Parliament at Strasbourg in 1984. A temporary adoption of a system of proportional representation allowed him to return to the National Assembly in 1986 at the head of 32 deputies. When proportional representation was abandoned in 1988, the National Front lost all its seats. As candidate for the presidency in 1988, Le Pen won 14.4 per cent of the vote. Seven years later, he obtained more than 15 per cent. He was re-elected to the European Parliament in 1989 and 1994. The failure of mainstream French politicians, whether left or right, to solve France’s problems of continual recession and rising unemployment, helped Le Pen find support for his denunciations of the French political establishment and immigration into France from the Near East and Africa.

Dismissed as a demagogue by his critics, he won 15 per cent of the overall vote in the presidential campaign of 1995. In June 1995 his followers performed well in municipal elections, winning the mayoralty of Toulon. However, Le Pen was bitterly criticized for making racist comments about the French national football team in June 1996 and for leading racist demonstrations after a murder in Marseille in September. In February 1997 the National Front won control of the town of Vitrolles in southern France, its fourth municipal victory. The party’s congress at Strasbourg in March was marked by large counter-demonstrations and violence. By this time, Le Pen was shifting his criticisms from immigration to economic globalization, the United States, and Anglo-Saxon free-market liberalism.

In April 1998 a French court deprived Le Pen of his right to be elected to office in France for two years, after finding him guilty of attacking a Socialist candidate in the 1997 legislative elections. The victory of the multiracial French national football team in the July 1998 World Cup severely undermined the racist elements of the National Front platform. Following another court decision in November 1998 banning Le Pen from office for a year for the same offence as before, the National Front faced serious internal divisions and a return to the political margins. In January 1999 Le Pen was further weakened politically when a breakaway rival Front National convened under the leadership of his former deputy Bruno Mègret after Le Pen refused to stand down as leader. In May 1999 a court awarded Le Pen sole right to the party name and funds.

In October 2000 his 1998 sentence was adjudged to also ban him from his seat in the European Parliament after it had been upheld by the French Council of State; the ban was overturned by the European Court of Justice in January 2001. The split in the far right vote resulted in the loss of the mayoralty of Toulon in regional elections in March. Le Pen was candidate for the National Front in the April 2002 presidential election. In a major political upset, he managed to win enough votes in the first round to beat the incumbent prime minister Lionel Jospin to the all-important second place, leading to a run-off in May against President Jacques Chirac. Although he marginally increased his share of the vote, he was overwhelmingly defeated by Chirac, who attracted the left's support to ensure Le Pen's defeat. Le Pen’s performance at the 2007 presidential election was lacklustre by comparison—he came fourth, winning only 10 per cent of the vote in the first round.