Will Jean-Marie Le Pen, 87, start a new party against his daughter Marine ?
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder and former president of France’s National Front, will be charged for public antisemitic remarks he made earlier this year, according to the French ministry of Justice. While interviewed on April 2 on BFMTV, a television channel, he insisted that « gas chambers are just a minor point in WW2 history, unless one says that WW2 is just a minor point of the history of gas chambers ». Under French law, such as statement can be construed as Holocaust denial, a criminal offense. Le Pen has repeatedly expressed similar views for about twenty five years. In 1991, he was sentenced to a heavy fine – the equivalent of 183 000 euros in curent terms – for his very first « minor point » statement.
Jean-Marie Le Pen sees such prosecutions as a further instance of the « legal persecution » he has been subjected to throughout his political carreer. Yet a French court vindicated on July 8 his claim that his daughter Marine Le Pen, the current National Front president, is not legally empowered to convene a party congress in order to strip him of his honorary presidency and possibly to expell him altogether. According to the court, the National Front statutes are worded in such a way that only a global congress comprising of all 51 551 paying members, can make such decisions.
Indeed, an open war has erupted between father and daughter. Jean-Marie Le Pen has been increasingly critical of Marine, who is eager to act as a responsible and law-abiding politician rather than as an extremist demagogue, and is distancing herself from antisemitism or Holocaust denial. Marine, in turn, has charged him of deliberately sabotageing the National Front’s new image and preventing her to win either the forthcoming regional next December or the 2017 presidential and parliamentary elections.
Jean-Marie Le Pen was supposed, in spite of his age – he is 87 -, to lead the National Front list in the Provence-Côte d’Azur (Paca) region in South-Eastern France in the December elections. In the wake of the BFMTV interview case, Marine replaced him by the young – she is only 25 -, alluring and charismatic niece Marion Maréchal-Le Pen. The move was initially seen as a compromise, since Marion was supposed to remain in afectionate terms with her grandfather Jean-Marie and to be slightly more rightwing than Marine. However, it soon became apparent that Marion was following Marine’s party line. In particular, she undertook to discard veteran National Front militants as candidates on her list and to coopt classic conservatives in place of them.
As a result, many rejected candidates are now talking about launching their own list against both Marine and Marion. Moreover, Jean-Marie said on July 20 that he was « considering » joining them. Some obervers think that a dissident National Front can weaken Marine Le Pen’s party just enough to deprive it of clearcut victories in many constituencies.
© Michel Gurfinkiel, 2015