Jean Marie Le Pen, Father of French Far-Right Leader Marine Le Pen Passes Away

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s far-right party, the National Front, has died at the age of 96. Jean Marie Le Pen who was elected as France’s youngest MP in 1956 is the father of  Marine Le Pen, current Far-Right Leader who was responsible for the fall of Prime Minister Michel Bannier’s government.

Early Political Career

Jean-Marie Le Pen started his political career as the head of the student union in Toulouse. He became president of the Association Corporative des étudiants en droit, an association of law students whose main occupation was to engage in street brawls against the “Cocos” (communists).

in 1956, he was elected to the French National Assembly as a member of UDCA populist party becoming one of the youngest French parliamentarians ever. Le pen became the General Secretary of the National Front of Combatants, a veterans’ organization in 1957, he was also the first French politician to nominate a Muslim candidate, Ahmed Djebbour, an Algerian, elected as deputy of Paris.

Le pen was reelected to the National Assembly as a member of the Centre National des Indépendants et Paysans (CNIP) party, led by Antoine Pinay in 1958.

Millitary Career

Jean Marie Le Pen enlisted in the Foreign Legion of the French Army in 1954 and arrived in Indochina after the 1954 battle of Dien Bien Phu, which had been lost by France and which prompted French Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France to put an end to the Indochina war at the Geneva Conference.

Le Pen was then sent to Suez in 1956, but arrived only after the cease-fire. In 1953, a year before the beginning of the Algerian War, in In 1953, a year before the beginning of the Algerian War, Le Pen contacted then French President Vincent Auriol, who approved Le Pen’s proposed volunteer disaster relief project after a flood in the Netherlands. Within two days, there were 40 volunteers from his university, a group that would later help victims of an earthquake in Italy.

In 1957, he was then sent to Algeria as an intelligence officer where he was been accused of having engaged in torture. Le Pen has however denied these accusations.

Founding The National Front Party

In October 1972,  Jean-Marie Le Pen and a group of political activists founded the French National Front (Front National, FN), a far-right political party with the aim of uniting various nationalist and far-right factions in France under a single political umbrella.

Le Pen’s party managed to increase its support in the 1980s, starting in the municipal elections of 1983 obtaining 16 seats in the 1984 European elections before securing 35 seats in the French assembly in 1986.

Le Pen ran in the French presidential elections in 1974, 1988, 1995, 2002, and 2007 under the National Front Party he founded but was unsuccessful on all occasions.

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