Jean-Marie Le Pen

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Jean-Marie Le Pen (born June 20, 1928) is a French far-right nationalist politician, president of the National Front party and perennial candidate for the presidential elections. He advocates immigration restrictions, the death penalty, incentives for homemakers [1], compulsory military service, censorship of the arts and euroskepticism. He has been convicted for Holocaust denial. [2]

Le Pen has run in several French presidential elections, qualifying for the second-round of the 2002 election, challenging incumbent president Jacques Chirac. He won an upset victory in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections, beating left-wing candidate Lionel Jospin. Le Pen announced he seeks the 2007 presidency, but has challenges against moderate conservative Nicolas Sarkozy.

Le Pen focuses on issues related to immigration, the European Union, traditional culture, and France's troubled economy.

1 Biography
2 Political career
3 Issues
- 3.1 Approbation on the Right
4 Notes
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Biography

Le Pen was born at La Trinité-sur-Mer, a small Breton harbour, as the son of a fisherman. Le Pen was orphaned as an adolescent; his father's boat was blown up by a mine. Today he is a wealthy businessman, mostly due to a large inheritance received in 1977 from a political supporter.

Le Pen studied political science and law at Paris II, and was at one time the president of an association of law students in Paris (the CORPO). His graduate studies thesis, presented in 1971 by Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jean-Loup Vincent, is entitled Le courant anarchiste en France depuis 1945 or "The anarchist movement in France since 1945".

From his first marriage (June 29, 1960 - 1985 or 1986) to Pierrette Lalanne, he has three daughters and nine granddaughters. The youngest of his daughters, Marine Le Pen, is a senior officer of the Front National.

On May 31, 1991, Jean-Marie Le Pen married Jeanne-Marie Paschos ("Jany"). Born in 1933, Paschos was previously married to Belgian businessman Jean Garnier. Pascho's father was a Greek merchant, and her mother is partly of Dutch descent.

[edit] Political career

A decorated veteran of the French Foreign Legion in Indochina (1953), Suez (1956), and Algeria (1957), Le Pen started his political career in Toulouse when he became the head of the students union. In 1953 he called Vincent Auriol, President of the Republic at the time, and by using his former status he got approval for a volunteer rescue project to carry out disaster relief after a flood in the Netherlands. Within two days there were forty volunteers from his university, a group that would go on to help victims of an earthquake in Italy. In Paris, 1956, he became the youngest member of the French National Assembly, with the party of Pierre Poujade.

In 1957, he became the General Secretary of the National Front of Combatants (FNC) as well as the first French politician to present a candidate of Muslim confession, Ahmed Djebbour, and to achieve his election. The next year, he was re-elected as deputy to the National Assembly and adhered to the parliamentary party National Centre of Independents and Peasants (CNIP), led by Antoine Pinay. In 1958 Le Pen lost his left eye during an election campaign where he was savagely beaten. He now wears a glass eye instead. During this period, Le Pen also actively followed issues of the war and defense budget. In 1965 Le Pen became the director of the presidential campaign of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour.

In 1972, he founded the Front National party. The electoral results of the Front National have been on the rise since the municipal elections of 1983.

In 1984 and 1999 Le Pen won a seat in the European Parliament. He was deprived of his seat by the European Court of Justice on April 10, 2003 for physically assaulting another candidate. In 1992 and 1998 he was elected to the regional council of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. His political career has been most successful in the south of France.

In 1997, the European Parliament, of which Le Pen himself was a member, removed his parliamentary immunity so that Le Pen could be tried by a German court for comments he made at a December 1996 press conference before the German Republikaner party. Le Pen stated there that: "If you take a 1,000-page book on World War II, the concentration camps take up only two pages and the gas chambers 10 to 15 lines. This is what one calls a detail." ; Le Pen had made a similar statement in France in 1987, which also caused him to be condemned in virtue of the Gayssot Act on negationism. In June 1999, a Munich court found this statement to be "minimizing the Holocaust, which caused the deaths of six million Jews," and convicted and fined Le Pen for his remarks.<ref>"German court fines Le Pen for Holocaust remark", Agence France-Presse, 1999-06-02.</ref><ref>"Jean-Marie Le Pen loses appeal over gas chamber remarks", Agence France-Presse, 1999-09-13.</ref>

Le Pen ran in the French presidential elections in 1974, 1988, 1995 and 2002. In the presidential elections of 2002, Le Pen obtained 16.86% of the votes in the first round of voting. This was enough to qualify him for the second round, as a result of the poor showing by the Socialist candidate and incumbent prime-minister Lionel Jospin and the scattering of votes among fifteen other candidates. This was a major political event, both nationally and internationally, as it was the first time someone with such extremist views had qualified for the second round of the French presidential elections. There was a widespread stirring of national public opinion, and more than one million people in France took part in street rallies, slogans such as "vote for the crook, not the fascist" were heard in an expression of fierce opposition to Le Pen's ideas.

Le Pen was then soundly defeated in the second round when incumbent president Jacques Chirac obtained 82% of the votes.

In the 2004 regional elections, Jean-Marie Le Pen intended to run for office in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur région but was prevented from doing so because he did not meet the conditions for being a voter in that region: he neither lived there, nor was registered as a taxpayer there. Le Pen complained of a government plot to prevent him from running. Some argue that this event was merely a scheme of Le Pen's to avoid defeat in the election.

In recent years, Le Pen has tried to soften his image, with mixed success. He has maneuvered his daughter Marine into a prominent position, a move that angered many inside the National Front, concerned with the grip of the Le Pen family on the party.

[edit] Issues

See also National Front for a summary of Le Pen's political proposals.

Le Pen remains a very polarizing figure in France. Opinions regarding Le Pen tend to be quite strong; a 2002 IPSOS poll showed that while 22% of the electorate have a good or very good opinion of Mr Le Pen, and 13% an unfavorable opinion, 61% have a very unfavorable opinion[3]. Indeed Le Pen and former National Front leader Bruno Mégret top the unfavorable ratings, with 74% and 75% respectively.

Le Pen and the National Front are described by much of the media and virtually all commentators except those from the Front to be far right. Perhaps unsurprisingly Le Pen himself disagrees with this label. Earlier on in his political career Le Pen described his position as "Neither left nor right, but French" (Ni droite, ni gauche, français). He later described his position as right-wing and opposed to the "socialo-communists" and other right-wing parties, which he deems are not real right-wing parties. At other times, for example during the 2002 election campaign, he declared himself "economically right-wing, socially left-wing, and nationally French". He further contends that most of the French political and media class are corrupt and out of touch with the real needs of the common people, and conspire to exclude Le Pen and his party from mainstream politics. Le Pen criticizes the other political parties as the "establishment" and lumped all major parties (PC, PS, UDF, RPR) into the "Gang of Four" (la bande des quatre – an allusion to the Gang of Four during China's Cultural Revolution).

The international media often cites Jean-Marie Le Pen as a symbol of French xenophobia. Le Pen is also occasionally criticized in French and foreign pop songs. In standup comedy, Le Pen and Brigette Bardot, the famous actress who supports Le Pen's views, may make "a wonderful couple". Le Pen is dreaded by other political parties and groups like the left-wing (i.e. communists and socialists) and conservatives and liberals of the center-right.

[edit] Approbation on the Right

Some of Le Pen's statements led other right-wing groups, such as the Austrian Freedom Party<ref>Bruce Crumley in Time International magazine, (6/5/02) writes: "Denunciations of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his xenophobic National Front (FN) as racist, anti-Semitic and hostile to minorities and foreigners aren't exactly new. More novel, however, are such condemnations coming from far-right movements like the Austrian Freedom Party (FPO), which itself won international opprobrium in 1999 after entering government on a populist platform similar to Le Pen's."</ref>, and some National Front supporters to distance themselves from him. Bruno Mégret left the National Front to found his own party (the National Republican Movement, MNR), claiming that Le Pen kept the Front away from the possibility of gaining power. Mégret wanted to emulate Gianfranco Fini's success in Italy by making it possible for right-wing parties to ally themselves with the Front, but claimed that Le Pen's attitude and outrageous speech prevented this. Le Pen's daughter Marine leads an internal movement of the Front that wants to "normalize" the National Front, "de-enclave" it, have a "culture of government" etc.; however, she is now out of favor with Le Pen. (Le Canard Enchaîné, March 9, 2005). Over the years, Le Pen gained widespread popularity to neo-nazis and white separatists throughout Europe and North America.

As Le Pen, like other European nationalists in recent years, has made anti-American statements, he has received notice from American conservatives. Author Ann Coulter called him an anti-American adulterer and said that his anti-immigration, anti-Muslim message "finally hit a nerve with voters" after years of irrelevance.[4]. Paleoconservative commentator Pat Buchanan contends that even though Le Pen "made radical and foolish statements," the EU violated his free speech rights.[5] He wrote:

As it is often the criminal himself who is first to cry, "Thief!" so it is usually those who scream, "Fascist!" loudest who are the quickest to resort to anti-democratic tactics. Today, the greatest threat to the freedom and independence of the nations of Europe comes not from Le Pen and that 17 percent of French men and women who voted for him. It comes from an intolerant European Establishment that will accept no rollback of its powers or privileges, nor any reversal of policies it deems "progressive".