Jean-Marie Le Pen—the antisemitic far-right French politician who downplayed the Holocaust and attacked AIDS victims, gays, Muslims, Jews, and immigrants—died Tuesday “surrounded by his loved ones,” his family said. A harbinger of the 21st century nativist politics to come, Le Pen, 96, shocked the political world in 2002 when he qualified for the final runoff ballot in that year’s French presidential election, losing to Jacques Chirac but winning nearly one in five votes. He founded and led the far-right Front National—now known as the Rassemblement National—in 1972, leading the populist political party until 2011 when he ceded control to his daughter Marine, who expelled him in 2015 for his extreme antisemitism. The so-called Diable de la République was convicted several times for inciting racism and Holocaust denial—including baselessly rejecting the number of Jews murdered by the Third Reich and dismissing gas chambers used during the Holocaust as a mere “detail.” But his bigoted and anti-immigrant campaigning took hold in some quarters, with the FN earning double-digit support in the popular vote for National Assembly elections beginning in the 1990s. That led to the term “la lepénisation des esprits”—“the lepenization of minds”—to describe the increasing creep of far-right views into mainstream French politics, a phenomenon that has since spread throughout Europe with the emergence of other far-right parties.
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