French far-right leader and Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen has died

The former leader of the extreme right in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen, passed away today (Tuesday) at the age of 96. Le Pen, the father of Marine Le Pen who continues his path in the leadership of the right in France, was one of the most prominent figures in French politics in recent decades and ran for the presidency in the past . He also served in the European Parliament for more than 30 years.

Le Pen has been hospitalized in recent weeks due to his medical condition. His family announced that he died in the wee hours “surrounded by his loved ones”. The date of his funeral has not yet been announced.

Le Pen’s past is full of extreme, racist and anti-Semitic statements, and he has been labeled as a staunch Holocaust denier. Various courts have convicted him for his extreme statements about race, immigration and gender. The French media previously called him “the devil of the republic”, and his replacement by his daughter was called “de-demonization”.

Le Pen caused a stir regarding his attitude to the Holocaust when he said in an interview in 1987: “I did not claim that there were no gas chambers, but I never saw them myself. I believe that they are a marginal detail in the history of World War II.” Decades later he stated: “I believe that in Auschwitz there was a factory where 80,000 people worked. To the best of my knowledge, they were not gassed and then burned.”

Referring to the gas chambers as a “marginal detail” was used by many Holocaust deniers, who claimed over the years that the number of Jews who perished in the Holocaust was “inflated”. For his words, he was convicted of violating a law that prohibits Holocaust denial and was also fined, but he continued to repeat his claims. Later he also publicly defended the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis – a statement that led to his expulsion from the party he himself founded.

Le Pen was born in the small village of Le Trinit-sur-Mer on June 20, 1928. He lost his father at the age of 14 when his father’s fishing boat hit a German mine, and received state funding as a war orphan. At the age of 16 he tried to join the German resistance to the Nazis but was refused, and in 1954 he joined the French Legion.

In 1956 he was first elected to the French Parliament, but then returned to the army. In 1972, Le Pen founded the “National Front” party and led it for about 40 years. His greatest political achievement was running in the second round of the French presidential election against Jacques Chirac in 2002. He ran for the presidency no less than five times, and used to claim that he was “not right, not left – I’m French”. To this he used to add defamatory rhetoric against immigrants.

His daughter Marin replaced him as the head of the party in 2011, and rebranded it – but left her father as honorary chairman. In 2015, he was expelled by his daughter from the ranks of the party, which changed its name to the “National Assembly”, after he returned and denied the horrors of the Holocaust. Marin publicly accused her father of making harsh statements about the Holocaust in an attempt to “save himself from public oblivion”, and he replied: “Maybe she was trying to make a gesture towards the establishment by removing me.” In recent years he suffered from health problems and was pushed out of the public arena.