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Jean-Marie Le Pen, Co-Founder of National Front, Is Ousted From French Far-Right Party Jean-Marie Le Pen, Co-Founder of National Front, Is Ousted From French Far-Right Party
(about 4 hours later)
Jean-Marie Le Pen, who co-founded France’s far-right National Front, was excluded on Thursday from the party following a disciplinary hearing. NANTERRE, France — Jean-Marie Le Pen, a co-founder of France’s far-right National Front, was expelled from the party on Thursday after he repeatedly angered its current leader, his daughter Marine, by reviving the party’s anti-Semitic past, which she is eager to shed.
The decision regarding a figure who has for decades been one of the mainstays of French politics came in a statement hours after the end of a three-hour hearing by the party’s executive bureau. In the tribunal-like session, the 87-year-old Le Pen defended himself against a list of 15 complaints, all consisting of public statements considered injurious. The party’s executive board voted to kick him out after hearing three hours of arguments from Mr. Le Pen, 87, a former paratrooper who for years has symbolized the most retrograde strain of French politics, including hatred of immigrants and nostalgia for the days of colonial rule in Algeria.
Party president Marine Le Pen, the elder’s daughter, has been trying for months to oust her father, who held the title of honorary president for life. A statement said the executive bureau “deliberated and decided ... the exclusion of Mr. Jean-Marie Le Pen as member of the National Front.” Under his daughter’s leadership, the National Front has broken into the political mainstream, and Mr. Le Pen has increasingly become an embarrassment to her, especially after repeating his familiar views on the Holocaust. He has repeatedly told interviewers that the gas chambers were a “detail of history” and has said the wartime collaborator Marshal Philippe Pétain was not a “traitor.”
His lawyer, Frederic Joachim, called the decision a “political assassination.” The Le Pens have been tussling in public for five months, with Ms. Le Pen saying in April that she was “in profound disagreement” with her father after his latest remarks on the Holocaust. France has been treated since then to a father-daughter political feud of rare virulence, one that at first riveted the French public but more recently has seemed to irritate it.
Joachim was being interviewed on BFM-TV when the announcement was issued. “It’s an assassination premeditated for a very long time,” said the lawyer, who assisted Le Pen at Thursday’s hearing. At a special meeting Ms. Le Pen called in May, party leaders suspended her father’s membership, but his lawyers later persuaded a judge to order him reinstated. She won an important round in July when party activists, in a mail ballot, voted by 94 percent to eliminate his title of honorary party president; that ballot, too, was annulled by a judge.
The party statement said that Le Pen would be notified “shortly” of the decision and the reasons behind it. There was no immediate comment from Le Pen. Mr. Le Pen told a French television station last week that he was “deeply shocked, hurt, and the victim of a political witch-hunt,” and would not support his daughter in the 2017 presidential election. His lawyer, Frédéric Joachim, told French radio that the “National Front, in killing its own founder, has in a certain way committed suicide.”
However, the normally feisty Le Pen left the meeting with a conciliatory tone, offering an outstretched hand in search of a “signal of pacification.” The party issued a terse statement on Thursday, saying simply that its executive board had “deliberated and decided, by the required majority, on the exclusion of Jean-Marie Le Pen as a member of the National Front.”
“I’m almost a man alone,” Le Pen said. Mr. Le Pen had vigorously contested the move in advance, saying the board was not qualified to judge him because they are “paid” by the party. He arrived at the party headquarters here in the western suburbs of Paris in a black limousine with tinted windows, and stumbled in front of a crowd of waiting journalists before disappearing into the bland three-story building.
The family feud, which has mushroomed into a debilitating crisis for the anti-immigration party, opened a new chapter with daughter summoning father before the bureau to explain himself. The complaints targeted recent public statements by Le Pen, including those in which he downplayed Nazi gas chambers and insulted his daughter and the party’s No. 2 figure Florian Philippot — whom father Le Pen openly distrusts. Mr. Le Pen regularly ran for president under the party’s banner, and managed to slightly outpoll the Socialist candidate in 2002, but he never spoke for more than a noisy fringe in France. He proudly advertised his friendships with some of the most notorious surviving collaborators from World War II, relationships that marginalized him and his party.
Le Pen contested the executive bureau’s right to judge him, according to a statement issued mid-way through the hearing. His daughter, by contrast, has led the party to impressive scores in elections for the European Parliament last year and municipal elections this year.
Three hours later, Le Pen emerged sounding conciliatory. He referred to the bureau members “not as judges, since I recused them, but as companions in combat.” As he stepped out of the car on Thursday, Mr. Le Pen muttered that “only foot soldiers” would be present at the meeting. His daughter did not attend, nor did her chief aide, Florian Philippot, whose top-flight education and toned-down rhetoric have made him seem the antithesis of Mr. Le Pen and his friends. Her father’s expulsion marks an important step in Ms. Le Pen’s four-year effort to “de-Satanize” the party.
“I expressed the hope that this episode ... can be a step toward the active reunification of the National Front,” he said. On Thursday, Bruno Gollnisch, an old ally of Mr. Le Pen, stood outside the party headquarters and angrily told journalists that he saw nothing in Mr. Le Pen’s recent statements that was incompatible with the National Front.
While Marine Le Pen signed off on the complaints, she was not present at the high-stakes meeting. Philippot was also absent. Both are part of the eight-member executive bureau. But Philippot said in an interview with the daily L’Opinion that they prefer not to be both judges and accusers in what amounts to a trial. Later Mr. Gollnisch, a member of the European Parliament, told reporters the board’s decision to expel Mr. Le Pen was “pitiless” and “unjustified,” and called it “the manifestation of an incredible ingratitude.”
Marine Le Pen, who has set her sights on the 2017 presidential race, has worked to clean up the image of the National Front since 2011, when she took over the leadership as the chosen successor of her father — who has been convicted numerous times of racism and anti-Semitism. The bombastic Jean-Marie Le Pen maintains that his remarks fall into the domain of freedom of expression.
He contends that his daughter is changing the National Front’s identity in her bid to offer a political alternative to the French — and doing so with the help of Philippot whose stack of degrees adds special weight to his policies.
The complaints included a remark first made years ago, and repeated in April, that the Nazi gas chambers are a “detail in the history” of World War II. That unleashed the feud and series of legal disputes.
Father and daughter have battled in court three times since April, with Jean-Marie Le Pen winning each round to maintain his title as the party’s honorary president for life.
Thursday’s meeting was the second of the executive board clearly trying to push out Jean-Marie Le Pen — who has but one supporter among the eight board members. The elder Le Pen earlier called the hearing “abject” and “undignified” of a candidate for the French presidency.
Bruno Gollnisch, a member of the party’s old guard also present at the hearing, said earlier it “would be stupefying” if Jean-Marie Le Pen was excluded from the National Front.
“The National Front can exist without Jean-Marie Le Pen, but it can’t exist in contradiction with all the positions he stands for,” Gollnisch told BFM-TV as he arrived at party headquarters in Nanterre, west of Paris.