Far-Right Party in France Tries to Push Jean-Marie Le Pen, Provocative Founder, to the Margins
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Version 0 of 1. PARIS — Leaders of France’s far-right National Front suspended the party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, on Monday after repeated instances in which he made anti-Semitic and racist comments, a first step in distancing themselves from the aging patriarch. In a statement, the National Front said that members would be asked at a party congress in three months to vote on a proposal to strip Mr. Le Pen of his honorary title of party president. That measure seems aimed at shrinking the significance of anything he says and diminishing its effect on the party’s image. The censure came after Mr. Le Pen, 86, repeated in April his position that the Nazi gas chambers were “a detail of history” and spoke highly of Marshal Philippe Pétain, France’s World War II leader who collaborated with Adolf Hitler. Relations between Mr. Le Pen and his daughter, Marine Le Pen, the party’s current leader, have grown strained over the years. Ms. Le Pen has focused on criticizing the European Union and what she calls the “Islamization” of France, trying to win favor with a mainstream electorate that is more sympathetic than ever to the party’s anti-immigrant stance. By contrast, her father relishes the party’s position on the fringes and has always been comfortable attracting far-right extremists. The debate over her father, held privately at the party’s headquarters in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, mirrors the questions facing the party as it looks to the 2017 presidential elections, said political scientists and experts on the politics of the far right. “One has someone who wants to normalize her party to win power and one who thinks that this normalization is a fatal error,” said Jean-Yves Camus, the director of the Observatory of Political Radicalism at the Jean Jaurès Foundation in Paris. In 2002, despite his extremist positions, Mr. Le Pen made it to a presidential runoff, where he faced Jacques Chirac, a conservative. He lost but changed the shape of French presidential politics. When Marine Le Pen ran a decade later, she moderated the party’s language somewhat, focusing more on economics, and did even better in the vote count but did not make it to a runoff. Now, the party is caught in a debate about whether to move even further to the center. “The National Front finds itself confronting the problem that what made it stand out in politics was how radical it was,” said Sylvain Crépon, a sociologist and professor at the University of Tours. “If the National Front remains too radical, it marginalizes itself, but if it becomes more mainstream, it risks becoming unremarkable and of becoming an UMP copycat,” he said, referring to the conservative party of former President Nicolas Sarkozy. There is little question that Mr. Le Pen will fight his ouster from the party. On Monday, he harshly criticized his daughter, saying he had built the party and inherited nothing, implying that she had benefited from his hard work and was now betraying him. “This is treachery,” he said. “I want Marine Le Pen to give me back my name.” He added, “It is dishonorable to have the same name as the president of the National Front.” Even if the party strips Mr. Le Pen of his honorary position, analysts said, he will still have a public platform at least until 2019 as an elected member of the European Parliament. |