French far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen dies aged 96

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s far-right National Front party, has died aged 96.

Le Pen, who had been in a care facility for several weeks, died “surrounded by his loved ones”, his family said in a statement shared with AFP.

The politician founded the National Front party in 1972 and was known for his rhetoric against immigration and multiculturalism.

His daughter, Marine Le Pen, succeeded him as National Front party chief in 2011. She has since rebranded the party as National Rally, turning it into one of France’s main political forces.

After kicking her father out of the party, Ms Le Pen aimed to distance herself from his extremist image.

But despite his exclusion from the party in 2015, Le Pen’s divisive legacy endures, marking decades of French political history and shaping the trajectory of the far right.

Born on 20 June, 1928, in the Brittany village of Trinité-Sur-Mer, he went on to become a paratrooper and Foreign Legionnaire who fought in Indochina and Algeria.

In 1963, he and Léon Gaultier, who served in the Waffen SS, a branch of the Nazi party, founded a company, SERP, while Le Pen later founded the neo-fascist group New Order, before he founded the National Front on 5 October, 1972.

But it would take more than a decade for the party to emerge as a political force – in a September 1983 municipal election when National Front’s Jean-Pierre Stirbois won 16.7 per cent of the votes in the town of Dreux, west of Paris.

A year later, the party won 11 per cent in European parliamentary elections and seated 10 deputies, and two years later, the party gained 35 seats in France’s National Assembly, which catapulted it into mainstream French politics.

“If I advance, follow me; if I die, avenge me; if I shirk, kill me,” Le Pen said at a 1990 party congress.

Le Pen, who lost an eye in a street fight in his youth and for years wore a black eyepatch, became a mainstay in French political life as he ran for president more than five times.

In 1988, he startled the nation by taking 14 per cent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections.

Despite his controversial statements, including Holocaust denial, he reached the presidential election-run in 2002, scoring 16.8 per cent before coming in second behind Jacques Chirac in the two-man run-off.

He was also convicted numerous times of antisemitism and routinely accused of xenophobia and racism, with Le Pen routinely claiming that he was simply a patriot protecting the identity of “eternal France.”

Towards the latter stage of his career, Le Pen was exempted from prosecution on health grounds from a high-profile trial over his party’s suspected embezzlement of European Parliament funds that opened in September.

His daughter still faces a potential prison term and a ban on running for political office if convicted in the embezzling trial.

Le Pen had 11 prior convictions, including for violence against a public official and antisemitic hate speech.

French judicial authorities placed Le Pen under legal guardianship in February at the request of his family as his health declined, French media reported.