Jean-Marie Le Pen

Jean-Marie Le Pen , 1928-, French politician. He graduated from law school, was elected (1956) a parliamentary deputy, and criticized President de Gaulle 's Algerian policy. Since 1972 he has led the extremely right-wing National Front. His views against immigration and his support for national defense have aroused strong feelings in France, and he has been convicted and fined for remarks that minimized aspects of the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation of France. Although his party won a number of seats in the National Assembly during the late 1980s, the party was unsuccessful in the 1988 elections. Still, his presidential campaign in 1988 was supported by four million voters. He became a member of the European parliament in 1984. He was stripped of his seat in 2000 as a result of his 1998 conviction for assaulting a rival politician, but it was later restored by the courts pending an appeal, which he lost in 2003. In the first round of the 2002 presidential election Le Pen edged out Premier Lionel Jospin to finish second behind President Jacques Chirac , but in the subsequent runoff Le Pen garnered only 18% of the vote. Le Pen placed fourth in the 2007 presidential election.

Le Pen, Jean-Marie (b. 20 June 1928). French politician Born in Trinité-sur-Mer into a family of humble origin, he did not attend one of the French elite schools, but studied political sciences and jurisprudence at Paris University. He was elected to the National Assembly for the far-right Poujadist party in 1956, but in 1972 he created his own movement, the Front National. He was marginalized by the political establishment, but in the 1980s Le Pen became increasingly popular as an orator. He sought to benefit from the division of the right (between the Gaullists and the UDF), whose pre-eminence was challenged in that decade by Mitterrand's Socialist Party. Nevertheless, the Gaullist leader, Chirac, refused any political cooperation with Le Pen, and the two men subsequently became intense personal rivals. This rivalry came to a head in the 2002 presidential elections. Le Pen confounded all opinion polls by coming second in the presidential elections, as a result of which he entered the run-off elections against Chirac. The great survivor of French politics, the impulsive and charismatic Le Pen was the first populist right-wing leader in Europe to attract significant and persistent popularity.