The former president of the French far-right National Front party (now the National Assembly) Jean-Marie Le Pen was hospitalized after “slight heart discomfort”, dpa and AFP reported.

“Jean-Marie Le Pen was admitted to a public hospital in the Paris area. His family and those close to him are worried,” his adviser Lorraine de Saint-Affric said, adding that Jean-Marie Le Pen, a historic figure on the French far right, was “in the know.”

In 1972, Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the Front National (FN) party, which became the National Assembly (RN), led until last November by his daughter Marine, who came second in the 2022 presidential election (41.5% ) in a confrontation with Emmanuel Macron. .

Her 94-year-old father has been hospitalized several times in recent years. In February 2022, he was hospitalized after a mild stroke.

Jean-Marie Le Pen ran for president five times, managed to reach the second round in 2002, but was defeated by Jacques Chirac by a landslide.

Who is Jean-Marie Le Pen?

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born on June 20, 1928 in Trinité-sur-Mer in western France and received a law degree. He was a legionnaire during the wars in Indochina (1953) and Algeria (1957).

Elected to the National Assembly in 1956, he was defeated in the parliamentary elections in 1962 and remained in the shadows for a long time.

In 1972, Jean-Marie Le Pen was elected leader of the party that united the neo-fascists: the National Front. Here he developed his favorite theme: “a million unemployed means a million more immigrants”, accusing the latter of using social assistance at the expense of the French.

In 1984, he was elected as a member of the European Parliament, then, after the legislative assembly of 1986, he received a seat in the National Assembly of France.

In 2000, he was dismissed as regional councilor for Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (South East) after being sentenced to a one-year disqualification for violence against a Socialist candidate in the 1997 parliamentary elections, one of his several trials. .

At the end of 1998, his party experienced a split, but the FN managed to establish itself as the main far-right movement in France.

Mistakes of Jean-Marie Le Pen

Jean-Marie Le Pen has never expressed regret for his mistakes, which have led to several convictions in court. Among these errors are his claims about the gas chambers as a mere “part of history”, about “racial inequality” (1996) or that the German occupation regime was “not particularly inhuman” (2005).

In the European Parliament in Strasbourg, where he has been elected several times, he will try, as he claims, “to protect France from Europe, from the abuses of the European Union.”

The youngest of her three daughters, she inherited the party in 2011. Marine Le Pen has long claimed that she is “taking full ownership of the inheritance” but was ultimately outdone by this bewildered father. To “destabilize” the FN, Marine Le Pen ends up expelling her father from the party in 2015 after his repeated claims about the Holocaust.

After the RN’s historic success in last year’s legislature, winning 89 seats, Jean-Marie Le Pen complained about the “certain absence in the media” of the RN MPs led by his daughter, calling on them to “react” and be “aggressive towards Power”. (Agerpress)