Burn in Hell, Motherfucker

The crowd in Paris celebrating Le Pen’s death is large. He was a convicted Holocaust denier & his political views were rife with racism, Islamophobia & anti-semitism. To many, he was a stain on French politics which remains to this day, despite his daughter’s attempts to soften the party’s image.

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— News Eye (@newseye.bsky.social) January 7, 2025 at 3:58 PM

Parisian crowds celebrating his death

Jean-Marie Le Pen has died at the age of 96.

This is the first time that he has done something to make the world a better place in ……… 96 years.

It appears that the French people feel the same way too, because they are out in the streets, and the cops aren't beating them:

From his election as France's youngest MP in 1956 to his daughter Marine Le Pen taking the party he founded to new heights, Jean-Marie Le Pen was present at every stage of the French far right's post-war history. He died on Tuesday, January 7, at the age of 96.

There are political events that immediately become history. April 21, 2002, was one of them. In a presidential election the left was widely expected to win, a "thunderclap" burst. Jean-Marie Le Pen qualified for the second round instead of Lionel Jospin, the Socialist who had been prime minister during five years of cohabitation with the scandal-plagued right. Le Pen would face Jacques Chirac, the president since 1995.

Le Pen, the pariah, the extremist, who had denounced "the cronies and the rascals" and the "gang of four" since he started in politics, was finally playing on the same court as them. It was the crowning achievement of a political career that began almost half a century earlier.

The far-right candidate would be easily defeated by Chirac (82.21% to 17.79%), after daily demonstrations against his party, the Front National (FN), which climaxed at a May Day parade that brought together huge crowds to say "no" to Le Pen. But 2002 also marked the start of the FN's second phase of growth, which would culminate, more than 20 years later, in the party becoming one of the country's main political forces, under the name Rassemblement National and the leadership of his daughter, Marine Le Pen.

The later success of the RN, and later AfD, and the rest of the neo-fascist nationalists are, I think, less an artifact of anything that Le Pen did, and more an artifact of the new structures created across Europe by another Frenchman, Jean Monnet, who was instrumental in the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which later became the EEC and then the EU.

The juxtaposition of neoliberalism and German Sado-monetarism has been almost completely unopposed by the left, and so the racist right wing nationalists have become the only alternative in Europe.

History is rhyming.