War erupted today between the two main figures of France’s far-right as Jean-Marie Le Pen told his daughter Marine that the Front National (FN) under her leadership had turned into a “bizarre”, insipid mainstream conformist party like any other, reports The Telegraph.
Mr Le Pen, who already has several race hate convictions, sparked political outrage over the weekend, even from within his own party, for pledging to make an “oven load” of the Jewish singer Patrick Bruel. The comment was widely interpreted as a reference to the furnaces used by the Nazis to dispose of their victims during the Holocaust.
Mr Bruel has spoken out against the FN on many occasions.
In a spectacular departure from her usual displays of family unity, Miss Le Pen joined the chorus of criticism of her 85-year-old father, who is an MEP and the party’s honorary president, saying he had committed a “political mistake”.
“I am convinced that the meaning attributed to his words stems from a malicious interpretation,” she said. “Nevertheless, given Jean-Marie Le Pen’s very long experience, not to have anticipated the way those words would be interpreted is a political mistake and the Front National is suffering the consequences.”
An unrepentant Mr Le Pen hit back at his daughter on Monday, saying the “political fault” lay with her stewardship of the party he founded in 1972, and which Miss Le Pen has sought to “detoxify”, purging it of overt racism and xenophobia.
“I consider the political fault is with those who have aligned themselves to ‘la pensée unique’ (‘single thought’ of the conformist political mainstream). They would like to resemble the other political parties. If that’s the stated aim of some FN leaders, they have succeeded,” he told RTL.
Mr Le Pen is clearly irked at the direction the party he led until 2011 is taking, despite the fact it has never been so popular, coming first in last month’s European elections with 25 per cent of the vote – its best ever electoral victory.
He made his displeasure abundantly clear in the same interview, saying his daughter’s far-Right political grouping, le Rassemblement Bleu Marine (Marine Blue Rally) was “a kind of bizarre formation without substance”.
Father and daughter have not seen each other since Mr Le Pen made the controversial remarks. When asked whether they had fallen out, Mr Le Pen said: “Hmmm, no comment.”
Florian Philippot, FN vice president, said: “Marine and her father will obviously have some explaining to do.”
Miss Le Pen was not the only party member to speak out about his “joke”.
Louis Aliot, Marine Le Pen’s partner and the deputy leader of the Front National, also condemned the comment as “politically stupid and distressing”. Gilbert Collard, one of the Front National’s two MPs, urged Mr Le Pen to retire.
In a series of television and radio interviews, Mr Le Pen denied that his comment was anti-semitic or intended to refer to the killings of millions of Jews in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War.
“I challenge you to find a single anti-semitic phrase in my political life,” said the man who once called the Nazi gas chambers a “detail” of history.
“I’m a free man. I don’t feel obliged to walk in the well-trodden paths of ‘single thought’,” he said, rejecting any suggestion he should retire from political life.
Read more of this report from The Telegraph.