France’s National Front party expels founder Le Pen

Jean-Marie Le Pen, France’s elderly, far-right master provocateur, was on Thursday booted out of the National Front party (FN) he founded, after a high-profile feud with his daughter and party leader Marine.

The party said 87-year-old Le Pen would be “notified shortly” of the dramatic decision, which came after the FN’s executive committee questioned him for hours and voted to exclude him over inflammatory comments that had proved too much for his daughter, pushing him out of a party he led for close to four decades.

A gifted orator with a taste for controversy, Le Pen had for years been an irritating thorn in the side of his daughter, who took over the party from him in 2011 and had tried to steer it away from the overt racism and anti-Semitism of its past.

The final straw came in April when the elder Le Pen rehashed familiar comments about gas chambers being a “detail” of history and said France should get along with Russia to save the “white world.”

Marine Le Pen openly split with her father, saying he was committing “political suicide”, and later suspended him from the party.

But the octogenarian firebrand showed little interest in going quietly, successfully challenging his suspension in court and barging onto the stage during a major FN rally in May.

In a sign of how deep the rift with his daughter had become, he had told a local newspaper on Sunday that he would not vote for her in 2017 presidential elections.

In July Le Pen was summoned to appear in a Paris court in the wake of his gas chambers comments. He is expected to stand trial for denying crimes against humanity.

Le Pen in April told French TV that he does not regret the statement he made in 1987.

“Gas chambers were a detail of the war, unless we accept that the war is a detail of the gas chambers,” he told BFM in April.

“I continue to uphold the view because I think it is the truth and it should not shock anyone. They have exploited this affair against me, implying this is about anti-Semitism. But I defy anyone to quote me on anything anti-Semitic I have said in my political career,” he said.

In recent years, Marine Le Pen, 46, has rejected her father’s revisionist views and courted French Jews in a move that many observers said was designed to rehabilitate the party’s name. Since she took the helm in 2011, the once-isolated party has achieved victories in some town and county legislatures. Marine Le Pen has flirted with the idea of a presidential run.

JTA contributed to this report.