French far-right father-daughter feud disrupts May Day parade

Jean-Marie Le Pen, a founder and the decades-long leader of France’s far-right National Front, declared Sunday that his daughter, the party president who has expelled him, will lose next year’s presidential race if she fails to unify the party.

The bitter division between the 87-year-old, who was kicked out of the party for refusing to tone down racist and anti-Semitic comments, and his daughter Marine Le Pen, 47, played out Sunday with the party’s traditional May Day parade canceled and separate wreaths laid at two different statues of Joan of Arc — the party’s patron saint.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, who instituted the tradition, spoke at the gilded statue where a year ago he implored Joan of Arc for help. This year, he predicted that without unity his daughter, who has worked to clean up the party’s image and broaden its base by reaching out to youth, will lose France’s 2017 presidential race.

“Since no signal of reconciliation has been put out, I say today with gravity and sadness that the National Front president will be defeated in the second round, perhaps even the first,” the elder Le Pen told several hundred followers.

After taming the FN’s racist rhetoric, Marine Le Pen has overseen an unprecedented rise in the party’s fortunes and many pollsters predict the FN will make it to the second round of the presidential election.

This has only happened once before in a shock breakthrough in 2002 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was later beaten by Jacques Chirac.

On Sunday, Marine Le Pen led the official FN gathering at another Paris statue of Joan of Arc.

Joan of Arc, burned at the stake in 1431, was later made a saint by the Roman Catholic Church and became a symbol of French resistance adopted to the cause of the anti-immigration FN.

Last year, Marine Le Pen had her May Day ruined when her father strode onto the podium uninvited, and bare-chested Femen feminist activists later disrupted her speech with Nazi salutes and a “Heil Le Pen” flag.

This time Femen was back in action: half a dozen bare-chested activists in gold skirts protested in front of the venue where the FN was holding a banquet, spraying champagne and chanting “Long live the end of the FN”.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, speaking to The Associated Press, denied that there were now two National Fronts.

“It’s the famous French diversity,” he laughed.

“It’s an episode. A detail if you will,” he added, alluding to his remark that the Nazi gas chambers were a “detail” in World War II history. It was the reiteration last year of this remark — initially made many years earlier — that proved the final straw for Marine Le Pen, who began the process of expelling him from the party.

The party could soon see moves against two other longstanding members who attended Jean-Marie Le Pen’s speech — Bruno Gollnisch and Marie-Christine Arnautu.

Gollnisch told the AP they had been disinvited to the banquet after advising Marine Le Pen they would attend her father’s speech.