Prime Minister François Bayrou delivered one such anodyne reaction, describing the five-time presidential candidate as “a figure of French political life.”
President Emmanuel Macron’s office similarly walked on eggshells and called Le Pen, who handed his party’s leadership over to his daughter in 2011, “a historic figure of the far right” whose “role in the public life … is now a matter for history to judge.”
Bruno Retailleau, a tough-talking conservative senator who took up a role in government as interior minister in September, said “a page in French political history has turned” and that Le Pen had “undoubtedly left his mark on his era.”
Left-wing officials were far more explicit in their denunciations of the nationalist figure.
“Respect for the dignity of the dead and the grief of their loved ones does not erase the right to judge their actions,” hard-left France Unbowed leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon wrote on X. Mélenchon, who was the leading leftist candidate in the past two presidential races, has in the past been unafraid to celebrate the deaths of figures he opposed. He tweeted that “Margaret Thatcher will find out in hell what she did to the miners” when the former British prime minister died in 2013.
“The fight against the man is over. The fight against the hatred, racism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism he spread continues,” Mélenchon added.
“A fascist from another era is gone. But he leaves behind some very contemporary heirs,” said François Ruffin, another leading politician on the French left.
Louis Boyard, one of the youngest French lawmakers and a rising star in France Unbowed, said Le Pen “deserves no tribute,” while Socialist Party spokesperson Arthur Delaporte said Le Pen’s death “should not exonerate the National Rally from the weight of his legacy: xenophobia, antisemitism, rejection of others.”