The first time Jean-Marie Le Pen stood in a French presidential election, in 1974, he won 0.75% of the vote. Half a century later, his daughter Marine leads the largest party in France’s parliament and could well become its next head of state.
Le Pen senior, who died on Tuesday aged 96, was for decades the far-right bogeyman of French politics, an eternal provocateur whose unabashed racism and antisemitism suggested he was much more interested in stoking outrage than in wielding power.
But his legacy is substantial. The briefest glance at the place now occupied by the far right in French and European politics shows just how extraordinarily potent his anti-immigration, anti-elites, anti-globalisation, anti-EU message was.
It was perhaps just not the right time, and he was not the right person, to deliver it.
A former paratrooper, Le Pen was first elected to parliament aged 27, as France’s youngest MP, on the coat-tails of Pierre Poujade, head of a populist, anti-taxation, anti-modernisation, anti-state movement of shopkeepers and small business owners.
He spent much of the 1960s in an array of small right-wing parties, eventually emerging as the focus of nationalist opposition to Charles de Gaulle, whom he accused of “making France small again” by granting Algeria independence.
In 1972 he co-founded the “national, social and popular” National Front (FN), whose supporters ranged from Catholic fundamentalists to fans of Philippe Pétain, leader of France’s collaborationist wartime government, and from royalists to former colonialists.
While some were former Nazi collaborators, Le Pen always denied any fascist leanings, portraying himself instead as the heir of a centuries-old – and distinctly French – ultra-nationalist ideology.
Slowly, he began to win over more than just nostalgic right-wingers and angry ex-colonialists.
The end of the economic boom known as “les trente glorieuses”, rapidly increasing immigration from France’s former colonies and the decline of the coal and steel industry drove more working-class, often former left-wing, northern voters to the FN.
By the 1980s the party was winning 10% and more in parliamentary and European elections, rising to 15% in the 1995 presidential election and, in 2002, to 16.7% – a political earthquake that propelled Le Pen into the second-round runoff.
Ultimately, however, it was Le Pen himself who proved the biggest obstacle to his party’s further growth. His undying thirst for provocation led to multiple convictions for inciting racial hatred and condoning war crimes.
He said future president Nicolas Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian immigrant, was not French enough to hold the office, and France’s “black-blanc-beur” (black-white-Arab) World Cup-winning football team had too many “players of colour” to be French.
He claimed African immigration would “submerge” the country, and that the Nazi second world war occupation of northern France was “not particularly inhumane”. He repeatedly described the Holocaust as a “detail” of history.
In an age of more deliberately divisive, controversy-courting and social media-driven extremism peopled by the likes of Donald Trump and European far-right leaders such as Geert Wilders and Alice Weidel of Germany’s AfD, it might have worked.
Back then, it didn’t. Le Pen retired from frontline politics in 2011 when Marine took over as FN leader, launching a long-term campaign to clean up the party’s image that she called “de-demonisation” – an implicit admission of her father’s impact.
The two fell out four years later, in 2015, when Marine kicked her father – who was viscerally opposed to her approach – out of the party he had co-founded after he again repeated his Holocaust remarks, and stripped him of his title of president for life.
Three years after that, in an ultimate humiliation, she renamed her “detoxified” party the National Rally (RN). She has made the runoff of the past two French presidential elections, scoring 34% in 2017 and 41% in 2002, and is frontrunner for the 2027 race.
Meanwhile, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s core political platform has been all but normalised, adopted by mainstream centre-right parties across Europe desperate to win back voters. His polarising, pugilistic style of doing politics is fast becoming so, too.
Far-right parties holding similar nation-first, anti-immigration, anti-elites and anti-EU views currently lead national governments in three EU countries, are in (or backing) right-wing coalitions in three others, and could soon be in power in four more.
Much as mainstream conservative parties may believe hardline policies on immigration and law and order will appeal to disillusioned voters, the evidence, in election after election, suggests the opposite is true.
In one of his more insightful observations as far back as 1990, Le Pen put it this way. Speaking of then French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, he said: “He prefers to be elected on our ideas, rather than fight for his own.
“In general, people prefer the original to the copy.”