A Provocateur Whose Unabashed Racism Paved the Way for the Populism of Today

In an age of more deliberately divisive extremism peopled by the likes of Trump, Le Pen's rhetoric might have worked

- Jon Henley

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 yesterday aged 96, was for decades the far-right bogeyman of French politics, an eternal provocateur whose unabashed racism and antisemitism suggested he was 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. He was perhaps just not the right person to deliver it.