Leader of France’s right splits with father

Marine Le Pen hopes to oust founder of National Front after comments on Vichy

PARIS— Marine Le Pen has had enough of her father.

The leader of France’s anti-immigration, anti-euro National Front signalled in a statement Wednesday that she’s seeking to oust her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, from the party he founded. She said Jean-Marie Le Pen has “entered a spiral between a scorched-earth strategy and political suicide” after he said he never considered France’s wartime collaborationist leader Philippe Pétain a traitor.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, in an interview with a right-wing publication Rivarol, said French postwar governments were “too harsh” with Pétain and that supporters of the Vichy regime “have their place” in the National Front, or the FN as it is known. Pétain was sentenced to death in 1945 and died in prison in 1951.

The open conflict between daughter and father comes as Marine Le Pen seeks to break from the National Front’s past as a protest group tinged with racism and Holocaust denial and transform it into a party that she says has a credible shot at the presidency in 2017.

“A breakup was in the offing after years of tension over policy and style differences,” said Luc Rouban, a researcher at Paris’s Institute of Political Studies. “The FN is now at crossroads, killing the father breaks with a position of protest.”

In her statement, Marine Le Pen said she’ll oppose her father’s candidature at regional elections this year and hold a meeting with leaders to protect the FN’s political interests. Candidates for the regional vote will be picked on April 17.

Jean-Marie Le Pen’s “status as honorary President of the party doesn’t allow him to take the National Front hostage with such outrageous provocation,” she said in the statement.

The very public spat is drawing support among FN members for a potential ouster of the father by Marine Le Pen. “The political split with Jean-Marie Le Pen is now complete and definite,” FN vice-President Florian Philippot said in a tweet. “Under Marine Le Pen’s guidance, decisions will be taken swiftly.”

In 2011, the 46-year-old Marine Le Pen took over the party and has sought to bring it into the French political mainstream, dropping her 86-year-old father’s often racist language, and focusing on economic issues such as protectionist trade policies and restoring the franc.

This month, father and daughter clashed over his oft-stated comment that Nazi gas chambers were “a detail” of Second World War history.