French National Front founder Le Pen dies aged 96

Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the ultranationalist National Front party who tapped into working class concerns over immigration and globalisation, shaking up the French political establishment, has died at the age of 96.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Marine Le Pen's political party, National Rally.

A pugnacious mix of populism, eloquence and charisma, Le Pen helped rewrite the parameters of French politics in a career spanning 40 years.

In one way or another, Jean-Marie Le Pen spent his life fighting, whether as a soldier in France's colonial wars, as a founder of the National Front party, for which he contested five presidential elections, or in feuds with his daughters and ex-wife, often conducted publicly and furiously.

He stunned the world by reaching a presidential election run-off in 2002, then losing in a landslide to Jacques Chirac as voters backed a mainstream conservative rather than the divisive son of a Breton fisherman.

An unabashed nationalist, Le Pen was the scourge of the European Union which he saw as a supranational project usurping the powers of nation states.

He was also known for his fiery rhetoric against immigration and multiculturalism.

Controversy was Le Pen's constant companion: accusations of racism dogged the National Front from the moment he co-founded the party in 1972.

He was tried, convicted and fined in 1996 for contesting war crimes after declaring that the Nazi gas chambers were "merely a detail" of World War II history.

The comment provoked outrage in France, where police had rounded up thousands of Jews who were deported to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in 1942.

"I stand by this because I believe it is the truth," he said in 2015 when asked if he regretted the comment.

Le Pen was eventually estranged from his daughter, who renamed his National Front party to Nationally Rally, kicked him out and transformed it into one of France's most powerful political forces while distancing herself from her father's extremist image

with AP