French far-right party excludes founder Jean-Marie Le Pen

Jean-Marie Le Pen, France’s elderly, far-right master provocateur, was booted out of the National Front (FN) he founded on Thursday after a high-profile feud with his daughter and party leader Marine.

A decision may come Thursday, or later.

Now his daughter Marine is trying to distance the party from her father’s extreme rhetoric and transform it into a mainstream political force.

Joachim was being interviewed on BFM-TV when the announcement was issued.

“I gave full explanations to those who had not always understood what was being said or what was being reported”, he said as he left the building.

The ballot has no legal validity, however, after a court on Tuesday agreed with Le Pen senior that it violated the party’s internal rules. “If they take such a decision, it would be a mortal blow to the National Front”, the founder and honorary president of the party said. Both are part of the eight-member executive bureau. But the daily l’Opinion quotes Philippot as saying they prefer not to be both judges and accusers in what amounts to a trial.

While the FN is still anti-EU and anti-immigration, it has worked hard to soften its image since Marine took over from her father in 2011 and has seen its popularity soar, enjoying a series of election successes. The bombastic Jean-Marie Le Pen maintains that his remarks, however offensive, fall into the domain of freedom of expression.

He contends that his daughter is changing the National Front’s identity in her bid to offer a political alternative to the French – and doing so with the help of Philippot whose stack of degrees adds special weight to his policies.

The complaints include a remark first made years ago, and repeated in April, that the Nazi gas chambers are a “detail in the history” of World War II.

Of the six members of the National Front’s executive board, just one – Marie-Christine Arnautu – is known to be a supporter of Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Unlike his last disciplinary hearing in May, Le Pen has said he will show up at the party headquarters in Nanterre outside Paris on Thursday, though “only to administer a lesson, not to receive one”.

In a dramatic move, the FN’s executive committee questioned the 87-year-old for three hours and voted to exclude him over inflammatory comments that proved too much for Marine Le Pen, pushing him out of a party he led for close to four decades.