Veteran French far right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen will finally step down as head of his anti-immigration party the National Front in January next year, he told reporters Monday. The 81-year-old former paratrooper founded the Front in 1972 and party members will vote for his successor at its conference on January 15 and 16. His daughter, Marine Le Pen, is favourite to succeed him. "I will not be a candidate to lead this organisation that I founded 38 years ago," he told reporters after a meeting of the party executive in Paris to decide the date of the movement's 14th congress. Le Pen's announcement was expected and comes at a moment when the party is riding relatively high in the polls following a strong showing in last month's regional elections, with just under 12 percent in the first round. While this was less than the party's record highs -- it scored 14.7 percent in a similar regional vote in 2004 -- it confirmed it had executed a comeback after a lean few years. The party claims to have 75,000 members. Marine Le Pen, the party founder's 41-year-old daughter and an accomplished media performer, is a member of the European parliament and the Calais regional council, and remains in pole position to succeed her father. The only other candidate to have officially thrown his hat into the ring is 60-year-old Bruno Gollnisch, another Euro-MP and a longstanding Le Pen ally. While never threatening a serious challenge for national power, Le Pen's brand of immigrant bashing and populist economics has won him enough support to maintain a platform in political life for four decades. He has been the convicted and fined on several occasions for street brawls and breaking hate crimes law, most notoriously for dismissing the World War II Nazi gas chambers where Jews were slaughtered as a "detail of history".
AFP
