Jean-Marie Le Pen, who repeatedly played down the Holocaust and was an unrepentant extremist on race, gender and immigration, founder of the French far-right National Front party, has died.
Always a controversial and divisive figure described as the ‘Devil of the Republic’, he caused consternation when he reached the presidential election-run off against Jacques Chirac in 2002 but was thereafter resoundingly defeated.
He started his political life fighting Communists and conservatives alike – described himself as “ni droite, ni gauche, français” – not right, not left, but French. His daughter, Marine, took over as party chief in 2011 and has since rebranded the party as National Rally, turning it into one of France’s main political forces.
Born 20 June 1928 3am Nantes, France, his chart is not as malevolent or as ideologically-obsessive as I might have expected. His only two Air signs were Sun Venus in Gemini on the focal point of a mini Grand Trine to a publicity-attracting Neptune trine Mars in Aries. Admittedly he had Mercury in emotional Cancer in a dogmatic conjunction to Pluto on one side and a revolutionary square to Uranus on the other, which would ramp up his rabble-rousing tendencies.
The National Rally party he founded, 5 October 1972, is more obviously a force for far-right agitating with a determined and can-be-hate-filled Mars Pluto conjunction square Jupiter- and six planets in Air, which would suggest an ideological bent.
His daughter Marine Le Pen, 5 August 1968 11.20 pm Neuilly Sur Seine, France, has a much harder chart despite her toning down the party’s hardline, rightwing politics. Her relationship with her father from her chart looks more than stressed with a competitive 10th house Mars in an unfair-treatment square to Saturn, with Saturn on the focal point of a yod inconjunct Pluto Uranus sextile Neptune. She threw him out of the party in 2015 after he repeated his Holocaust views.
The post Jean-Marie Le Pen – the face of French nationalism first appeared on Astroinform with Marjorie Orr – Star4cast.
