The French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, who turns 90 on Saturday, has decided life is too short for family fallouts.
After three years of very public spats with his youngest daughter, Marine, and 20 years of not talking to the eldest, Marie-Caroline, Le Pen has decided it is time for reconciliation.
To that end he has invited both to his birthday party this weekend, for which about 200 guests will gather at the patriarchal manor, the 17th-century chateau Montretout in the western suburbs of Paris.
Marine Le Pen visited her father in hospital recently after he was admitted for 11 days with a severe bout of flu. Before that they had not met since she expelled him from the Front National – now renamed Rassemblement National (National Rally) – in 2016 for repeated racist comments.
“I was happy she came,” Jean-Marie Le Pen told Paris Match magazine. “We had a very pleasant time. Despite our political differences, she’s still my daughter. I even found her to be beautiful. She came with her daughters, Mathilde and Jehanne, and Nolwenn, Marie-Caroline’s daughter.”
He sent Marie-Caroline to the Gallic equivalent of Coventry, refusing to let her name pass his lips, after she supported his former general Bruno Mégret when he left the FN to start his own party in 1998. But despite the long silence, he said he hoped she would attend his party “with her husband and her sisters”.
His middle daughter, Yann, married Samuel Maréchal, director of the FN’s youth wing, in 1993 and had three daughters herself, one of whom, Marion Maréchal, became the youngest politician ever to sit in the national assembly when she was elected as an MP in 2012 at the age of 22.
Had the old patriarch had a change of heart or a sudden revelation of his own mortality while in hospital? “What do you want me to say … I’m at the age of indulgence,” he said. “I’ve a sense of time passing. I’m rowing against the current but I know it will eventually drag me towards the rapids.”
