PARIS - Just when she thought she had cleaned up her far-right National Front's image, French presidential contender Marine Le Pen was forced to disown her father's sense of humour on Friday after a Nazi joke.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, 83, the anti-immigration party’s founder and five-time presidential candidate, embarrassed his daughter with a play on words linking President Nicolas Sarkozy’s initials and the Nazi party’s Nuremberg rallies.
"NS: national socialism. Oh sorry! I thought when I watched that square the other day that it was Nuremberg, with NS," the elder Le Pen told some 6,000 National Front supporters at his daughter’s closing campaign meeting in Paris on Tuesday evening.
He was referring to Sarkozy’s open-air rally in Paris’ Place de la Concorde which drew about 100,000 people last Sunday, according to the ruling conservative party’s estimates.
Asked about her father’s comments, Marine Le Pen said in a television interview on Friday: "When Jean-Marie Le Pen makes a joke, you’re entitled to think it’s bad. I myself think it was bad, I thought it was a bad joke."
The veteran former paratrooper had already embarrassed her in February by quoting at a party convention a poem by Robert Brasillach, who was executed for collaboration with the Nazis during World War Two.
Marine Le Pen denied this week that her father had been gagged or put under close surveillance to prevent his outbursts sabotaging her efforts to bring the party into the political mainstream by expelling extremists and cracking down on members expressing racist or anti-Semitic views.
Credited with 14-17 percent in opinion polls, she is expected to come third in Sunday’s first round of voting.
Jean-Marie Le Pen has been convicted several times for inciting racial hatred over comments about Jews and Muslims.
