Is Jean-Marie Le Pen the patriarch of European populism?

Jean-Marie Le Pen turned 90 last month and to celebrate he threw a party on Saturday for 350 guests. His three daughters were present, including Marine, whose attendance signalled the end of two years of hostility. The pair fell out when she expelled him from the National Front for repeating his belief that the Holocaust was “a detail of history”.

The rapprochement between father and daughter is also a political move on her part. Marine Le Pen knows she messed up in last year’s presidential campaign by focusing on Frexit when the National Front’s strategy should have centred on mass immigration and Islamic extremism. Ahead of next May’s European elections, she is going back to the party’s basics, and her father’s endorsement will help her in that respect.

Immigration from North Africa was the reason her father founded the National Front in 1972, and for decades Le Pen was persona non grata in polite society.