The Trinity philosopher, the late Francis La Touche Godfrey, would describe to students with a chuckle the long-term survival challenge for antiquity’s few suicide cults, their central – he was a Hegelian – internal contradiction, the anomaly of the “non-playing captain”.
Far-right parties, notably those built explicitly or implicitly around the cult of the leader, have an analogous problem to the non-playing captain. How does a party survive intact when its epitome leaves the stage? Or refuses to do so? France's Front National has the problem in spades. Ex-leader Jean Marie Le Pen (86), who could until recently fairly have paraphrased Louis XIV in insisting that "le parti, c'est moi", is not going quietly. The result has been described in the press as "all-out war" with his own daughter and heir to the leadership, Marine Le Pen, who has been driving a successful "detoxification" campaign to make the Front respectable, to reach into parts that he could only dream of. A poll last weekend suggested as many as a quarter of France's voters will back her in the 2017 presidential elections.
But her unreconstructed father's repeated comments belittling the Holocaust and defending Marshal Pétain, the collaborationist leader of Vichy France, have gone far beyond political incorrectness and deeply embarrassed the party's new leadership. In an unprecedented rebuke to him that marks her first move to cut him out of the party he co-founded, Marine Le Pen warned that he would be prevented from standing in regional elections this year – Jean-Marie remains an MEP, regional councillor and honorary party president. "Jean-Marie Le Pen seems to be in a total spiral of strategy somewhere between scorched earth and political suicide," she said. Expulsion could be next – and prosecutors are examining whether his latest comments again warrant hate crime or Holocaust denial charges.
The Front's critics insist its former leader is only unveiling the party's true colours and this leopard does not change its spots. Whatever she may wish, distancing herself from Papa, the man who all saw as the Front, will not be easy.