‘Thunderclap’: The day Jean-Marie Le Pen staged the biggest upset in French election history
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the rabble-rousing far-right leader who died on Tuesday aged 96, was a political outcast on April 21, 2002, when he stormed into the second round of France’s presidential election, confounding pollsters’ predictions and knocking out the Socialist frontrunner in a political earthquake that would forever change French politics.
An earlier version of this article was published under a different title on April 17, 2022, marking two decades since Jean-Marie Le Pen’s famous upset.
Just four days before the first round of the 2002 French presidential election, the then-Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, relaxed and smiling, sat down with a mischievous reporter keen for a game of political science fiction.
At the time – just four days before a fateful first-round vote – it was unthinkable for a sitting prime minister (or indeed anyone else) to imagine far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen advancing to a presidential final. Just alien. After all, Le Pen was the diabolical ex-paratrooper who had once downplayed Nazi gas chambers as "a detail" of World War II history. A marginal figure. One that voters would marginalise, surely. And yet a history-shaping cataclysm was to come.
"It's impossible?" the candidate is asked.
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