Marine Le Pen moves to oust father from National Front

Marine Le Pen has taken steps to oust her father Jean-Marie from the party he founded, as the head of France's far-right National Front attempts to sanitise the party ahead of the next election.

In a deepening of the family drama, Ms Le Pen said that she would oppose her father's candidature at regional elections this year following a string of controversial comments made by the 86-year-old.

Jean-Marie Le Pen last week defended a past comment that Nazi gas chambers were "a detail" of history and was quoted on Tuesday as calling France's Spanish-born prime minister Manuel Valls "the immigrant".

Speaking to the rightwing publication Rivarol, he also this week defended Philippe Petain, leader of the wartime government that co-operated with Nazi Germany, saying the postwar French government was "too harsh" with him.

Is a statement on Wednesday, Ms Le Pen, who has run the party since 2011, said: "Jean-Marie Le Pen seems to have descended into a strategy somewhere between scorched earth and political suicide.

"His status as honorary president does not give him the right to hijack the National Front with vulgar provocations seemingly designed to damage me but which unfortunately hit the whole movement."

She added that she had informed her father that he would not have the party's support in France's regional elections in December, where he was to stand for leadership of the Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur region.

Florian Philippot, the National Front's vice-president, said in a tweet: "The political split with Jean-Marie Le Pen is now complete and definite. Under Marine Le Pen's guidance, decisions will be taken swiftly."

Since taking over the party Ms Le Pen has sought to shed it's racist and anti-semitic image and bring it into the political mainstream, focusing more on economic issues such as nationalising banks and bringing back the franc.

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The party won first place in last year's European elections in France, the party's biggest victory since it was founded in 1972. It also won a quarter of the votes in the first round of local election polls last month, placing second.

Polls suggest that the anti-immigrant party could make it into the second-round run-off of a presidential election in 2017 but is unlikely to win.

Ms Le Pen last year began to distance herself from her father after remarks published on his online blog about a Jewish singer that appeared to invoke the gas chambers of Nazi concentration camps.

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