Le Pen sells headquarters to the Chinese

JEAN-PIERRE MULLER/AFP/Getty Images

Remember Jean-Marie Le Pen, the ultra-nationalist French politician who shocked the world by reaching the second round of France’s 2002 presidential election? The leader of the anti-immigrant, anti-semitic, anti-everything Front National is more or less a Ku Klux Klan member who was born on the wrong continent.

That’s why it’s so beautifully ironic that, faced with millions of Euros worth of debt after voters apparently didn’t respond so well to his “Keep France for the French” motto in the 2007 legislative elections, Le Pen’s party is selling its lavish Paris headquarters to a Chinese university. Perhaps the Front had trouble finding a pure-blooded French buyer willing to be associated with them.

The Guardian writes that the well-known building next to the Seine was “a symbol of the upward mobility of the party when it was purchased 18 years ago.” I guess the sale is a symbol of the party’s future drowning in the neighboring river.

These are tough times for Le Pen. He already had to sell his bulletproof car on eBay to try to pay off debts. Hopefully the dear leader of French neo-Fascism will be able to keep his white hood and robe.