Far-right leader Le Pen defends father's Norway massacre remarks

The leader of France's far-right Front National (FN), Marine Le Pen, said Friday she "did not disagree" with claims that Norway’s government was to blame for the Oslo massacre made by her father Jean-Marie, who founded the party.

Reuters/Stephane Mahe

Jean-Marie Le Pen caused uproar in France last week when he declared that the Oslo government’s "naivety" over immigration was to blame for the 22 July killings of
77 people by a far-right Islamophobe.

Dismissing self-confessed mass killer, Anders Behring Breivik, as a “nutter”, he said that the “murderous consequences” were “much more closely linked to the naivety of the Norwegian state than to [Breivik’s] madness”.

Le Pen accused Norway of underestimating the “global danger” of immigration and terrorism, the central questions in Breivik’s 1,518-page internet statement.

"If I had disagreed or if I felt his words were shocking, I would have said so," Marine Le Pen told Europe 1 radio.

Her father "raised the question, and it's a real question, about society's choices," she said.

Since succeeding her father as party head in January, she has been trying to give the FN a friendlier face and one party member has been disciplined for publishing praise of the mass murderer on his blog.

The opposition Socialists' interim head, Harlem Desir, claimed the statement showed that "the party has not changed".