‘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.