PARIS (AFP)---French extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen said he has put his armoured car up for sale on the online auction site eBay to face up to the financial crisis gripping his party.
"The National Front is not bankrupt because its assets are greater than its debt. But that means we have to cash in the crown jewels, as it were. They are being sold," the 79-yar-old Le Pen told France Inter radio.
"I am even selling my armoured car, to tell you the truth. It's on the Internet, it's all very public" said Le Pen, 79, whose party is negotiating the sale of its historic headquarters in the plush Paris suburb of Saint Cloud.
The bidding race for Le Pen's car, a 1992 blue Peugeot 605 model with full leather interior, started Monday and had reached 13,000 euros (20,000 dollars) by Wednesday midday.
But it was then taken off the site after a 10 million dollar bid which an eBay spokesperson said was a "joke."
It was quickly put back on sale at the request of the National Front at a starting price of one euro. A bid of 10,000 was made soon after.
The auction closes on May 10.
"To be treated as a collectors' item. Jokers please abstain," reads the eBay ad, which specifies that Le Pen used the car daily throughout last year's presidential race, in which he gathered around 10 percent of first round votes.
In 2002 the firebrand extreme-right leader shocked Europe by making it through to the second round of the French presidential election.
But his party has racked up millions of euros of debts after losing state subsidies thanks to its unexpectedly poor showing in last year's parliamentary elections, with a round of layoffs planned in the party ranks.
Las Thursday, Le Pen led an annual nationalist May Day march in Paris but turnout was low among supporters of his struggling party.
The extreme-right leader made headlines last week for repeating an incendiary claim that the Nazi gas chambers were a "detail of history."
Anti-racism and Jewish groups threatened immediate legal action against the National Front chief, who already holds several convictions for racism and anti-Semitism.
