Marine Le Pen and the Jews

Just nine days before the first round of the French Presidential elections, polls are suggesting that Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron are neck and neck in the race for first place. In any case, the same polls say that Le Pen, head of the French National Front (FN), won’t be able to win the second round, regardless of who her opponent might be.

But considering the spectacular rise and rise in support that the FN has seen recently, and considering how unreliable polls have been of late, failing to predict Brexit and Trump, a far-right victory in France has ceased to be a mere piece of science fiction. In this context, what would President Marine Le Pen mean for France and the Jews who call it home?

The first thing to ask would be whether or not Le Pen has really, genuinely changed the party, having taken the reins from her father, Jean Marie Le Pen. Le Pen senior has been charged for the anti-Semitic remarks in which he described the Holocaust as a mere ‘detail’ in history, and more recently has provoked outrage for calling a Jewish singer part of the fournée that he’ll get next time (an alleged reference to gas chambers).

One particularly widespread opinion is that Marine has changed the party’s appearance, bringing its shop window up to date, giving it a gloss of respectability and modernity. It’s something that would mark a successful return for the FN, back from the somewhat malicious reputation that for a while it had. The rebranding has allowed Le Pen to convert the FN from a small platform that her father founded into a viable party for government.

In this sense, the battle over who would succeed to the party’s leadership, which saw Jean Marie Le Pen excluded from its upper echelons (today he’s barely the honorary president), sowed a seed of doubt: is it all a bit too staged? A sort of unresolved Oedipal complex? Or is it a genuine attempt to front up, ideologically, to the party’s more challenging wing?

Beyond all that speculation, one thing we do know is that Marine La Pen has no anti-Semitic comments or Holocaust denials to her name. Interviewed time and again by Jewish journalists and the family-members of its victims, she has called the Holocaust ‘the abomination of abominations’.

A couple of recent remarks however have had people wondering if perhaps Marine Le Pen is starting to pick up the gauntlet that her father had thrown down. A few days ago, she commented that France ‘wasn’t responsible’ for the Vel d’Hiv Roundup, where 13,000 Jews were arrested in a mass raid and held in a Paris Velodrome in 1942. Those detained were eventually taken to Nazi extermination camps across Europe. Le Pen’s argument – that the France occupied by the Nazis wasn’t the real France, which instead could be found alongside Charles de Gaulle in London – had been the official French position until Jacques Chirac’s U-turn in 1995. ‘France, on that day, committed the irreparable,’ Chirac would admit.

Le Pen’s comments were unanimously condemned. To defend herself, she alluded to the Israeli newspaper MakorRishon. In the interview, the FN leader rejected any accusations of antisemitism.

‘The truth is that lots of French Jews vote for us because they know very well that, not only am I not an anti-Semite, but I am also their best weapon against antisemitism,’ she claimed.

Jews that vote for Marine Le Pen?

There are an estimated 500,000 Jews in France, which constitutes less than 1% of the population. Until the 1970s, the Jews had traditionally lent towards left-wring parties. This all changed in the 2000s, during the Second Intifada, where France saw a surge in anti-Semitic activity – synagogues burnt, schools attacked, assaults – the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the end of the Second World War. The left wing remained conspicuously silent, appearing to play down the risk of radical Islamism. As a result, a proportion of the Jewish vote threw themselves towards Nicolas Sarkozy, who in 2002 began to channel this anger into votes. Some other thousands of Jews chose to leave or Israel as part of an unprecedented wave of migration.

The one thing that’s certain is that, for today’s French Jews, the most imminent and concrete existential threat in the streets of France doesn’t look like skinheads or populists, but rather like Mohamed Merah (the Toulouse shooter who murdered seven people, including three children at a Jewish school), Youssouf Fofana (who kidnapped and killed Ilan Halimi), or Amédy Coulibaly (the murderer at the kosher supermarket), amongst other recent, fatal anti-Semitic attacks.

Where the left in France has denied the existence of an Islamist antisemitism and played down anti-Jewish attacks, it has left French Jews with almost nowhere to go. It’s a vacuum that the FN and Marine Le Pen have taken advantage of, promising a firm stance against political Islam and electing herself defender of France’s much-maligned secularism. It’s an ideological pirouette.

The FN is the party that’s home to France’s traditional Catholics (as well as France’s monarchists, France’s neo-Nazis, and France’s nostalgic few who miss Pétain’s Vichy), who have opposed the separation of Church and State ever since it was enshrined in law in 1905.

Either through conviction or through happy circumstance, Le Pen has flown the flag for secular France. It’s a flag that the left have been happy to leave behind, instead defending multiculturalism. They have been criticised for apparently forgetting the promise of egalité for all in favour of a new buzzword – diversité – and the community values that it espouses.

Catholic traditionalists seem to feel more comfortable today with the conservation François Fillon, who falls in line with the many organisers of the anti- Gay Marriage campaign in France, and with the younger Marion Maréchal Le Pen, who, ideologically speaking, is the apple that falls closer Jean Marie’s apple tree.

The shift in existential threat, the left’s lax attitude towards Islamist antisemitism, and Marine Le Pen’s position as the best defence against Islamist terror combine to explain that some proportion of France’s Jews see the FN, historically the party that collaborated with the Nazis, in a new light.

According to a Ifop poll, 13.5% ofself-defining Jews voted for Marine Le Pen in 2012, a substantial leap from the4.4% that had voted Jean Marie Le Pen for president in 2002. This development indicates that the Jewish vote has followed a similar trend to the rest of the French population. Above all, it seems to show that the taboo of supporting the FN is disappearing for France’s Jews, as well as for France’s general population.

But the Jewish vote, if it exists, is far from homogenous, and the FN’s opportunistic narrative of threat and saviour is drawing a line down an already fractious Jewish community.

Now then, more than whether Le Pen has shifted the traditional party line away from its origins and towards a Trump-style populism, she might just be the tip of the iceberg. An FN government would mean that its local vigilantes might also come to power.

Invariably, where the FN has had power locally, they have indicated that the fascist leanings of Jean Marie Le Pen’s party are still intact. The nostalgia for a hypothetical pure France, for a country which might discriminate between the pure-blooded French and the rest, for a purge of public libraries and events – not to mention for the corruption and improvised government that came with it – make it clear that the small-scale issues locally might lead to disaster on a national level: a country in the hands of ignorant and chauvinist leaders. The militants at local level and across social media make it clear that racism and antisemitism, widespread throughout the party, revved on by the Alt Right and by pro-Putin trolls, are alive and well.

Translated from Spanish by Josh Marks