The conflict between Israel and Hamas has brought the issue of antisemitism back into the French political debate. While today the accusations of antisemitism mainly concern the left-wing La France Insoumise party, the president of the Rassemblement National, Jordan Bardella, has found himself having to try to explain the past statements of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the movement.
Jordan Bardella spoke to BFMTV on Sunday, November 5th to reiterate: “I don’t sound out hearts and minds, but I don’t believe that Jean-Marie Le Pen is antisemitic.”
This claim comes at a time when the French political debate is flaring up over the Israeli-Palestinian question. Old accusations against Jean-Marie Le Pen, his movement, and his associates are resurfacing, at the instigation of the Left and the media.
Since the beginning of the conflict, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, La France Insoumise, has been accused of antisemitism because of numerous ambiguous statements by its members and leaders, including the refusal to describe Hamas as a terrorist movement. One of its rhetorical defences has been to deflect the criticism by pointing a finger at the Rassemblement National, formerly the Front National, accusing it of having antisemitism in its DNA.
The France Insoumise party is finding it hard to accept that, in the eyes of the public, it has replaced the old Front National as France’s new refuge for antisemitism—a phenomenon that can be explained by its complacency towards Muslim immigrant populations who openly express their hostility to Israel.
Jordan Bardella spoke to BFMTV about the historic image of antisemitism attached to his movement. Some of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s statements, dating back to the 1980s, played a decisive role in making the Front National unattractive, such as his statement in 1987 that the gas chambers were a “detail” of the Second World War, or his play on words “Durafour – crématoire” (four crématoire standing for crematoria), directed at the minister Michel Durafour in 1988. As a result of these and other remarks, Jean-Marie Le Pen has been convicted of antisemitism by the French courts on six occasions.
The current president of the Rassemblement National made it clear that as far as he was concerned, “the horror of the Shoah is not a mere detail in history.”
Bardella’s intention was to try to extinguish, once again, the eternal controversy about the respectability of the Rassemblement National at a time when the party appears to be a favoured recourse of French people of the Jewish faith against the increasing number of antisemitic attacks. It is not certain that his televised speech had the desired effect, however. The RN’s opponents, led by a press largely hostile to its political camp, believe that attempting to defend Jean-Marie Le Pen is always a political faux pas.
“Jean-Marie Le Pen has been convicted of antisemitism, Jordan Bardella can’t ignore that,” denounced government spokesman Olivier Véran on France 5 channel on Monday, November 6th. The secretary general of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faure, announced his intention to exclude the Rassemblement National from a rally against antisemitism that he plans to organise in the next few days, accusing Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen’s party of using the fight against antisemitism as a pretext for attacking Muslims.
Despite its steadily rising popularity in opinion polls, the curse hanging over the French national Right never ceases to resurface in new forms.
