In snap election, many French Jews reluctantly endorse far right over dreaded far left
As Macron sends voters to the polls on Sunday, unprecedented levels of antisemitism after October 7 have prominent Jews reluctantly backing a party founded by a Holocaust denier
Canaan Lidor is a former Jewish World reporter at The Times of Israel
In a bombshell announcement during a live televised address earlier this month, French President Emmanuel Macron called for snap elections, saying the move was “grave and serious” but necessary to counter extremists “who endanger our nation.”
An immediate reaction to the gains of the French far right in the June 9 European Parliament elections, Macron’s declaration was a rallying call to his base and other moderates to unite around his centrist policies and reverse the far right’s advances.
But the move, which critics say was rash, appears to be backfiring. It has already sparked riots against the police by far-left protesters and could give a huge win not only to the far right but also to the far left, leaving Macron and other centrists in the dust.
Polls suggest that voters in many constituencies will eventually need to choose between a far-left candidate and a far-right one. Troubling to many French centrists, it is a tough choice for Jews — some of whom have astonishingly given public endorsements to a far right they loathe to keep out of power a far left they fear even more.
The polls (French link) ahead of the first round of voting on June 30 project only a 19% share of the vote for Macron’s Renaissance party, significantly less than what is projected for the far-right and far-left parties.
The two leading candidates in each constituency advance to the second and final runoff round of voting on July 7, which will determine the makeup of the lower house of France’s parliament, the National Assembly, which has 577 members and whose powers include overruling the Senate.
This means that in many constituencies, the runoff is likely to be between the far-right National Rally party under Marine Le Pen (34% in first-round polls) and the New Popular Front (28%), which is a bloc formed hastily and unexpectedly for the elections between the center-left Socialist Party and the far-left France Unbowed party, or LFI, of Jean-Luc Melenchon.
This unprecedented (French-language webpage) and controversial realignment on the left, which stunned a political establishment that had considered Melenchon’s party untouchable, leaves the bloc containing that party as the only alternative available to countless voters interested in keeping the far right out of power. Yet some French Jews who abhor the far right nonetheless will vote for it to keep out what they see as the greater evil of an antisemitic, anti-Israel far left.
“I never imagined voting for the National Rally [of Le Pen] to curb antisemitism,” said Alain Finkielkraut, a liberal Jew who is one of France’s best-known philosophers. A consistent and fierce critic of the far right, Finkielkraut will nonetheless vote for Le Pen’s party, he told Le Point, “if there’s no other choice and if LFI had a real chance of reaching power.”
More stunning still was the announcement by Serge Klarsfeld, a prominent historian of the Holocaust and hunter of Nazis. “I would have no hesitation, I would vote for the National Rally,” Klarsfeld told the LCI radio station on June 15. His life, he explained, “revolves around defending Jewish memory, persecuted Jews, Israel. Now I’m faced with a far left that’s in the grip of LFI, which reeks of antisemitism and violent anti-Zionism, or the National Rally, which has evolved.”
The elections coincide with an explosion of antisemitic incidents in France and a widely reported case involving three boys aged 12-13 accused of raping a 12-year-old girl because she’s Jewish while making anti-Israel slurs against her. Against this backdrop, the political shakeup is adding to some French Jews’ exasperation with their society.
Losing the Jews
“France and its political class need to understand it’s losing its Jews,” Julien Dray, a French Jew who cofounded the SOS-Racisme watchdog group, told (in French) the RCJ radio station on June 20. “Many young Jews and Jewish families ask me all the time now: ‘Do we belong here? Isn’t it time to leave quickly now before it gets too late?” added Dray, a former spokesperson for the Socialist Party.
About 50,000 Jews have moved to Israel since 2014, and the Jewish Agency expects another 3,200 to do so this year, triple last year’s tally.
Founded in 1972 as the National Front, the National Rally under Marine Le Pen has attempted to appear attentive to the plight of French Jews. On Saturday, its leader Le Pen penned an op-ed (in French) in Le Figaro describing the alleged rape as part of a wave of antisemitic hatred by immigrants from Muslim countries that she said the far left was instrumentalizing. “It should outrage the whole of France,” Le Pen wrote about the alleged rape.
Melenchon, who has rejected accusations of antisemitism, has condemned the alleged rape, saying on X that it shows problems with “male juvenile delinquency and antisemitic racism.” But a lawmaker for LFI, Aymeric Caron, appeared to relativize the affair on X by juxtaposing it with the slaying of a Roma woman in February, about which “no one is talking,” he wrote (in French.)
Le Pen’s championing of the fight against antisemitism is a new development for National Rally, which for decades had been synonymous with its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father. An ultranationalist provocateur with several convictions for Holocaust denial and a penchant for racist and antisemitic remarks, his leadership of the party had kept it on the sidelines of French politics.
A slow rehabilitation
But in 2011, Marine took over and began rehabilitating the party, including by kicking out members caught engaging in antisemitic rhetoric. This included her own father after he reiterated a statement that the Holocaust being merely a “detail” of World War II. A court prevented Marine from stripping her father of the party’s honorary president title, but he lacks any real power over its policies.
Dozens of National Rally members have been punished or kicked out for antisemitism, including Jean-Pierre Templier, the deputy of a party candidate in the current elections who is facing expulsion for writing on social media networks in 2014 that Jews “rule over us,” among other statements (in French.)
Under Marine Le Pen, the National Rally continues to support hardline positions on immigration and Islam. The party wants to ban street prayers and public wearing of some religious symbols, including the niqab for Muslim women and the kippah for Jews, which Le Pen has described as a sacrifice that Jews needed to make to defend themselves and the country against radical Islam.
Last month, an Israeli cabinet minister, Amichai Chikli, met officially for the first time with Le Pen, ending a decades-long boycott of the country by the Israeli government. National Front has consistently defended Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza even as the left and even the center turned against Israel. National Rally President Jordan Bardella, a 28-year-old acolyte of Marine Le Pen who joined the party at the age of 16, on Monday said (in French) that recognizing a Palestinian state would be “recognizing terrorism.”
The main representative body of French Jewry, CRIF, considers both LFI and National Rally illegitimate, saying in a statement Monday that the latter has “not addressed its antisemitism problem properly.” But there are signs that the National Rally under Marine Le Pen, who won 41% of the vote in the last presidential elections, is gaining acceptance among Jews regardless.
Some French Jews remain staunchly opposed to the changing attitudes toward National Rally, including supporters of the Socialist Party, a former political home of French Jewry. Ginette Kolinka, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, said she “didn’t understand” Klarsfeld’s relatively positive position on National Rally. “If even the Jews support the far right, it will never end,“ she told Le Figaro (in French.)
The current ‘party of antisemitism’
Gilles-William Goldnadel, a well-known French-Jewish lawyer and pundit, sees an overestimation of National Rally’s antisemitism problem and an underestimation, especially in the Jewish world outside France, of the antisemitism of the far-left LFI.
“The left-leaning media in France and abroad zooms in on the far right, raising its specter. French Jews also did this,” Goldnadel told The Times of Israel. Yet, under Melenchon, “LFI became the party of antisemitism. The party of Islamo-leftism, of Palestinianism,” Goldnadel said.
The visceral reaction of many prominent French Jews to LFI in the leadup to the parliamentary elections “demonstrates that practically everyone understands the risk, namely: If the far left takes power on July 8, French Jews will leave France,” Goldnadel added.
Melenchon, a former communist who won 19% of the vote in the previous presidential elections, has increasingly adopted pro-immigration stances and a tolerant approach to public expressions of the Muslim faith as he replaced the Socialist Party as the main political force in heavily Muslim suburbs. He’s also made multiple statements that critics said were antisemitic.
In a 2017 speech, Melenchon said about French Jews that “France is the opposite of aggressive communities that lecture to the rest of country.”
In 2014, weeks after nine synagogues were torched in France, he said he wanted to “congratulate the youth of my country who mobilized in defense of the miserable victims of war crimes in Gaza,” adding: “If we have anything to condemn, then it is the actions of citizens who decided to rally in front of the embassy of a foreign country or serve its flag, weapon in hand,” he said, referencing French pro-Israel Jews. Earlier this month he said that antisemitism in France was merely “residual.”
Melenchon, who has long sought (in French) a union on the left, recently appointed to his party’s European Parliament faction Rima Hassan, a French-Palestinian activist who is under a police investigation for justifying the October 7 onslaught. She has visited multiple anti-Israel demonstrations at French campuses and danced and sang with the protesters. Melenchon has called Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza a “genocide,” and has said that “peace-loving Frenchmen” cannot express solidarity with the victims of the Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, in which the terrorist group’s gunmen murdered some 1,200 people in Israel and abducted 251.
A political tailspin
“As the National Rally moved away from antisemitism, LFI rushed toward it and embraced it,” said Philippe Karsenty, a center-right French-Jewish former politician.
Karsenty considers the early elections a major political misstep for Macron. “He’s a gambler, who arrogantly thought he would catch everyone off guard and position himself as the only alternative to Le Pen. But he misjudged the left’s ability to unite and his own unpopularity, sending us into a tailspin,” Karsenty told The Times of Israel.
In an interview (in French) with LCI, Mathieu Kassovitz, a left-leaning French-Jewish actor and film director who has inveighed against National Rally and has said he would not vote for it, appeared to reflect the dismay, confusion and desperation shared by many ahead of the elections.
“I’m sick of protests. I’m for countering violence with violence,” he said when asked whether he would attend demonstrations against a National Rally victory. With an air of cynicism, he then added: “Maybe we’re not the France of human rights and we need to accept that maybe the National Front [sic] has its place and would do a better job. Maybe it’s an experiment to try. I think we’ll never be who we [truly] are unless we go through that phase.”
