Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.
It is, nearly to the day, 45 years on from when Simone Veil, France’s then Health Minister and survivor of the horrors of both Auschwitz and Belsen, found her rally for 1979’s European Parliament election attacked by the far-right, the foot soldiers of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.
In the spirit that characterised her life, Veil simply retorted that she had faced much worse and that they were but the SS with small feet.
That description was entirely correct. Composed of Petainist body snatchers, the leadership of the SS’s ‘Charlemagne’ Division, members of Algérie Française terror organisations, and the ‘founding father of French holocaust denial’, the National Front of that era was a far-right, fascist organisation combining extreme ethno-nationalism with a hostility to France’s republican tradition.
How then has it ended up in a position where it has gone from being denounced as neo-Nazi by Beate Klarsfeld, France’s most prominent Nazi-hunter, to being endorsed as a good option for a tactical vote against the left by her husband (and fellow Nazi-hunter) Serge Klarsfeld?
Whilst it has been a decades-long process the transition has almost entirely been in the last decade as leadership passed from Le Pen the senior to Le Pen the younger. De-demonisation has been both benign and serious: purging the prior generation of party leadership including her father, ending a pact in the European Parliament with the Alternative for Germany, renaming the party, and positioning it as firmly republican… and using the cuteness of kittens to soften the public’s perception
Ultimately though, in 10 or 15 years time, it will be the terrorist attack on 7 October 2023 that will be seen as having marked the completion of this process. In the weeks and months afterwards, the far-right swapped its position as the long-established bastion of French antisemitism: the far-left.
At the rally organised by the speakers of the French Parliament against the exploding number of antisemitic attacks, this contrast became clear as day. Whilst Jean-Luc Mélenchon, France’s answer to Jeremy Corbyn, denounced the all-party march as being a ‘rally for the friends of unconditional support for massacres’, Marine Le Pen attended, though unwelcome by the mainstream parties, stating that ‘we are where we need to be’.
That statement came but a few weeks after Jordan Bardella, her protégé, the likeliest candidate to be the next Prime Minister of France, described the National Rally as a shield for French Jews.
Courtesy of IFOP
In some ways what is most remarkable about this positional shift is how much of the rhetoric has remained the same: how the language of the antisemitic far-right is so immediately substitutable with the ‘decolonial’ and ‘anti-zionist’ rhetoric of the far-left. François Duprat, the number two of the National Front during its 1970s naissance and who in 1967 had previously founded the Rally for the Liberation of Palestine, in makes this case (in his own words) clearer than anyone else.
In perhaps his most infamous speech he declared that “the imperialist aggressors of Israel are carrying out their final solution to the Arab problem”, and that: “We French patriots, reaffirm our solidarity with the oppressed people of Palestine, in their heroic resistance against the Zionist occupier”. He then asked the people to join him in his “fight against the Zionist lobby”. Speech after speech would end with the phrase ‘down with Israel’s imperialist aggression’.
That such a speech could be given by a Columbia University student or the leader of the French left without any words being substituted (except for perhaps ‘patriots’) is the essential reason for the Klarsfelds’ drift.
A month prior to 7 October, the largest independent poll of French Jewish students found that half thought the hard-left was a very significant threat to Jewish students – a figure twice that of the hard-right. New polling of the Jewish community generally has found much the same pattern, with 92 per cent of French Jews saying the hard-left La France Insoumise has contributed to the rise of antisemitism, and 60 per cent saying the same of the Greens.
The same figure for the party of Le Pen? Just 49 per cent, only slightly ahead of the decimated Socialist Party.
Courtesy of IFOP
De-demonisation then has not been a mere rebrand: it has ultimately inverted politics, with the left embracing the world’s oldest racist tradition and now questioning even gay and women’s rights.
Voters risk being left with a choice between a united left under the leadership of an antisemitic conspiracy theorist who, again, 92 per cent of French Jews believe has worsened antisemitism, and a party founded by ex-SS officers which now wins double digit majorities on a majority-Muslim and majority-black island.
That choice has come into increasingly stark focus as the hard-left consolidates in the ‘New Popular Front’ (the prior left-front having collapsed last year because of the pro-Hamas position of its leader) and the hard-right coalesces around Le Pen, with Éric Ciotti, disputed leader of the centre-right Republicans, offering a pact to her.
Caesar’s old adage that Gaul is split in three (“Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.”) has become too applicable. Yet unless Macronist candidates can win over 12.5 per cent of the electorate (a tall order should turnout be low) Gaul will instead be forced to pick between hard-left and hard-right.
Say what you will about Boris Johnson, but if there is one thing the public can be grateful for it is that, in eliminating the Corbyn project, he spared British voters that choice.
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Author: Alexander Bowen
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