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President of France’s far right National Rally party accused of 2010s antisemitic statements
Jordan Bardella strongly denies having sent a serious of messages which describe how 'the Jew has to dominate other peoples, crush them, and rob them'
The President of France’s far-right National Rally party has been accused of sending a series of antisemitic messages between 2013 and 2015, in which he allegedly referred to “the Jew” wanting to “dominate” and “exterminate” other peoples.
Jordan Bardella, 31, who has served as a Member of the European Parliament since 2019, is a longstanding member of the party, formerly known as the National Front. He is understood to have joined it when he was 16, becoming the party’s youngest ever department official at the age of 19.
Published by Mediapart, a French investigative website, Mr Bardella is alleged to have written: “All the banks are owned by Jews.”
The website also quoted him as having written in a chat: “The Jew has to dominate other peoples, crush them, and rob them; a Zionist is necessarily a Jew, and fundamentally so”, with another alleged message reading “And that is what they want: a New World Order dominated by Israel, with Jerusalem as the capital, of course.”
The messages are reported to have been sent by Bardella between 2013 – 2015, when he was in his late teens
Bardella has strongly denied authorship of the messages. In a series of social media posts he described how “the journalists from the far-left media outlet Mediapart are political activists, committed to trying to bring me down politically. These statements, I did not make them, I didn’t even think them: not a single French person can doubt my honesty on this matter”. He went on to confirm that he had filed a defamation lawsuit against Mediapart, saying that “I will use the courts to protect my honour and my complete integrity.”
He subsequently went on to say that “In matters of combating antisemitism, I have no lessons to receive from a newspaper whose founder made statements in support of terrorists who assassinated Israeli athletes during the Olympics in Munich.”
The National Front party was founded by Jean Marie Le Pen, who was notorious for being convicted on multiple occasions for antisemitism and Holocaust denial. Under the leadership of his daughter, Marine Le Pen, the party has made an effort to claim that it has moved away from the antisemitic viewpoints which had previously dominated, although such claims have long been viewed with scepticism by many.
Marine Le Pen, who is the parliamentary leader of National Rally in the French Assembly, described the accusations as “madness”, going on to say that “This seems so crazy to me that it can only be a fake.”
The next French Presidential election is due to take place next year, with current polling suggesting National Rally, under Le Pen, will be one of the two parties to proceed to the final round of voting.
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