SPECIAL REPORT: Keep Le Pen out, urge French Jews
As far as France’s Jewish community is concerned, there is no doubt who should win this Sunday’s presidential election.
Michael Daventry is Jewish News’s foreign and broadcast editor
As far as France’s Jewish community is concerned, there is no doubt who should win this Sunday’s presidential election.
The Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions, better known by its initials Crif, did not mince its words: “We appeal for a blockade of Marine Le Pen and to vote massively for Emmanuel Macron.
The country’s biggest Jewish organisation was clearly never going to endorse a candidate of the far-right like Le Pen, but its statement was doused with a panic and urgency that made something else plain: she could actually win.
Sunday will be the second time Le Pen has won enough support to qualify for a run-off election against the liberal Macron.
she could actually win.
They last faced each other in 2017 when Macron, then a political newcomer, trounced her by a margin of two to one.
He is still the likely victor this time — there has been only one opinion poll in the past month that put Le Pen ahead of him — but it will be much, much closer.
That raises the possibility of a surprise outcome in the style of Brexit or Donald Trump, when voters confounded the pollsters and delivered results that shocked the system.
The mere prospect was enough to trigger French Jewry’s call for all voters to “mobilise”: “Crif wants everyone to be well aware that the true face of Marine Le Pen is the one she displays to the most violent and xenophobic leaders in Europe to whom she is close on a personal and ideological level.”
And it was not just Crif. France’s Chief Rabbi Haïm Korsia endorsed Macron by calling on voters to “overcome political divisions” and rally behind the incumbent.
The mere prospect was enough to trigger French Jewry’s call for all voters to “mobilise
Of particular concern, he said, was a promise to ban slaughter of animals that have not been pre-tunned, effectively, a ban on kosher and halal meat. Several European countries have already done this, but Korsia said Le Pen’s party wanted to go further by banning imports from other countries.
“These detestable remarks mark a new stage in the discriminatory policy of this party,” the chief rabbi said, “and this, all the more so since no European country prohibits the import of products from ritual slaughter.”
Party leader Jordan Bardella appeared to row back on the position this week, telling the news channel FranceInfo that slaughter on French territory would be banned “in the name of animal dignity and suffering”, although imports would still be permitted.
That move is one example of the great strides taken by Le Pen’s movement to moderate her image. She no longer wants to take France out of the euro. She mingles with voters on campaign stops in a deliberate contrast to Macron’s elitist image. And it has been years since she expelled her antisemitic father from the party, then called the National Front, and renamed it the National Rally.
Her election strategy in recent months has been clever too: for an advocate of Vladimir Putin like her, Russia’s war in Ukraine could have proven fatal. She has successfully pivoted her rhetoric towards the rising cost of living.
She mingles with voters on campaign stops in a deliberate contrast to Macron’s elitist image
But there is no doubt a Présidente Le Pen would seek to discriminate between the people who live in her country. She still wants a ban on the Muslim veil, but not the kippah, in public spaces.
Although the interventions by Crif and the chief rabbi prompted muttering about France’s tradition of separating religion and government, the bulk of the country’s Jewish community appears positioned against Le Pen. Even the National Jewish Circle, a fringe group that initially backed her, said it was withdrawing its support over a campaign photo that it said showed her making a white supremacist gesture.
But today’s France contains many voters disenchanted by the centre-right, centre-left and centrist presidents of the past 15 years.
It is just possible that enough of them will be tempted to try something new.
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