Why French Jews Believed the Political Right Could Save Them—and France

 

Caught between ‘one monster and another,’ many Jews chose the party willing to stand up against radical Islam. They lost.

https://www.thefp.com/p/why-french-jews-believed-le-pen-could-save-them?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

GORDES, FRANCE — On Saturday night, I was at a birthday party here, in Provence, and everyone was asking everyone else whether they planned to vote fascist in Sunday’s election. Most of the attendees were Jews.

They were being a tad ironic. They don’t think the current incarnation of the National Rally party is actually fascist. No swastikas. No goose-stepping. 

But the party is fascist-adjacent. It’s the direct descendant of fascists: the National Rally (formerly known as the National Front) is run by Marine Le Pen, the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the National Front in 1972 and hated Jews. (Among other Le Pen lowlights is this 1987 quip: “I’m not saying the gas chambers didn’t exist. I haven’t seen them myself. I haven’t particularly studied the question. But I believe it’s just a detail in the history of World War II.”)

But that was then. And now? Well, now the “fascists” and the Jews are bound together by a common foe: radical Islam, which has cut a gaping hole through the French body politic.

Now, the French far right and many of the country’s 500,000 Jews believe that they are under siege, and that unless something radical changes, France will soon be lost forever.

“The best shield for our fellow French citizens of Jewish faith today is the National Rally. It’s the only movement with the will, the conviction, and the means to fight Islamist fundamentalism, which is the major danger facing them”: when Marine Le Pen said that in May, many took note, and compared her clarity with Macron’s Renaissance party.

To stave off what Macron has portrayed as the dire threat—he’s warned of “civil war”—posed by the National Rally, the president allied with the New Popular Front, the coalition of far-left parties that includes La France Insoumise (LFI), or France Unbowed. LFI is led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who in 2017 called Jews “an arrogant minority that lectures to the rest” and has openly embraced vitriolic antisemitism over the past several months. 

The LFI has found fertile soil—and not primarily because of the far right. 

The demography of France has transformed over the past two decades. 

Nearly eight percent of the French population—some five million people—now identify as Muslim, making Islam the second most popular religion in the country, behind the 25 percent who identify as Catholic. (In 1960, there were about 400,000 Muslims in France.) By 2050, Muslims are expected to comprise 17 percent of the country’s population.

The French government is currently debating whether to save from destruction countless village churches that have been abandoned—while the mufti of Paris’s Grand Mosque Dalil Boubakeur has proposed converting abandoned churches into mosques.

And antisemitism is exploding here. A recent study showed that more than half of French Muslims “hate” Jews or have a “bad” or “very bad” opinion of them. In 2023, antisemitic incidents in France quadrupled. In the first three months of 2024, there were more than 360 antisemitic incidents.

 That number does not include the recent gang rape, allegedly motivated by antisemitism, of a 12-year-old Jewish girl by three boys, aged 12 to 13, in a Paris suburb. Jewish boys know not to wear their kippot in public. People admit to taking mezuzot off their doorposts. 

French Jews and, really, liberals of all backgrounds and faiths, have known all this for a long time. But for a while they could pretend that pretending wasn’t problematic. They could vote in good conscience for Macron, because he was smart, and he had a lovely résumé, and he was a natty dresser, and he spoke the lingo of the anointed. He was not that dissimilar to Barack Obama, who was also celebrated by all the right people, but whose policies, at best, now seem like a disappointment.

Then we crossed the Rubicon of October 7. 

That was when pretending became impossible and when we had to choose sides: you had to be with the people who oppose the murder of innocents. Or not. The metaphysical crawl space that had persisted pre-October 7—when one had the luxury of talking about the plight of the Palestinians as a way of sidestepping the thuggery and violence of their terrorist overlords—evaporated.

So some French Jews chose the people who oppose the murder of innocents—the so-called fascists. (A recent poll commissioned by the American Jewish Committee in Europe showed that 92 percent of French Jews believe the LFI has contributed to antisemitism in the country, while 51 percent think the National Rally has.) On the day of the Hamas attack, Le Pen tweeted: “Terrorism cannot be tolerated and the security of the Israeli people is non-negotiable.” She added: “In these difficult times, we stand more than ever alongside Israeli democracy.” 

It was Le Pen and the 28-year-old president of the National Rally, Jordan Bardella, or it was Macron and his ineffectual, neoliberal, pretty people. 

Or, worse yet, it was the New Popular Front, a coalition of parties that includes greens, socialists, and communists. 

“I never imagined voting for the National Rally to curb antisemitism,” Alain Finkielkraut, a French philosopher, told Le Point. Compared to the LFI, he said, it was the lesser of two evils.

More stunning was the announcement by Serge Klarsfeld, a prominent Nazi hunter and Holocaust historian, who said he would vote for the National Rally. “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 parallels between here and there, between America and France, were impossible to overlook.

The American liberal—who is not necessarily a Democrat or even on the left, but simply believes in civil liberties and the Constitution and pluralism and due process, and hasn’t succumbed to the fever dreams of the populist left or the populist right—finds himself where the French Jew finds himself. “Between one monster and another,” as one of my French acquaintances noted.

The sane people, the reasonable people, the people who think October 7 was an atrocity and the loss of life in Gaza is awful and believe that the peaceful transfer of power is central to the democratic experiment—they are an embattled species. Wedged between two monsters, they are forced to pick a side. Or no side at all.

“Everyone I know in Paris is voting RN,” a Frenchwoman sitting opposite me said, referring to the National Rally. That was telling, she added. It used to be that only the yokels voted for the so-called brownshirts—the fascists. But that was changing as reality crowded in. In the cities, and especially the beat-up, graffiti-splattered outer arrondissements, or suburbs, the anger of the working-class Muslim communities was almost palpable. Now, even the elites, the fancy people, were pulling the lever for the RN, because they did not know what else to do.

In other words, the “far right” is no longer really on the fringe. It’s no longer really the “far” right. As the number of mega-mosques has jumped, as the attacks have proliferated, as the conflict between Westerners and non-Westerners inside France came into focus, French voters were thought to have shifted right. 

“The Jews will change the fascists” is not something one hears every day, but there I was, at this party, and the Frenchwoman opposite me was saying exactly that. She added that the old language—fascism, Nazi—was mostly meaningless now. These were words that partisans and their surrogate-drones lobbed at people they didn’t like. They bore little resemblance to their original meanings.

Meanwhile, they were wondering whether the old monsters can be tamed in the service of squeezing out or overcoming the new ones. They were wondering whether, by supporting the people whose grandparents once celebrated the destruction of their grandparents, they could preempt more destruction. They didn’t know. 

In the first round of voting in France last week, the National Rally was the top vote-getter. It was unclear, early Sunday, whether it would win a 289-seat majority in the 577-seat National Assembly. American reporters have portrayed the far-right surge as the result of Macron’s tactical blunder in calling, in June, for snap elections. 

But Sunday night, it was clear that the National Rally had come in third and that the alliance between the centrist Macron faction and the far left had prevailed. On social media, Jews and Israelis called for French Jews to get out now. Soon, the country is expected to recognize a Palestinian state. 

It will be led partly by a newly empowered Mélenchon who believes that antisemitism in France remains nothing more than “residual.” Rabbi Moshe Sebbag’s declaration last week that “France has no future for Jews” seems to be coming true. Even the fascists can’t help them now.

Peter Savodnik is a writer for The Free Press. Follow him on X @petersavodnik, and read his piece, “Islamists Keep Stabbing People. Why Aren’t We Talking About It?”