Why Are French Jews Supporting the Far Right?

Last week, a popular radio host for the France Culture station, the humorist Guillaume Erner, confessed that he had had enough of the “Jewish question.”

“It seems to me there’s enough in the campaign platforms of the National Rally, France Unbowed, or any other party, so that we need not base our vote on the Jewish question,” he said. “More than weariness, I feel exhausted in the face of this daily Judeo-obsession, one which has become suffocating since Oct. 7.”

Erner is not just the genial voice on France’s flagship station; he is also a sociologist who teaches at the University of Paris, a scholar who studies antisemitism, and a member of a Jewish family decimated by the Holocaust.

The fact that even these credentials will not absolve Erner from charges of antisemitism underscores the resilience of the “Jewish question” in France. Galvanized by Hamas’s massacre of more than 1,000 Israelis last year, followed by the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians in the Israeli military invasion of Gaza, that question looms even larger following the European Parliament election, which was held in France on June 9. When the voting led to an overwhelming victory by the extreme-right National Rally party, President Emmanuel Macron made the disastrous decision to dissolve the National Assembly and schedule new elections less than three weeks later, on June 30.

Most surprising of all, perhaps, is that several prominent French Jews have publicly expressed a willingness to vote for the National Rally (RN)—a party with its roots in the National Front, a group founded by the openly antisemitic politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.

The Twenty Days of Macron—which will assume the same historical significance as the Hundred Days of his idol, Napoleon—are nearly up, yet the battlefield is not what the president had imagined. Macron had expected a resurgence of the same coalition he led in previous electoral campaigns, pitting the supposedly reliable “republican front” of socialist to neo-Gaullist parties against an outnumbered National Rally, the far-right party led by his perennial nemesis, Marine Le Pen.

Yet the RN, with its electoral ranks burgeoning with new recruits from both the right and left, now dwarfs Macron’s floundering Renaissance party. In the first round of voting this Sunday, the RN is projected to win slightly more than 36 percent, while coalition led by Renaissance will capture barely 20 percent.

Moreover, Macron must fight on not one, but two fronts. Running well ahead of his party in the projections, hovering at 30 percent, is the New Popular Front. The coalition was formed by a popular left-wing politician, François Ruffin, after Macron’s dissolution announcement.

In an appeal that went viral, he compared the current moment to 1936, when a confluence of social, political, and economic crises swept the original Popular Front into office. This coalition of the socialist, communist, and radical parties had been conceived two years earlier, birthed by a failed but bloody attempt by anti-republican and antisemitic forces to overthrow the government.

Invoking the name of Léon Blum, the French Jewish socialist who became the original Popular Front’s prime minister, Ruffin declared that just as the Popular Front defended the republic then, it could do so now. An extreme right-wing government, he affirmed, “is not inevitable!”

But it was no more inevitable that Ruffin’s rallying cry would succeed. The New Popular Front consists of the same parties—France Unbowed, the French Communist Party, the Ecologists, and the Socialist Party—that formed the doomed New Ecological and Social People’s Union after the 2022 legislative elections. Wobbly from the start, this earlier coalition fell to pieces last October, when events in Israel and Gaza heaved the “Jewish question” front and center across much of the world. But this was especially and painfully true in France, a nation whose collaborationist government had, three-quarters of a century earlier, assisted Nazi Germany’s Final Solution to that perennial question.

As a result, when France Unbowed parliamentarian Danièle Obono described Hamas as a “resistance movement,” a firestorm of outrage ensued. The party’s former leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, fed the widespread fury when he refused to describe the slaughter of Israeli civilians as an act of terrorism.

One month later, the conflagration destroyed the bridge between France Unbowed and its partners when Mélenchon and his close circle refused to participate in the march against antisemitism. Though their stated reason was the participation of Le Pen and her lieutenants in the march, it did not prevent the separation between France Unbowed and its partners from turning into a bitter divorce.

Mélenchon has since kept these fires burning, most recently with an observation made on his blog that antisemitism “remains residual” in France. In the face of the meteoric rise of antisemitic incidents in France—in 2023, more than 1,600 occurred, most of them after Oct. 7—Mélenchon’s remark reflected indifference at best and insouciance at worst.

After an appalling incident in a Paris suburb in mid-June—the alleged torture and rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl by three adolescents spewing antisemitic insults—Mélenchon quickly announced his “horror” over the crime while condemning “antisemitic racism.” But this was too little, too late for the legion of critics who insist that his words and silences contributed to the toxic atmosphere that made such a crime possible.

Those critics included a crucial member of the New Popular Front, Raphaël Glucksmann. He is the grandson of left-wing Zionists and militant labor organizers who emigrated to France from Eastern Europe between the wars, as well as the son of André Glucksmann, a leading member of the nouveaux philosophes, who pummeled their predecessors on the left for defending the crimes of Soviet communism.

The young and telegenic Glucksmann, after a career in journalism and filmmaking, entered French politics stage left, won a seat in the European Parliament earlier this month with a solid 14 percent of the national vote for his party—about the same that Macron’s grouping won—and now represents the last great hope of French socialism.

When the parties launched discussions over the formation of the New Popular Front, Glucksmann insisted on several conditions. He demanded that the joint statement include a message of unwavering support for Ukraine’s struggle against President Vladimir Putin’s Russia as well as for a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians.

Moreover, Glucksmann also stipulated that the statement contain a declaration that the Hamas massacre was, in fact, a terrorist attack, as well as a condemnation of antisemitism. He largely achieved these aims and, while acknowledging the hasty nature and difficult compromises that they entailed, he declared that they were necessary to prevent France, in a matter of days, from “sinking into the abyss.”

For the French Jewish community, the abyss long had just one name: the National Rally, formerly known as the National Front. They have not been persuaded by the long campaign pursued by Le Pen to de-demonize a party co-founded a little more than half a century ago by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The elder Le Pen was a Holocaust denier and antisemite, a worldview shared not only by his co-founder, Pierre Bousquet—who served during World War II as an officer in the Waffen SS—but also by the Nazi-curious and Vichy apologists in the movement’s ranks.

Since inheriting the National Front in 2011, the younger Le Pen has declared the Holocaust as the “summum of barbarism” and rebranded the party’s packaging by purging its ranks of its more embarrassing elements, including her father, and renaming it the National Rally. Yet the party’s original ingredients are largely untouched. Over the past few weeks, journalists have uncovered several RN candidates who have trolled or posted racist or antisemitic opinions online—prompting additional purges.

Yet this game of whack-a-troll obscures what the scholar Cécile Alduy calls the “ideological matrix” of the RN: the principle of national preference. This shared ideal of Le Pen père et fille, though the latter has renamed it “national priority,” would create a new category of second-class citizens. It would entail a constitutional amendment that would deny medical care and social services to undocumented immigrants, as well as deny automatic citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants who are born in France.

Not only would this law make the already desperate lives of tens of thousands of human beings in France yet more desperate—part of the law’s raison d’être—but would also make a mockery of the humanist and universalist heritage of French republicanism.

The RN’s worldview threatens not only those who are not yet French citizens, but also those who already are. Earlier this month, the party’s president and probably the country’s next prime minister, Jordan Bardella, reassured “French citizens of foreign origin” that they have nothing to fear from his government. The fact that he employed this phrase suggests that these same citizens have everything to fear.

As the columnist Thomas Legrand observed, this phrase not only has no legal standing, but also that the last time it did was in 1941, when the antisemitic legislation of the collaborationist Vichy regime distinguished French Jewish citizens from their non-Jewish compatriots. It was, moreover, one of the administrative steps taken by Vichy that facilitated the eventual deportation of more than 70,000 French (as well as foreign) Jews to the death camps.

Nevertheless, the prospect of a New Popular Front government dominated by France Unbowed has made what once seemed impossible—the rallying of French Jews to the National Rally—all too possible. During a campaign stop in Marseilles last week, Glucksmann was lambasted by a Jewish woman for his role in the coalition. “As a Jew, you should be ashamed of yourself!” He subsequently noted the irony that Jews are now practicing what antisemites have always practiced: “I was reduced to my name and origin.”

Yet more striking was a recent public statement made by Serge Klarsfeld, the universally admired Nazi hunter who wrote the definitive account of the Final Solution in France. Insisting that the National Rally had “evolved” and now “supports Jews,” whereas France Unbowed is a “resolutely anti-Jewish party,” he urged French Jews to vote for the former.

This was not a sudden or impulsive decision by Klarsfeld. Last fall, he welcomed the presence of the National Rally at the march against antisemitism, describing both it as “fréquentable” or respectable, thus rewarding Le Pen’s long courtship of the Jewish vote.

At the same time, the influential French Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut, author of dozens of works, including the early and brilliant book The Imaginary Jew, confessed that to prevent the spread of antisemitism, he might be “constrained” to vote for the RN. The situation confronting French Jews, he observed, is “heartbreaking.”

No doubt it is. But it is also heartbreaking that such admired and prominent figures like Klarsfeld and Finkielkraut—both of whom should really know better—are now willing to vote, even if they hold their noses, for a party whose ideological roots are buried in the rancid soil of racism and antisemitism.

It also happens to be a party that has shown persistent admiration for Putin’s Russia, an enduring hostility to those who do not adhere to traditional gender norms, and an ongoing problem of running candidates who express sentiments that are as racist and antisemitic as the founders of the movement that spawned the National Rally, making the words of Klarsfeld and Finkielkraut yet more heartbreaking.

Most heartbreaking of all, though, is that regardless of the results of the second round of voting on July 7, the Jewish question in France will also persist.