Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing New Popular Front, speaks before thousands of supporters at Place de la Republique in Paris on June 30, 2024. (Pierre Crom/Getty Images)
Shira Li Bartov July 7, 2024
(JTA) — In a surprising turn of events, French voters rejected a far-right party with anti-Semitic roots but gave an edge to a left-wing coalition that has faced allegations of anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile, the country’s most prominent far-left politician vowed in his victory speech to push for recognition of a Palestinian state.
In the second round of France’s parliamentary elections on Sunday, all 577 seats in the National Assembly were up for grabs, with no party winning a majority. The left-wing New Popular Front coalition won 182 seats, while President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Ensemble won 168, according to Le Monde.
“We will have a prime minister from the New Popular Front,” Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of France’s far-left party, posted on X on Sunday night. “Many things will be decided by decree. At the international level, they will have to agree to recognise a Palestinian state.”
Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rally National won 143 seats, a disappointment for the party, which had led in the first round of voting a week earlier and appeared to be within reach of a majority. Instead, center and left-wing candidates worked together to defeat the Rally National by withdrawing candidates from elections where other parties were more likely to win.
The result is a setback for Le Pen’s party and a relief to many Jews who see it as a danger. The party’s founders include her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has been repeatedly convicted for hate speech and Holocaust denial, and former Nazi SS officer Pierre Bousquet. Its candidates have also been accused of anti-Semitism.
But Sunday marked a victory for Mr. Mélenchon, leader of the far-left party Indefatigable France, who has been accused of playing dog whistles, repeating anti-Semitic stereotypes and denying the threat of anti-Semitism. Despite the French government reporting a sharp increase in attacks on Jews — more than 360 in the first three months of 2024, a 300% increase over 2023 — Mr. Mélenchon said anti-Semitism in France “remains.”
The vote and its results put many French Jews in an uncomfortable position: before the vote, political scientist Jean-Yves Camus said he felt “trapped” on the far left, especially since the moderate Socialist party had formed a coalition with Mélenchon’s party. (The leader of France’s center-right party had similarly caused controversy by supporting the Rally National.)
“We are very angry and disappointed,” Camus said. “As Jews we feel betrayed and it would have been better if the Socialist Party had not entered into this alliance with the far left.”
Many French Jews say far-left rhetoric has opened the door to anti-Semitism: According to a poll by the American Jewish Committee in Europe, 92 percent of French Jews believe that French Independence has “contributed” to the rise of anti-Semitism.
Now France’s future seems to be in a deadlock: After the election, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, a centrist Jewish man, announced his intention to resign.
The country’s 500,000-strong Jewish community has been reeling since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip, which destroyed large swaths of the area. France has also seen a surge in anti-Semitism since Oct. 7. In the latest case that has rocked the country, two teenage boys were charged with raping a 12-year-old Jewish girl and hurling anti-Semitic slurs at her.
“Many Jews have been deeply shocked by the events since October, but not everyone has been shocked by the same thing,” sociologist Martin Cohen told the Jewish News Agency. “Some are shocked not only by the trauma of the October massacres, but also by the ongoing war in Gaza.”
In the aftermath of October 7, several far-left politicians shocked some French Jews by refusing to explicitly condemn the Hamas attacks on Israel, but Le Pen has sought to clean up her party’s image by renouncing anti-Semitism, condemning the Hamas attacks and emphasizing a pro-Israel stance. The party now emphasizes an anti-immigration, eurosceptic stance.
CRIF, the umbrella organization for French Jews, has called on the Jewish community to reject both the far-right and the far-left. But with an unyielding France emerging ahead of Sunday’s vote, the Jewish community has been vocal in its urging to vote for Le Pen’s party. One notable voice in support of the Rally National was Serge Klarsfeld, a French Holocaust survivor famous for hunting down and pushing for the prosecution of Nazi criminals.
“The National Rally is for the Jewish people and for the state of Israel,” Klarsfeld, 88, said in a nationally televised interview last month. “If there are anti-Semitic parties and pro-Semitic parties, I will vote for the pro-Semitic party.”
Prominent French philosopher Alain Finkelkraut also wrote in the magazine Le Point that he “considers the nightmare of having to vote for a National Rally to Stop Anti-Semitism.” Meanwhile, leaders of France’s Jewish community met with Le Pen on Monday.
However, elements of the RNC’s anti-Semitic history resurfaced during the election. After receiving nearly 20% of the vote in the first round, Ludivine Daudi, the RNC candidate in Normandy, was forced to withdraw from the second round after photos surfaced of her wearing a Nazi hat emblazoned with a swastika. Other candidates have also circulated anti-Semitic and racist posts on social media.
France bans the collection of data on its citizens’ religion and ethnicity, making it difficult to ascertain how Jews voted nationwide, but in some areas with large Jewish communities, the election highlights the dilemma faced by Jews.
For example, in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, the Rally National received 27% of the vote in the first round — less than its share of the national vote but almost double its support in the district two years ago — but in the second round, a far-left candidate won the district with more than 60% of the vote.
“What if you lived in a district where there was no moderate candidate and you had to choose between Mélenchon’s party and the Rally National? What would you do? Would you stay at home? Would you just say, ‘That doesn’t concern me?'”
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