Marine
Le Pen has a plan to court Jewish voters
New
group will try to counter criticism of far-right National Front
party.
By NICHOLAS VINOCUR
4/22/16, 7:04 PM CET
PARIS — Marine Le
Pen has set her sights on a novel potential group of backers as she
tries to build support for a presidential bid next year: France’s
Jewish voters.
Her anti-EU National
Front party has given arms-length blessing to the launch of a
nonprofit group that aims to drum up support among France’s
500,000-strong Jewish minority and counter criticism from mainstream
religious groups.
Le Pen locked horns
last year with the head of France’s main Jewish umbrella group, the
CRIF. Its president, Roger Cukierman, had warned that French Jews
would leave the country en masse if the National Front ever came to
power, the same response if Islamic religious law were ever imposed
on the population.
That’s the sort of
criticism that the nonprofit group, whose name is to be announced
within coming days, aims to counter, the group’s founder told
POLITICO.
“In France’s
Jewish community there are lots of people who disagree with the views
of the CRIF and don’t want to follow them like sheep,” said
Michel Thooris, a police union member who advised Le Pen on security
matters during France’s 2012 presidential election and remains a
party member. “We want to give them an alternative voice.”
The National Front,
which has taken to targeting specific voter groups despite its public
opposition to defining ethnic or religious minorities, won’t be
funding the group directly. It will be officially launched and named
within coming days and will “not exert pressure” on Le Pen, added
Thooris, who Le Monde reported was linked to Israeli far-right
groups.
However, two senior
National Front officials said they supported the initiative. Vice
President Louis Aliot told Europe 1 Le Lab this week that it was
important to offer an alternative narrative about his party to French
Jews.
“The idea is to
fight the dictatorship and constant defamation of the CRIF against
the National Front,” Aliot said. “This collective will not make
pronouncements on foreign policy or religious issues like the CRIF
does. It’s there to fight against people who try to smear the
Front.”
A complicated
relationship
Whatever publicity
the group manages to generate, it won’t erase the National Front’s
complex and tortured past when it comes to France’s Jewish
community.
Jean-Marie Le Pen,
who headed the party before Marine’s takeover in 2011, gave the
National Front a reputation for racism and anti-Semitism which has
yet to be entirely scrubbed, despite his daughter’s attempts to
make a clean break with her father and his acolytes.
Last year, the elder
Le Pen reignited controversy about the Front’s anti-Semitic
leanings when he repeated that the Nazi gas chambers were merely a
“detail of history” — a comment that sparked a row with Marine,
and resulted in him being officially kicked out of the party.
Jean-Marie, who has repeatedly been tried and convicted on charges of
inciting racial and anti-Semitic hatred, is also known as an
apologist for France’s wartime Vichy regime, which collaborated
with Nazi occupiers in rounding up and deporting French Jews to
concentration camps.
While retaining much
of her father’s basic policy mix, including calling for a “national
preference” in distributing social housing and jobs, Marine Le Pen
has sought to make a clean break with her father’s racist and
xenophobic legacy. She avoids attacking minorities, saying: “I
defend all the French people in France, regardless of their origin or
religion.”
But her strongly
worded critiques of fundamentalist Islam have even won her a measure
of support among French Jews, some of whom fear being targeted by
Islamist terrorists.
Authors:
Nicholas Vinocur
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