French
election: Nazi attire and racist comments dog Le Pen’s campaign
National
Rally leadership is under fire for fielding candidates who have made racist
comments or done favors for the Russian government.
JULY 7, 2024
7:15 AM CET
BY NICHOLAS
VINOCUR
PARIS — Over
the past decade, French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has gone to
extraordinary lengths to rid her National Rally party of its reputation for
racism and xenophobia — including firing her own father and ditching the
party’s historic name.
But Le Pen’s
attempts to portray a polished, mainstream-friendly veneer cracks when one
takes a closer look at her candidates who are (repentant) Holocaust deniers,
admirers of Russian President Vladimir Putin and overt racists in the second
round of parliamentary elections on Sunday.
Le Pen’s
candidates, who are expected to sweep between 230 and 260 seats in the 577-seat
National Assembly, just short of an absolute majority, look like a rogue’s
gallery of extremists and whackos who would have felt just as much at home in
the party when it was run by Le Pen’s controversial father, Jean-Marie.
Start with
the aficionados of racist posts on X or Facebook. Despite the existence of
journalists who can easily read such posts, Le Pen’s candidates keep on getting
caught for writing things like “not all civilizations are equal” and that some
“have remained right above bestiality in the evolutionary chain.”
In a post
that was since deleted, that one was courtesy of Marie-Christine Sorin, a
candidate in southern France who placed first in her district after a
first-round vote last Sunday.
Another
candidate, Monique Griseti, took aim at a famous Black singer called Gims,
writing on Facebook in January 2022 that he should “go back to where he comes
from and bring his whole tribe with him. Let him go milk goats, it will give
the rest of us a holiday,” according to the left-wing daily, Libération.
Another candidate, Paule Veyre de Soras, touted the fact that she has a “Jewish
eye doctor” and a “Muslim dentist” as proof of her non-racism.
One might
think that having such messages dug up and published might hurt these
candidates’ chances at the ballot box. Au contraire, mon cher: All four of
these candidates were qualified for the second round of voting, which — it must
be said — does not necessarily mean they will be elected during a runoff on
Sunday.
Putin fan
club
Then there
is the Putin fan club, arguably a larger tent than Le Pen’s Facebook racists.
It includes
candidates like Pierre Gentillet, a co-founder of France’s pro-Russian Pushkin
Circle, traveled to Syria at the invitation of President Bashar al-Assad, who
has been shut out by global leaders over atrocities in the decade-long Syrian
civil war.
There are
also those who personally rendered services to Putin by acting as “election
observers” in various sham elections taking place in Russia or
Russian-controlled territories of Ukraine. And then there is Frédéric
Boccaletti who combines pro-Putinism — he was an observer for Russia’s
parliamentary election in 2021 — with a history of anti-Semitism. Indeed, in
the late 1990s he was the owner of a bookshop specializing in anti-Semitic and
Holocaust denying works.
Are voters
punishing these candidates for embracing a foreign leader whose country has
just endorsed Le Pen as France’s next leader? Pas du tout. Here again, it
appears that being radical is a selling point rather than a hindrance.
Boccaletti placed first with 48.3 percent of the votes in his southern Var
district, a National Rally stronghold.
Ditto
Gentillet, who placed first in his district. In total, according to tf1info,
nine National Rally candidates who participated in sham election observation
missions for Russia passed the first round hurdle last Sunday and could be
headed for a seat in the National Assembly.
‘Black
sheep’
When
confronted with the overtly racist comments made by their candidates, National
Rally leadership tends to take one of two approaches. If the comment or
behavior crosses a certain line (typically, legally actionable acts under
France’s hate speech laws), the party may yank their endorsement. This was the
case with Ludivine Daoudi, a candidate in northern France who dropped out after
a photo surfaced of her grinning in a Nazi Luftwaffe uniform cap. “We cannot
accept such things,” said Philippe Chapron, the local party boss. “She is
withdrawing in order to not cause problems for the [National Rally] and its
candidates.”
But in most
other cases the approach is to shrug, minimize and take action only when the
scrutiny has grown too uncomfortable for Le Pen’s “new look” National Rally
party. Asked if such candidates would face consequences for cases of racism
specifically, Jordan Bardella, the party’s president and potential prime
minister, told BFMTV that his “hand would not tremble” before withdrawing
endorsements from such candidates, whom he compared to “black sheep.” But the
bar for qualifying as a black sheep appears to be quite high — indeed, at the
level of a Luftwaffe cap.
With
Sunday’s election drawing near, Le Pen and Bardella will increasingly be at
pains to present their party as reasonable on the model of Italian Prime
Minister Giorgia Meloni, a right winger who impressed her peers by not
embracing Putin or turning her back on the West since taking power in 2022.
But a party
is only as reasonable as its members and the lawmakers who support its agenda
in Parliament. In this case, it appears Le Pen’s “normalization” effort still
has some way to go.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário