French Jews and the 2012 presidential election

The electoral behaviour of French Jews in 2012 confirms the rightward shift observed for years. But their vote in favour of Nicolas Sarkozy is somewhat less massive than in 2007, and its determinants are quite different: less a vote of conviction than of resignation, or even of confusion, on the part of a community in disarray.

In 2012, French Jews approached the presidential election like all other French citizens: with less interest, and above all less enthusiasm, than in 2007. At the time, massive Jewish support for Nicolas Sarkozy¹ anticipated and amplified the national trend. But the outgoing president disappointed, and his Jewish voters, like the others, expressed doubts. It was in this context of uncertainty that the man everyone had already declared the winner a year in advance could have imposed himself: Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

DSK, or the missed opportunities

On 14 May 2011, when Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York, French Jews lost the opportunity to reverse the rightward shift observed over two decades. Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s candidacy had everything to please them. His political positioning, first of all. An avowed social democrat, he defended rather social-liberal views in economics, notably on taxation, which corresponded well to the sensibility of a community where the independent professions (doctors, lawyers, shopkeepers, artisans, consultants…) are overrepresented. His Jewishness, shared by his wife, Anne Sinclair, a lifelong community activist, obviously played a decisive role in the electoral choice contemplated by many French Jews. Back when his political career was unfolding in France, DSK had multiplied his interventions on behalf of the community institutions, first and foremost in Sarcelles, of which he was mayor and deputy. Pro-Israeli, he had even gone overboard in this domain, pronouncing a sentence that would often be held against him. During the Gulf War, while Israel was being bombarded by Iraqi Scuds, Dominique Strauss-Kahn declared: “I consider that every Jew of the diaspora, and therefore of France, must, wherever he can, bring his aid to Israel. That, moreover, is why it is important that Jews take on political responsibilities. In short, in my duties and in my everyday life, through the whole of my actions, I try to bring my modest stone to the building of Israel” (Passages no. 35, February–March 1991).

Jewish support for a Dominique Strauss-Kahn candidacy thus had a marked ethnic dimension. One even saw, during the first days of the affair, a veritable communal solidarity develop around the accused, finding every excuse for him and even raising the idea of a conspiracy. Some did not fail to note that his most faithful supporters were named Robert Badinter, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Michèle Sabban… Community media, including those marked to the right such as Radio J and Actualité Juive, recalled how Dominique Strauss-Kahn had never spared his support for French Jews and for Israel. Alas! The revelations of Tristane Banon and the Carlton affair were to ruin, within the Community as elsewhere, the image of the former managing director of the IMF. Thus Jewish women, like all women, were shocked by the revelation of the escapades of the man who aspired to the highest offices.

DSK eliminated, and political nature abhorring a vacuum, the Jews very quickly found another hero on the left in the person of Manuel Valls, candidate in the Socialist primary. This choice was interesting. First because Manuel Valls is not Jewish. This native of Barcelona has nonetheless remarried a Jewish woman, Anne Gravoin, a violinist, and does not hide his philosemitism. Manuel Valls, as mayor of Évry, managed to develop privileged relations with the small Jewish community of his town, though nothing obliged him to, the other communities being far more numerous in this crossroads-town of religions: its modern cathedral, its grand mosque and its Buddhist temple figure among the most important places of worship in Europe. Manuel Valls, who in the past claimed to be pro-Palestinian, also developed a capacity, rare enough on the left, to understand Israel’s positions. Finally, Manuel Valls, well before 2012, powerfully contributed to renewing Socialist thinking on security by advocating firmness toward offenders. In this domain, he gave concrete form to this approach first as mayor, and now as Interior Minister, fighting without mercy against antisemitism, which earns him still today the status of darling of the French Jewish community. There is no doubt that Manuel Valls, who has not abandoned his presidential ambitions, will be able to count in the future on numerous supporters within the Jewish community. But this does not mean for all that that the Community escapes the sirens of the right, including those of the far right.

The FN temptation

On 14 March 2011, the Union des étudiants juifs de France organized at the town hall of the 3rd arrondissement of Paris a meeting whose title might come as a surprise: Not a single Jewish vote for the FN! The CRIF, the Consistory, the FSJU, among others, and hundreds of Parisian Jews answered the call — a turnout that showed the risk was quite real. It is true that for some time, certain fringes of the Community had been showing a strange complacency toward the Front national, its ideology, and its leaders. The question is first a matter of ideology. On the occasion of her accession to the presidency of the far-right party, Marine Le Pen set about “de-demonizing” the Front national, and to that end undertook an enterprise of seducing French Jews. This initiative had two dimensions. A national dimension first: by brandishing the threat of a Muslim France, the FN found an echo in the most extreme segments of the Jewish community. All the more so since, ever since 11 September 2001, a discourse on the dangers of Islamization, very close to that of the FN, developed by a number of community leaders (such as Gilles-William Goldnadel) and intellectuals (Guy Millière first and foremost), is frequently taken up in the Jewish media. Moreover, the distance Marine Le Pen took with respect to her father’s declarations about the Second World War nearly opened to her, for the first time, the doors of a Jewish medium: in the spring of 2011, Radio J invited the president of the Front national onto its flagship programme, Forum. But this initiative raising an outcry, including within part of the station’s editorial staff, the programme was taken off the air. The FN’s charm offensive toward French Jews also had an international dimension. Marine Le Pen being unable to obtain an invitation for an official trip to Israel, it was her companion and number two in the Party, Louis Aliot, who went there. But he did not manage to be received by important figures. This was without reckoning on the help of Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, who, on 3 November 2011, met with Marine Le Pen for 20 minutes. Despite embarrassed explanations — the Israeli Foreign Ministry spoke of a “misunderstanding” — this strange affair proceeded neither from an error nor from a personal initiative on the part of an experienced diplomat. Let us wager that the Israeli government wanted to show the French president — of whom it was said at the time that he might be overtaken by the FN president and fail to make it to the second round — that Marine Le Pen’s candidacy should not suffer ostracism.

By gathering nearly 18% of the votes on 22 April 2012, Marine Le Pen largely won her wager of de-demonizing the FN. Among Jews too. According to the sample of voters declaring themselves of Jewish faith assembled by the IFOP for the study to be discussed below, 14% of Jews are said to have voted for Marine Le Pen on 22 April 2012, against 4% for her father five years earlier. One will also observe that among the French of Israel, in Ashdod and in one polling station in Netanya, the FN candidate came in second, ahead of François Hollande. One will likewise note that, on this occasion, a Union de Français Juifs was formed to gather the Community’s FN activists, and that the far-right party managed to find Jewish candidates such as Michel Thooris in Sarcelles, and Michel Ciardi in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, the choice of these constituencies owing nothing to chance. In any case, during the campaign, the question of the “marine blue” vote polluted the debate, sometimes eclipsing the contest between the two main candidates.

François Hollande, Judeo-compatible

When François Hollande was designated the Socialist Party candidate during the “citizen primary” on 16 October 2011, he benefited, far more than his rival Martine Aubry, from a presumption of Judeo-compatibility. The CRIF would publish, the day after his designation, a communiqué in an unusual style: “The CRIF, which has long known François Hollande’s profound attachment to respect for individuals in their diversity, hopes that he will assert during his presidential campaign the sentiments of friendship for the Jewish community of France and of empathetic understanding toward the State of Israel that he has always manifested up to now.” François Hollande could count on the engagement of Jewish activists impatient to be done with the image of a Community sold to the right. The organizations marked to the left mobilized their troops. As early as the summer of 2011, on the initiative of Patrick Klugman, former president of the UEJF, the association Socialisme et Judaïsme was reactivated. Several meetings and an appeal to left-wing Jews enjoyed a succès d’estime. On the association’s website, one recalled the Socialist candidate’s constant engagement in the struggle against antisemitism, and the moderation he had always shown concerning the Israeli-Palestinian dossier. More surprisingly, figures marked to the right were seen to declare their sympathy for the Hollande candidacy. Thus, in the very right-wing Hamodia (9 November 2011), the Franco-Israeli Emmanuel Navon, candidate in the Likud primaries, under the resounding title “Sarkozy is finished!” expressed his sympathy for the “moderate and conciliatory” François Hollande. It is true that for many of Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 Jewish voters, the grievances were accumulating: the vote in favour of admitting Palestine to UNESCO, the French president’s off-the-record remarks calling Binyamin Netanyahu a “liar”… Without going over to the left, those disappointed by Sarkozyism were ready to show, in the absence of explicit support, a benevolent neutrality toward the favourite of the polls. The upturn was to be short-lived.

The CRIF vote

It is not emphasized enough that the rightward shift of French Jews results in no way from a phenomenon of spontaneous generation, but from a dogged labour by the right directed at this community. The left, by distancing itself from Israel and by not reacting strongly enough to the antisemitic wave of the 2000s, certainly opened the way to this rightward shift. The internal evolution of the community — more religious and ageing — also facilitated the success of conservative themes. But nothing would have been possible without a sustained and well-organized effort. At the level of political leaders first, with the constant engagement of figures such as Claude Goasguen, Christian Estrosi, Rudy Salles and Valérie Hoffenberg. Intellectuals such as Raphaël Draï and Schmuel Trigano, journalists such as Clément Weill-Reynal, justified this rightward shift on the ideological plane. In the print press, since the disappearance of Tribune juive, and the programmed end of L’Arche, Actualité Juive, close to Likud and to the UMP, enjoys a quasi-monopoly. The community radio stations show more impartiality, with the exception of Radio J. The online media — J Forum, SarahJ Forum, Guysen.com… — which widely and freely disseminate the viewpoint of Binyamin Netanyahu’s government, and constantly brandish the spectre of the Islamization of France, contribute to the penetration of the right’s theses into the grassroots Community. All the more so since this discourse frequently receives reinforcement from the CRIF. Under an apparent neutrality, the CRIF was thus to intervene in the electoral campaign by favouring the right — not openly, which would be to confess its inclination, nor even by discrediting the left, but by casting doubt on its practices. There was first the affair of the Jewish deputies of Paris — in addition to the departure of Tony Dreyfus, Danièle Hoffman-Rispal and Serge Blisko were eliminated in favour of ecologist candidates — while Daniel Goldberg in Seine-Saint-Denis and Julien Dray in the Essonne saw other candidates for the nomination preferred to them within the PS. Richard Prasquier hastened to question publicly the reason for these ousters, while the parties concerned attested that this was a matter of electoral horse-trading, their Jewishness not being at issue. But the damage was done. All the more so since, at the same moment, the new left-wing Senate majority’s refusal to accept a military contract with Israel, and the use by the Socialist deputy Jean Glavany of the word “apartheid” regarding the Jewish State in a report on water in the Near East, were being denounced by the community institutions. But these polemics proved quite trivial when, on 19 March 2012, the sky fell on the heads of French Jews.

After having gunned down three French soldiers in Montauban, Mohamed Merah, who claimed allegiance to Al-Qaeda, killed four Jews, including three children, in front of the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse, declaring that he wished to avenge the children of Palestine. The electoral campaign was suspended. François Hollande was one of the first to react and flew immediately to Toulouse, where he would meet the families of the victims and the leaders of the Community. Nicolas Sarkozy resumed his presidential posture and paid a national tribute to the slain soldiers, a ceremony attended by his main rival, as well as by Éva Joly and François Bayrou. For the Jewish community, this tragedy had important consequences, bringing its vulnerability to light. In the first place, the Toulouse killing translated, in a paroxysmal mode, a disquieting phenomenon: the persistence in the suburbs of a systematic and violent antisemitism. Commenting on the event, the Islamologist Gilles Kepel underscored in this regard: “In the suburbs, the figure of the Jew is perceived as that of the aggressor, linked to Israel par excellence; victimization passes through identification with Palestine and the parallel is drawn in the following manner: the Palestinian is oppressed by the State of Israel as the Muslims are by the French State” (Le Nouvel Observateur, 29 March 2012). This attitude of young Muslims, marginal but worrying, was to manifest itself in the refusal by certain pupils to observe the minute of silence decreed in all the schools of France in tribute to the victims. In the weeks that followed, one noted a resurgence of antisemitic acts inspired by an idealization — if one may say so — of the killing, the aggressors claiming allegiance to Mohamed Merah. In the second place, the Toulouse killing revealed the weakness of activist mobilization within the Jewish community. With the exception of a mass gathering on the Place du Capitole in Toulouse, the demonstrations were quite sparse: in Paris, two silent marches, on the evening of the killing and the following Sunday, gathered only a few thousand people. It must be said that only the UEJF and the antiracist organizations, supported by the left-wing parties, had called for demonstrations. A large demonstration that was to bring together Jews and Muslims at the call of the CRIF and the CFCM was cancelled when it was learned that the killer was not a far-right fanatic, as had been supposed in the first hours following the tragedy.

On a more political plane, contrary to what one might have thought, the Toulouse killing had no consequence for the rest of the presidential campaign, except perhaps among the Jews, who saw in the head of state’s attitude one more reason to consider him a protector. But, in fact, their choice had been made long before.

Sarkozy, or the confusion of roles

In the race for the presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy enjoyed a head start among French Jews. An advantage of seniority first, since he had been courting this electorate ever since his first term as mayor of Neuilly (1983). Using all the resources of his successive offices, he acquired solid credit within the Jewish community when, as Interior Minister between 2002 and 2007, he fought — not without success — against the wave of antisemitic aggressions which, for the first time since the Shoah, was making Jews doubt the protection that could be granted them in France. From that period on, he let the community leaders know his pro-Israeli sentiments, reinforced by an ideological and friendly proximity with Binyamin Netanyahu. Finally, the grandson of a Jew from Salonika, he was seen by some Jews as a distant cousin. After his election in 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy did not forget to make this capital bear fruit, notably on the occasion of his successful trip to Israel in 2008. He also frequently received the community leaders, and attended the CRIF dinner every year, whereas previously this event had been reserved for the Prime Minister. But in the final period, these relations loosened. On the one hand, as we have seen, with France’s vote in favour of admitting Palestine to UNESCO, Nicolas Sarkozy demonstrated strikingly that he was no more pro-Israeli than his predecessors. On the other hand, incidents such as the refusal granted to religious students seeking accommodations to sit an examination at Passover 2011, or again the polemic over ritual slaughter, cast doubt on the President’s philosemitism. It must be said that the questioning of halal and kosher reached the highest summits of the State. Launched by Marine Le Pen, the accusations of needless suffering inflicted on animals were taken up on 6 March 2012 by the Prime Minister, François Fillon, in a staggering declaration in which he asked religious leaders to reflect on the merits of maintaining “ancestral traditions.”

This distancing of French Jews from the outgoing president was of course reinforced by the disenchantment that was overtaking la sarkozye, all religions combined. But the majority of French Jews resigned themselves to choosing Nicolas Sarkozy nonetheless, for avowable reasons and others that were far less so. Among the former figured the main argument developed within the Sarkozyist electorate, according to which the President had held firm in the storm of the financial crisis. More specifically, the Jews noted that he had continued to fight against antisemitic aggressions, which, moreover, were seriously receding. Finally, the attacks against the left, very well organized in the community media, gave the impression that with François Hollande it would be worse, notably for Israel. The height of manipulation was the article given between the two rounds by Richard Prasquier to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. In this article, the president of the CRIF said he had no doubt about François Hollande, but was worried about his alliance with the Greens and the Communists, notably with Jean-Luc Mélenchon, very hostile to Israel’s policy. The argument hit home, even though — as the sequel was to show clearly — François Hollande did not depend on EELV or on the Front de gauche, and especially not in matters of foreign policy, which, under the Fifth Republic, is the President’s reserved domain. Irony of History, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was entrusted to a Jew, Laurent Fabius, and the two ecologist members of the government do not even have a say on the Near East: Cécile Duflot, Minister of Territorial Equality, is concerned with Greater Paris and not with Greater Jerusalem, and Pascal Canfin, Minister of Development, is concerned with the future of Africa and not with that of Palestine! The drift did not stop there. In a more surreptitious and unavowable manner, the suspicion maintained toward the left was part of a hostility toward the other minorities, Arab and Black, who massively supported the Socialist candidate. Here one touches on a taboo subject within the Community: the development of “Zemmour reflexes,” in other words a morbid racism less and less concealed.

All of this was translated at the ballot box. Adherence to the Sarkozy candidacy was massive among the French of Israel, who granted him 83.5% as early as the first round, and 92% in the second. It is true that with an abstention rate of more than 85%, these results have only the value of an indication. According to the aforementioned IFOP sample, in metropolitan France, 63% of voters declaring themselves of Jewish faith voted for the outgoing president in the second round, that is 15% more than the national average, but according to our estimates 10 to 15% less than in 2007. In the French towns where the Jewish electorate carries a significant weight, the trend was moreover less marked than in 2007. In the 19th arrondissement of Paris, in the polling stations where Jewish voters are numerous, François Hollande also came out largely ahead, but with a turnout sometimes a little lower than in the rest of the arrondissement: disoriented Jewish voters no doubt gave up on choosing. In Sarcelles, with “only” 60% of the votes, François Hollande does markedly worse than in two other comparable towns of the same constituency: 68% in Villiers-le-Bel, and 72% in Garges-lès-Gonesse. Moreover, in several polling stations where the number of Jewish voters is high, Nicolas Sarkozy comes out ahead. But in Créteil, the weight of the Community is not perceptible: François Hollande achieves there more than 61%, a result very close to that of another Socialist town in the Val-de-Marne, very comparable on the sociological and political planes, but with far fewer Jews, Alfortville, where he obtains an identical score. The “Jewish vote” phenomenon thus seems weaker than in 2007, and could have affected only the most militant and most religious Jews (as in Sarcelles), and somewhat less the more composite communities (as in the 19th arrondissement).

This hypothesis is close to the one developed by the IFOP in a study carried out under the direction of Jérôme Fourquet in March 2012: Des votes Juifs (Jewish votes, available on the Internet). The authors declare: “the available data show that, while the right enjoys a broad base in this electorate, the other political families are also represented; the ‘Jewish vote’ is therefore not univocal.” But the rightward shift, which is said to have occurred with the antisemitism wave of the 2000s, would nonetheless be clear: “Whatever the differences in political sensibilities, the over-vote in favour of the parliamentary right appears today as a real singularity of the Jewish electorate, even if a significant share of this category of the population recognizes itself in the left and chiefly in the PS.”

The study also points to an interesting fact. Disappointment with Nicolas Sarkozy between the beginning and the end of his five-year term is said to have been greater among Jews than among other French citizens: he loses 19 points among the former against 14 among the latter. One always burns more easily the idols one has worshipped.

*

It can never be emphasized enough that the Jewish vote, despite the interest it presents for analysis, has strictly no influence on the national results. For a simple demographic reason: according to the aforementioned study, Jewish voters would represent only 0.6% of the total. But the Jewish vote expresses many things. Old and well-known facts such as the fear of antisemitism and the centrality of Israel in contemporary Jewish experience. Newer and less openly displayed phenomena such as a form of Islamophobia and, disquietingly, a permeability to far-right ideas. As Patrick Klugman, president of Socialisme & Judaïsme, ironically declares: “The Jewish community lost the elections.” It is true that in decisive ballots like those of 1981 and 2007, the Jews had anticipated and amplified the national trend. In 2012, they did the opposite, their lack of political sense leading them to support to the very end a candidate with the air of a desperado. More fundamentally, the hesitations shown by French Jews in the face of the electoral stakes in 2012 translate a genuine disorientation, that other name for disarray.

Philippe VELILLA (11/07/2012)

Notes