The rise of Marine Le Pen is the French version of the surge of populism throughout Europe. Having become a catch-all party on the basis of an anti-Islam discourse, the FN now has what it takes to appeal to the Jews of France. More broadly, the Front national having succeeded in its operation of “de-demonization,” nothing stands in the way of its progress.
The rightward turn of the Jews of France did not benefit Nicolas Sarkozy alone. By gathering a significant percentage of the Jewish vote in 2012, Marine Le Pen did far better than win tens of thousands of ballots: she cleared the far right of its past, opening the way to new successes.
The Populist International
The Front national is not alone in the World. Its ascent partakes of the one observable for populist parties throughout the West. In the United States, the situation is somewhat particular, for it is within the Republican Party that populism expresses itself. This has always been the case: in a two-party system, one finds within each of the major formations a progressive wing and a conservative wing. The Republican Party harbors within it an extreme right that makes of communism yesterday (with McCarthyism), of moral freedom today (with the evangelical churches), an obsession. The Tea Party movement, designating the State and taxation as the principal enemy, completes the populist apparatus within the Republican Party. Let us note that the evangelical churches, pro-Israeli, and the neoconservatives, among whom the Jews are numerous, did not succeed in tipping into the Republican camp a Jewish community that, after granting 78% of its votes to Barack Obama in 20081, renewed its confidence in him with 70% of its ballots in 2012.
But the populist madness is first of all a European madness, which expresses itself very differently in the east and the west of the continent. In the former communist countries, it is a matter of a traditional far right, making of hostility to the Roma and the Jews a major theme of its discourse. Parties such as Romania Mare in Romania, and Jobbik in Hungary, are very representative of this tendency. In a less clear-cut way, the Austrian FPÖ, before its divisions, situated itself within the classic far right. In Western Europe, the far right has mutated. It has abandoned — at least officially — the theme of antisemitism in favor, if one dares say so, of an anti-Islam discourse. This change presents several advantages. On the one hand, it partakes of the far right’s strategy of “de-demonization,” giving populism the appeal of a new discourse. By rejecting antisemitism, the populist parties in Europe clear themselves of their past. On the other hand, the anti-Islam discourse makes it possible to broaden the audience, beyond the working classes frightened by immigration, to the middle classes worried by the threats weighing on national identity. Finally, this mutation of the discourse permits rapprochements with the classic right. All in all, the populist parties declare their project compatible with the values of liberal societies, such as gender equality. This aggiornamento has paid off. In Northern Europe, the countries of old immigration, after having proclaimed their will to integrate and organized diversity, increasingly give in to the sirens of the populist madness. In Southern Europe, in countries where immigration is a more recent phenomenon, racism is advancing rapidly, making the bed of far-right formations. In any case, populism has become an inescapable datum of the life of democratic States that risk becoming less and less so. The Danish People’s Party obtained more than 12% in the legislative elections of 2011. In the elections of June 9, 2010, Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom had become the third party of the Netherlands with 15.4% of the vote. Strong with its 24 seats (out of 150) in the lower house, it permitted the constitution of a minority government, but by provoking its fall in 2012, it lost 5 points in the early legislative elections. Its successes have since been surpassed by the True Finns party, which, in 2011, obtained 19% of the vote. Even the very prosperous Norway granted nearly 23% of the vote to the Norwegian Progress Party in 2009. Other populist parties obtain spectacular scores in Europe. The Swiss SVP became the leading party in the federal elections of 2011 with more than 26% of the vote. The irredentist parties are often in the lead in the cities and regions they covet, like the Northern League in Italy and the Vlaams Belang in Flanders. With a Front national reaching nearly 18% in the presidential elections in France in 2012, one can no longer doubt it: populism is the most important political phenomenon of this early twenty-first century in Europe. Let us note with interest that in many European populist parties, the leaders display themselves as pro-Israeli, like Geert Wilders, who worked on a moshav in his youth, or Oscar Freysinger, leader of the Swiss far right, who declared in 2009:
“Our party has always defended Israel because we are well aware that, if Israel were to disappear, we would lose our vanguard…”
This positioning in favor of Israel is first of all a positioning against: against the Arab world, against Islam. It is precisely on this terrain that the connections with the Jewish communities will be established.
Islam, There Is the Enemy!
Islamophobia was theorized by a historian — Jewish, let us underline it — Bat Ye’or, who invented the concept of Eurabia: Europe would run a mortal danger by letting Islam implant itself, transforming the Old Continent into a mission land for jihad and sharia. In Northern Europe, this discourse was relayed by the leaders of the populist parties. After Pim Fortuyn, assassinated in 2002, Geert Wilders combats nazislamism and wants to ban the Quran, which he compares to Mein Kampf. In Scandinavia, hostility to Muslims is reinforced by the fear in the face of deviant behaviors and urban riots, as in the Swedish suburbs in May 2013. Let us note that this climate is painfully felt by the Jews, an ultra-minority in these countries, where they have had to flee certain cities, like Malmö. In Switzerland, it is indeed hostility to Islam that made the success of Oscar Freysinger. At the origin of the 2009 ballot initiative against minarets, he won a great success with 57.5% of the vote. Let us wager that in Southern Europe, after the Northern League in Italy, populist parties in Spain and Portugal will know how to play on the weakening of the governing parties, incapable of pulling their countries out of the crisis, by exploiting the uncanny strangeness of an Islam come from neighboring Morocco into these countries hitherto monochrome: white and Catholic.
In France, the Front national prospers too by developing Islamophobic themes, but not only: an anti-European discourse contributes powerfully to the success of the FN. But hostility to Islam is never absent: Europe is accused of being a sieve for a savage immigration that benefits above all the nationals of Muslim countries. This discourse is well received in the Jewish community, which since 2000 has an increasingly negative vision of Islam. There are several reasons for this. One will of course evoke the trauma of the expulsion from the Maghreb countries in the Sephardic families. But the explanation is a bit short, and does not explain the resurgence of this sentiment several decades after the events that accompanied the independence of the North African countries. In fact, hostility toward Islam was considerably reinforced by the outbreak of the Second Intifada and the birth of a new antisemitism closely correlated to the events of the Near East: violent acts that are the deed of youths of immigrant origin, mainly Maghrebi. Obviously, the murder of Ilan Halimi by a gang of barbarians led by a Muslim of Senegalese origin in 2006, and the killing in Toulouse perpetrated against four Jews, three of them children, by Mohamed Merah in 2012, considerably reinforced the sense of insecurity lived by the Jews of France. This sense of belonging to an aggressed minority is all the keener in that the Jewish community is henceforth weakened.
A Community in Decline
The regression is first of all demographic: after peaking at 600,000 persons during the seventies, the Jewish community is in demographic decline. The figure of 500,000 was commonly admitted at the start of the 2000s. It would now be closer to 450,000. A lower nuptiality rate, a mixed-marriage rate close to 50%, and an aliyah that tends to grow, contribute to the diminution of the number of Jews in France. The decrease is also relative: after having exceeded 1% of the French population, the Jewish community now represents no more than 0.6% of it. Let us also note a fact important for the subject that occupies us: the Jews are now ten times less numerous than the Muslims, whose number would be on the order of 5 million. The regression is also of an intellectual order. The time seems far off when Jews dominated the cultural agenda with thinkers like Emmanuel Levinas, and later the wave of the nouveaux philosophes, when the bestselling writers were named Albert Cohen and Isaac Bashevis Singer, when the cinema gave pride of place to the films of Claude Berri or Claude Lelouch. A sign of the times, it is now Israeli cinema that interests a cultivated public, the popular successes being reserved for films like La Vérité si je mens (Would I Lie to You?). On the plane of the battle of ideas, Jewish intellectuals and journalists (Alain Finkielkraut, Élisabeth Lévy, Éric Zemmour…) tend to focus on polemics that draw upon them the hostility of many French people, on the left above all. On the political plane, the presence of Jews is increasingly rare, and in the young generation, only Jérôme Guedj seems to be making a name for himself. Two important events have come to confirm the intellectual decline of the Jews of France. The first is the forced resignation of the Chief Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim. The latter, who passed for a moral and intellectual authority, practiced plagiarism and the usurpation of the title of agrégé in philosophy. At the CRIF, the new president is a former one, Roger Cukierman, who got himself re-elected at the age of 77, and should finish his mandate on his 80th birthday. To this intellectual regression, one must oppose the rise to power of artists or writers come from the Arab world (Tahar Ben Jelloun, Yasmina Khadra, Rachid Bouchareb, Abdellatif Kechiche) or from immigration (Azouz Begag, Nina Bouraoui, Faïza Guène…) in literature or cinema. In the debate of ideas, Arab intellectuals — Malek Chebel, Soheib Bencheikh — are imposing themselves by developing a universalist vision that earns them respect and consideration with the broad public. On the political plane, figures like Rachida Dati, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, or Razzy Hammadi are now inescapable. In short, talent has changed camps.
In the same sense, one will add that the relation of the Jews to French society has deteriorated. The development of the Jewish school, which enrolls a third of the children, while another third also attends private schools, contributes to a withdrawal of the community. The antisemitic wave of the 2000s also drove the Jews out of certain neighborhoods. Towns in Seine-Saint-Denis are said to have lost 80% of their Jews, and new ghettos — after Sarcelles and Créteil, the 17th and 19th arrondissements of Paris, Saint-Mandé and Levallois — have developed. All these phenomena ruin the image of a well-integrated community. One will never underline enough that these evolutions, which in less than a generation have upended the physiognomy of the community and its perception on the outside, are motivated first of all by fear: fear of debate, fear of aggressions, but also fear of assimilation. And fear is never a good counselor.
Lepenist Jews
The rise to power of populism among the Jews feeds, obviously, on these fears, but not only. Populism is favored by the ostracism toward a left that the majority of Jews have abandoned for more than 10 years: in addition to a hostility toward Israel that is often reproached to it, a lesser vigilance toward antisemitism is imputed to it. Let us note that on these two questions, the Socialist power that emerged from the 2012 elections has clearly corrected the prior trajectory: between his speech at the Vel d’Hiv [the 1942 Vélodrome d’Hiver round-up of Parisian Jews], his homage to the victims of Toulouse in the company of Benjamin Netanyahu, his presence at the CRIF dinner and at the congress of the Jewish communities in June 2013, François Hollande is a very attentive president. With respect to Israel, he even shows an understanding that is sometimes surprising. As for the struggle against antisemitism, with Manuel Valls at the Ministry of the Interior, the aggressors can count on no laxity. It remains nonetheless that the left continues to arouse mistrust among the majority of Jews. No doubt the general climate, with the persistence of a substantial unemployment, and a budgetary austerity that dares not speak its name, also partakes of this disaffection. But it is not the UMP that profits from it. One will observe in this regard that, on the occasion of by-elections, it was not the official candidates of the UMP who won the electoral battles in the constituencies where the Jews are numerous: in the 8th constituency of the French abroad, which includes Israel, Meyer Habib, UDI, was elected against the UMP candidate, Valérie Hoffenberg, the PS having been eliminated in the 1st round. In the 1st constituency of Val-de-Marne, Sylvain Berrios, a dissident UMP candidate, beat Henri Plagnol, mayor of Saint-Maur, UDI supported by the UMP, the PS, there too, having been unable to maintain itself in the second round.
Logically, the Front National should benefit from this retreat of the PS and the UMP. Among the Jews too, which is new. Already, in 2012, as was underlined in these columns2, the Jews are said to have chosen Marine Le Pen in a proportion (14%) close to the national average (18%), and in two polling stations in Israel, the FN candidate came in second position ahead of François Hollande. Within the Front National, Jews constituted themselves into a Union of Jewish French, and obtained their party’s nomination in very typed constituencies like Sarcelles or the 19th arrondissement of Paris. In any case, fear favors the extremes, and no doubt, after the Merah affair, incidents like those that occurred in Argenteuil, in Marseille, or in Trappes, where checks on women wearing the full veil degenerated, exacerbate among the Jews of France the sentiment that one can no longer distinguish Islam from Islamism. Let us add that in the working-class categories, where, contrary to the legend, there are still many Jews, notably among the employees, hostility toward Europe and the sentiment of having been cheated with the euro predispose to a good reception of the Front National’s discourse. All the more so since with the Jews, Marine Le Pen knows how to go about it.
A Successful De-demonization
Against the current of the entire history of the far right, within the framework of her enterprise of “de-demonization,” Marine Le Pen spares no effort to seduce the Jewish electorate, not hesitating to declare:
“In certain neighborhoods, it is not good to be a woman, nor a homosexual, nor a Jew, nor even French or white” (Lyon speech, December 10, 2011).
She will take care to specify, after her offensive against ritual slaughter and her criticism of the wearing of the veil and the kippah in the street, that her rhetoric is a compulsory figure:
“If I had limited my proposal to the Muslim religion, I would have been burned at the Place de Grève for Islamophobia… It is obvious that the kippah poses no problem in our country… I ask our Jewish compatriots for this small effort… I am sure that a large part of them are entirely ready to make this small sacrifice” (La Baule speech, September 22, 2012).
Having failed to get herself invited to Israel, she sent there during the presidential campaign her companion and number two of the FN, Louis Aliot, and met, in the circumstances one knows, the ambassador of the Jewish State to the UN in 2011. With respect to Israel, she has not yet taken the step like her peers from other European populist parties, who, as we have seen, are openly pro-Israeli. A tendency within the FN does, in fact, tend to support Iran and authoritarian Arab regimes. But it is rather the old Lepenist guard. With the help of the revolutions under way in the Muslim world, this tendency is in regression, and soon Marine Le Pen will no doubt be able to display a respectable support for Israel.
For Marine Le Pen, her seduction operation with respect to the Jews of France far exceeds the stakes of conquering a quantitatively limited communal electorate. It is a matter, by presenting proofs of her “Judeo-compatibility,” of showing that today’s FN no longer has anything to do with the far right of yesterday, that its xenophobia is directed only against illegal immigrants and Muslims. All in all, it is a matter of showing that the FN has become a party of government, one that can form alliances on the right and accede to power. With such an approach, nothing stands in the way of a new progress of Marine Le Pen among the Jews, as in the electorate as a whole. The FN has succeeded in its operation of “de-demonization,” since the devil is elsewhere: in the mosques, the suburbs… One will add that the dikes put in place to oppose this rise are in the process of collapsing. The Republican Front showed its limits on the occasion of by-elections in the Oise and at Villeneuve-sur-Lot, where the FN candidates came very close to the 50% bar. It must be said that the left has not yet revised its line of argument: its reminders of the misdeeds of fascism are inaudible to a public that mistrusts the FN less and less, and considers more and more that it is a party like the others. Marine Le Pen’s adversaries have not yet renovated a discourse that should much more denounce the demagogy and the dangerousness of her economic propositions, of her projects to exit the euro…
In any case, in a period when the workers and the young — the two principal electoral pools of the FN — are abandoned, and when the middle classes, pauperized, are terrorized by their prospects of downward mobility, populism can only prosper. Marine Le Pen has no worry to have for her future. The Jews of France, they do.
Philippe VELILLA