Le Pen finds new ally for final push
Presidential candidate in ‘ploy’ to reassure sceptical voters with promise to appoint former rival
MARINE LE PEN sought to distance herself from a row over the Front National’s anti-Semitic roots and broaden her appeal yesterday by promising to appoint a Eurosceptic former rival as prime minister.
The presidential hopeful made the announcement at a joint press conference with Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, who ran in the first round of the election and took 4.7 per cent of the vote, but has now endorsed her. “We will build a national unity government that will bring together people chosen for their skills and their love of France,” she said.
Emmanuel Macron, the centrist frontrunner facing Ms Le Pen in the election’s final round, dismissed the appointment as a “ploy to fix the credibility problems of Marine Le Pen”.
Ms Le Pen has temporarily stood down from the leadership of the Front National (FN) in an attempt to reach out to voters put off by a party many still regard as xenophobic and far-Right, despite her efforts to “de-toxify” it.
Her strategy suffered a setback when Jean-François Jalkh, the man she picked as interim party leader, was forced to resign on Friday only days after being appointed when claims emerged he had denied the Holocaust.
She was dealt another blow when her father, the FN’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, criticised a memorial ceremony for the gay policeman killed in the recent Champs-Elysées terror attack for “honouring the homosexual more than the officer”. Mr Macron’s movement, En Marche, demanded Ms Le Pen, whose aide Florian Philippot is gay, condemn the remarks. She had her father expelled from the party in 2015 over an anti-Semitic outburst.
Ms Le Pen herself provoked outrage only weeks ago by denying that the French state was to blame for deporting Jews from Paris during the Second World War to concentration camps.
Most of France’s roughly 500,000 Jews are sceptical about her courting of mainstream voters and Jewish support. France’s chief rabbi, Haïm Korsia, has urged Jews to back Mr Macron.
In the Jewish quarter of Paris, people talk of an exodus of Jews if Ms Le Pen wins. Yonathan Arfi of the CRIF, an umbrella group of Jewish organisations, said they were alarmed by the “normalisation” of her advance, saying: “French society is not seeing it as exceptional. That is worrying.”
Jean-Paul Rosner, 81, sees the Front National’s electoral gains as a threat to France’s fundamental freedoms. He recalls watching German troops occupying the opposite bank of the River Saone in Lyon from the window of his family’s second-floor flat on November 11, 1942. Eleven days later, he was taken to a farm 25 miles from the city where a Catholic couple hid him and his brother for almost two years until the Germans withdrew.
“Not everyone who votes for the Front National is racist, some are just fed up with political corruption, but the movement is still very dangerous,” said Mr Rosner, a retired furrier.
Yet a sprinkling of Jews will be among the thousands of admirers who watch Ms Le Pen lay a wreath at Joan of Arc’s statue in Paris tomorrow before a rally in a northern suburb.
Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far-Right, said a minority of Sephardic Jews, with roots in the Arab world rather than eastern Europe, were tempted to vote for the FN because they saw “a common enemy” in militant Islam. They believe Ms Le Pen’s tough talk on Islam and immigration outweigh any taint of far-Right collaboration with France’s Nazi occupiers during the Second World War.