Party’s racist past torments Le Pen
Second World War horrors take centre stage in nation’s tense presidential election
PARIS— The horrors of Nazi death camps moved front and centre in France’s presidential campaign on Friday, nine days before the election, reawakening the anti-Semitic stigma that has clung to the party of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen and that she has spent more than six years trying to erase.
Transforming the National Front into a voter-friendly party without compromising its anti-system essence — which is her banner — has been perhaps her toughest battle preparing for her dream job as chief of state.
Her efforts, which included showing her father, party founder JeanMarie Le Pen, the door in 2015, took a hit after remarks questioning the Holocaust allegedly made in 2000 by the man chosen to temporarily replace her as party chief surfaced in the French press. The reports threatened to undo her work nudging the National Front from pariah status to respectability.
Le Pen — who once called Nazi death camps the “height of barbary” — firmly denied that anyone in the party leadership would cast doubt on the extermination of six million Jews and others, some deported from France, during the Second World War. Even without the cloud of antiSemitism casting its shadow anew on the party, Le Pen, who took over the National Front in 2011, faces claims of racism for evoking fears that Muslims want to conquer France. A resistance was mounting with anti-Le Pen demonstrations planned.
But it was the alleged remarks 17 years ago of Jean-François Jalkh, a discreet party vice-president and longtime member, which raised the question of whether Le Pen risks throttling France backward to its darkest moments if she defeats cen- trist rival Emmanuel Macron, who is favoured, and becomes the next president.
Jalkh firmly denies French media reports that he questioned whether Zyklon B poison gas was used in death camps. Lawyer David DassaLe Deist said he was filing a defamation suit against Le Monde newspaper, which identified his client as a “negationist,” someone who denies the Holocaust.
Damage control was swift. Another party stalwart, Steeve Briois, mayor of Le Pen’s northern bastion, HeninBeaumont, was named to replace Jalkh as temporary party chief while Le Pen campaigns in the critical final stretch ahead of the May 7 vote.
Le Pen has reversed the party’s slide into ideological darkness, after a purge of the old guard, including their master, Le Pen senior, when he repeated a statement belittling the Holocaust for which he was convicted. But she has not fully succeeded in revamping the party’s image.
In the 1990s, 70 per cent of French people said the National Front was a danger to democracy — a figure that today has fallen to 58 per cent, according to noted far-right expert Jean-Yves Camus.
Surmounting that stigma is critical for Le Pen to obtain a majority in the final-round vote and surpass her rival, independent centrist Macron, a former economy minister and banker — and the rival Le Pen reviles as the symbol of an elitist system she rejects.