Le Pen’s National Rally Candidates Exposed for Antisemitic and Anti-Muslim Remarks.

The Far Right May Have Been Crushed in Local Elections, but is Racism Simply Becoming More Mainstream?

Editorial credit: Radu Razvan / Shutterstock.com

Contrary to expectations, France’s local elections in June saw the far right fail to gain control of a single region. Candidates from the mainstream left and right dealt a major blow on both the National Rally and La République En Marche (LREM), whose leaders - Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron - are the frontrunners for next year’s French presidential vote. 

With only one third of voters showing up at the polling stations, this ballot was characterised by a record-low turnout. But this electoral campaign also saw several far-right National Rally candidates being exposed for their antisemitic and racist posts on social media. In an attempt to distance itself from the most controversial issues, the party withdrew their official investiture, but they were allowed to run anyway as independent candidates.  

Cases

Screenshot of Tweet from Info France 2

• Marta Le Nair, running for NR in the Gironde department in the south-west France, published an antisemitic conspiracy theory post on Jacob Rothschild on her Facebook page in February last year. In 2015, she tweeted an antisemitic joke “it’s like when you shake hands with a Jew, you should check if you still have your ten fingers”. After a local council exposed her on Twitter, she was suspended by the party, but remained a candidate.  

• Juliette Planche, candidate in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, was also expelled from the NR for antisemitic conspiracy posts on social media. The news site Mediapart revealed that she retweeted several conspiratorial remarks by Yvan Benedetti, far-right activist condemned for incitement to hatred and antisemitism. One tweet, among many, said: “if you want to fight antisemitism, you need to eradicate the Jewish impudence”. Planche ran as an independent candidate.  

• Geneviève Veslin, in the NR electoral list in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region of central France, saw her National Rally nomination withdrawn, after a news programme on the TV channel France 2 uncovered dozens of racist and antisemitic statements by her. On VK, a Russian social media platform, Veslin made tributes to Robert Faurisson, a well-known Holocaust denier who was been convicted for claiming there was no systematic mass killings of Jews by Nazi Germany. Other than negationist videos, Veslin also posted racist and dehumanising statements on migrants. Although not officially with the NR, Veslin remained a candidate in the elections.  

• Danièle Delavaud, candidate for the National Rally in the Correze department in central France, was dropped from the party electoral list after old tweets emerged where she incited for violence against Muslims. In 2017, she tweeted: “Stop building mosques, I'm okay with blowing them up”, and “To all these mosques, boom!" 

• In Oulches, a village in the Centre-Val de Loire region, Nazi symbols were spray-painted on all electoral posters except for the ones belonging to the National Rally. The symbols included swastikas, Celtic Crosses, and 88, a white supremacist numerical code for "Heil Hitler”. In the night when these antisemitic actions were carried out, people in the village also heard Nazi salutes. The mayor of Ouches filed a complaint against the perpetrators, who are believed to be a group from outside the village. 

Screenshot of Tweet from Licra

Exposing and denouncing

From Mediapart to France 2, it was news media that discovered most of these cases, which were then covered by local media outlets. Reporters have investigated the profiles of candidates, uncovering antisemitic, anti-Muslim and racist statements. Almost certainly, without the investigations, these candidates would have not been caught and their party nomination withdrawn. However, almost all of them were allowed to run in the elections, but simply without the official National Rally appointment. None of them were elected.  

Like other organisations, Licra, GTTO partner in France, consistently denounced the antisemitic and anti-Muslim statements by National Rally members, keeping voters informed on candidates and parties, and contributing to a democratic debate.

A decades-long history of antisemitism and anti-immigration

This year’s regional elections were considered significant as a precursor to the approaching presidential race. Marine Le Pen herself framed the regional vote as a dress rehearsal for the 2022 elections. She has since blamed her crushing defeat on “unnatural alliances” among other parties for keeping NR out of power. 

Since replacing her father Jean-Marie Le Pen as the leader of the party, Marine Le Pen has tried to make it more mainstream, in order to win the elections – hence the withdrawals of nominations of candidates expressing explicit antisemitic and violent anti-Muslim statements. However, despite this superficial glossing over, the National Rally remains an anti-immigration and anti-Muslim party with a decades-long history of antisemitism (party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen referred to the gas chambers used by the Nazis “a minor detail” and called Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson a “symbol” for free speech). 

Alongside other far right parties in Europe, such as the League in Italy, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, and AfD in Germany, the National Rally has certainly improved its electoral results and established itself as a contender. At the same time, hard-line ideas on immigration and security become more mainstream. Some media pundits have argued that the rise of the far right across the continent is due to mainstream parties embracing racist and xenophobic narratives, as opposed to confronting them.  

Screenshot from the Intercept