Has the National Front, the far-right French party, truly shed its antisemitic carapace, or is this a good cop-bad cop routine?
On August 20, the party’s founder and longtime leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was expelled from its ranks at the insistence of his daughter Marine, the current head of the NF.
They had already been feuding for months, and Jean-Marie had already been suspended in May for saying he saw the Holocaust as a “detail of history.” Last month, 94 percent of NF members said in a postal ballot that they wanted Le Pen senior stripped of his title as honorary president.
Le Pen, in turn, remarked that he was “deeply shocked, hurt, and the victim of a political witch-hunt,” and would not support his daughter in the 2017 presidential election, which she thinks she has a chance of winning.
“To be persecuted by the leadership of the political movement you have founded, particularly when the president of the movement is your daughter, is very difficult,” he added.
Since she replaced her father in 2011, the 47-year-old Marine has been trying to broaden the party’s base to include people uneasy at the way France has been handling its economy and immigration policies.
In particular, she wants to attract French Jews, increasingly upset by attacks from radical Islamists. The Charlie Hebdo magazine massacre last January is still fresh in their minds.
Marine has tried to steer the NF away from the overt racism and antisemitism of its past. The party did well in elections to the European parliament last year, and in French municipal elections more recently.
On the other hand, Jean-Marie, who created the party on 1972, has kept making statements casting doubt on the veracity of the Holocaust. He has also continued to insist that those who led the collaborationist Vichy regime in World War II were patriots. And he has contended that the wartime collaborator Marshal Philippe Pétain was not a “traitor.”
In 2007 he told the newspaper Le Monde that “you can’t dispute the inequality of the races.” More recently, he said that France should get along with Russia to save the “white world.”
These and other remarks prompted Marine to accuse him of trying to “rescue himself from obscurity.”
Florian Philippot, one of the five vice presidents of the NF and one of the main advisors of Marine Le Pen, said that the 87-year-old Le Pen went “from provocation to provocation” in a “work of destruction.”
So the rift does seem genuine.
France has the largest Muslim population in Europe. They have come mainly from its former colonies in north and west Africa. The country’s tradition of secularism in recent years has been challenged, as efforts to integrate Muslims into the country’s culture have led to controversy over headscarves, halal food, and the construction of mosques.
Author Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, Submission, published earlier this year, imagines France in 2022 as a country ruled by a Muslim president, in which there are numerous conversions to Islam, widespread polygamy, and creeping sharia.
Accused of undue provocation, Houellebecq said, after the Charlie Hebdo attack, “Marine Le Pen doesn’t need me.”
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
