A quick post to draw attention to yesterday’s mass demonstrations against antisemitism in Paris and across France. Led by the speakers of the two houses of parliament, participants included former presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande and most of the French political class. Controversially, that included the far-right National Rally and its leader, Marine Le Pen, and (relatedly) did not include far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Mélenchon was not the only one concerned about the far right’s presence, given its thoroughly antisemitic origins. Members of president Emmanuel Macron’s party also objected, and it was apparently one reason why Macron himself decided not to march – although he endorsed the event, and his prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, was there. Unlike them, however, Mélenchon objected to the event itself as a whitewashing of Israel’s crimes, calling it a rendezvous for the “friends of unconditional support of the massacre.”
There’s no doubt that public angst about antisemitism often has a political purpose and can be used for illicit ends, including both opposition to Palestinian rights and domestic attacks on Muslims. But Mélenchon’s inability to see antisemitism as a real problem, following on from his initial failure to issue a clear condemnation of Hamas’s crimes, is a disturbing sign of where some currents of the European far left are headed: a topic that we looked at a few weeks ago, and will return to.
Antisemitism in France has often been a bipartisan project, although its more natural home is on the right. I wrote about this a few years ago, noting that “France’s history with its Jewish population is a long and troubled one, and if Muslims are now responsible for a large proportion of antisemitic incidents, that’s not necessarily because antisemitism is something they’ve brought to France with them.”
In recent years, far-right parties and tendencies in the west have mostly become strong supporters of Israel, and of the most militant forms of Zionism. That doesn’t mean giving up on antisemitism; you can hate Jews while backing Israeli policy (see Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán for obvious examples). From the far right’s point of view, that was always the attraction of Zionism: send all the Jews to Israel so as not to have to deal with them at home.
There’s also a broader agenda at work. As I put it back in 2018, Benjamin Netanyahu and his western admirers “share an ideological interest in promoting ethno-nationalism and weakening the liberal international order”; it makes complete sense that anti-democratic parties would support either antisemitism or militant Zionism, or both at once, since they share a common enemy in liberal democracy.
But the other thing that’s going on is Le Pen’s continuing effort to bring the National Rally into the mainstream, and to shed – or at least give a convincing appearance of having shed – some of the demons of its origins. (We’ve talked about this before as well.) The strategy doesn’t involve a general shift away from bigotry, but focuses it more narrowly on Muslims and a few other targets, hoping to enlist France’s Jews (among others) as supporters.
For the other parties that poses a dilemma. Bringing the far right within the democratic tent poses dangers, but so does leaving them out; there’s no algorithm for determining which is the better strategy in a given situation. That’s especially a problem for those on the centre and centre-right who might have to think about one day co-operating with the National Rally in government, in the way their counterparts in a number of other countries have. And although yesterday he distinguished himself as the rejectionist, it’s also a problem for Mélenchon and his party, who are regularly tempted to co-ordinate tactics with Le Pen in opposition.
It’s a problem, too, for the Jewish community in France and similarly-placed countries. On the one hand, the support of as broad a front as possible against antisemitism is very encouraging. On the other hand, bigotry can’t easily be contained within a few approved channels; it tends to spread, and we know from long experience that once the project of demonising minorities really gets going, the Jews always suffer in the end.
So it would be nice to see an equally large demonstration next week against anti-Muslim bigotry as well. But I’m not optimistic.
The World is Not Enough 