Marine Le Pen may be headed to prison — antisemitism and xenophobia still roam freely

Robert Zaretsky
April 2, 2025

The reaction of the national press to the latest news from Paris was predictable: “Shock wave,” blared Le Parisen. A “crack of thunder,” opined La Dépêche du Midi, while L’Opinion, turned to yet another tried and true metaphor: “earthquake.” But the large headline in Libération did without similes: “Guilty.”

The word, of course, was applied to Marine Le Pen, leader of the extreme-right National Rally. On Monday, a French court declared her guilty on embezzlement charges. Between 2004 to 2016, the court found, Le Pen oversaw the illicit channeling of funds from the European Union, close to 5 million euros, to pay phantom assistants in Brussels. Instead, the money subsidized party activities and staff in Paris.

The sentencing was an even greater clap of thunder than the verdict: Not only was Le Pen sentenced to four years in prison — two of which were suspended, two of which she would have to wear an electronic bracelet — but she was also banned from political office for five years. In the days leading up to the verdict, Le Pen insisted the court’s sole objective was “to prevent me from being the party’s candidate” in the presidential election in 2027. “The judges would have to be blind and deaf not to see this.”

It turned out the judges, if only to Le Pen’s eyes and ears, were blind and deaf. Le Pen then pulled a page from Donald Trump’s playbook: Condemn the judges and the institutions — le système (think the “deep state”) — of stifling the voice of the 13 million citizens who voted for her in 2022. “The system,” she declared, “has dropped an atomic bomb. The use of so potent a weapon reveals their fear that we are on the point of winning the election…We will not allow them to steal it.”

Obviously, these threats, issued by the leader of an intensely xenophobic party with authoritarian proclivities, pose an existential threat to French democracy, as they do to France’s minorities. Among these groups, of course, are the country’s 500,000 Jews.

Let’s count the ways. First, there is the twisted lumber with which the National Rally was made. Born a little more than 50 years ago, the party was founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former soldier in the Foreign Legion — during his tour of duty in French Algeria, he was accused of torturing prisoners — and Pierre Bousquet, an ex-member of the Waffen SS. Over the four decades since the party’s creation, Le Pen was condemned 25 times by courts for defending war crimes and committing hate speech, mostly against French Muslims.

But Muslims were not the only target; French Jews were repeatedly in Le Pen’s crosshairs. Perhaps most notorious was his stubborn attachment to Holocaust denialism. In 1987, Le Pen asserted that the gas chambers were a “detail of history.” This instance of Holocaust denialism earned him a hefty fine, but perhaps not hefty enough. He publicly repeated the claim two more times, the last in 2016, which inevitably (and fruitlessly), earned him yet other large fines.

When his daughter inherited the party in 2011, she launched her effort to make it gentler and kinder. In part, this project was cosmetic as when, in 2018, she succeeded in shedding the confrontational National Front to the inspirational National Rally. In yet another aspect to this exercise in rebranding, the logo of a menacing flame was swapped for a comforting blue rose.

Yet other aspects to Le Pen’s undertaking seemed deeper, most importantly purging the party’s association with antisemitism. A remark made by Louis Aliot, Le Pen’s former partner, made the urgency of this issue clear. The party could hammer away all it wishes at immigration and Islam, but, he argued, “it is antisemitism that keeps people from voting for us. The moment you dynamite this ideological lock, success will follow.”

However, this endeavor also turned out to be cosmetic. Le Pen rid the party of many antisemitic-adjacent officials, yet others, as if this were a game of Whack-A-Mole, keep cropping up, revealing themselves by remarks made on social platforms. More important, antisemitism runs deep among the party’s followers. A study conducted by the League of Human Rights in 2024 found that 34% of National Rally voters believed “that Jews hold too much power;” 51% agreed with that Jews were guilty of “double allegiance” to France and Israel; and 51% held that Jews are especially good at money-making (if only that was my case). Needless to say, these percentages dwarf those found in other political parties.

But the real problem is rooted not in the party’s antisemitic DNA — one that the party’s slick president Jordan Bardella’s visit to Israel will not remove — but in its effort to revise the French constitution. In the recently published book Révolution nationale en 100 jours et comment l’éviter (A National Revolution in 100 Days and How to Avoid It), the journalist Pierre-Yves Bocquet observes that the party’s stated plans to revise the constitution amount to its evisceration. The modifications and additions demanded by Le Pen amount to more than 20% of the founding constitution, a feat never attempted since the 5th Republic’s founding in 1958.

These changes would not only replace the principle of equality with the principle of “national preference” —  a rebranding of the old National Front chestnut “France Belongs to the French” — but, even more important, they would also dynamite restrictions on the right to request a national referendum. It would now be far easier for xenophobic, homophobic, or why not, Judeophobic citizens to call for a referendum.  As Bousquet warns, Le Pen plans to “use the mechanisms of democracy in order to shatter its foundations.”

It is at this point that we once again cite the lines written by the German pastor Martin Niemöller, “First they came for the socialist, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.” But as we now realize in our own country, it is less transactional and more fundamental: First they come for the laws and judges, and there is no way to speak out for all of us. Period.

La source de cet article se trouve sur ce site