Anti-Immigrant Le Pen Finds Rising Jewish Support in France

French Jews’ growing support for the anti-immigration National Front was brought into focus after a community chief said Monday that the party’s leader Marine Le Pen was “beyond reproach.”

Although the Jewish Council’s president, Roger Cukierman, said he didn’t share Le Pen’s “moral values” and that the National Front was a party to avoid, the remarks made waves. The comments come less than a month before local elections that may put Le Pen’s party in the top spot and about seven weeks after attacks in and near Paris by self-proclaimed Islamists claimed 17 lives, including four at a kosher grocery.

Opinion polls like Ifop show Cukierman’s comments reflect a growing reality. Between the last two presidential elections in 2007 and 2012, Jewish voters supporting the FN, the party’s acronym, more than tripled. The shift came after Marine Le Pen took over the helm in 2011, steering clear of her party-founder father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s anti-Semitic stance. In a comment to Bloomberg on the side lines of a conference in Paris Tuesday, Marine Le Pen made common cause with France’s Jews.

“It’s the rise of Islamism that hits, hurts and kills,” she said. “It’s time to fight the danger threatening French Jews.” She welcomed Cukierman’s comments, saying “his words reveal an internal debate within the Jewish community. The comfortable idea that anti-Semitism is a right-wing theme is not true anymore and hasn’t been for decades.”

On her watch, the FN has set aside Holocaust denials and the anti-Semitic rhetoric employed by her father and his allies, most of whom are still members of the party.

Nationalist Focus

She called the Holocaust “the height of barbarism” in a 2011 interview with Le Point magazine. Her father in contrast was sentenced several times in French courts for Holocaust denial. Cukierman said there is still “virulent anti-Semitism” in the ranks of the FN.

France has the largest Jewish community in Europe with about 500,000 members.

Marine Le Pen, 46, has focused her speeches and campaigns on restoring security, sovereignty and economic revival for France. She touches on voter concerns about immigration from the Middle-East and Africa and blames radicalized Muslims for attacking France. Immigrants hurting the French labor market with its record-high jobless rate, is among her main themes.

After the January attacks in Paris in which 12 people at the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, a police officer and four shoppers at a kosher supermarket were shot dead, Le Pen’s analysis and platform have resonated in some parts of France.

‘Risen Sharply’

While France’s doesn’t officially measure or publish religious and ethnic statistics, pollster Ifop has surveyed the Jewish community’s voting habits for several years.

“While only a minority of Jewish voters backs the FN, below the national average, their numbers have risen sharply,” Jerome Fourquet, who heads Ifop, told 20 minutes newspaper on Monday. “They feel they have been abandoned by the left wing parties. There is also a rise in the feeling of insecurity.”

About 13.5 percent of voters polled who said they were Jewish told Ifop they voted for the FN in the 2012 presidential elections, when Marine Le Pen ran.

That’s three times more than in 2007 when her father did, the Ifop survey for Atlantico online news website showed in September.

An Ifop poll in Le Figaro newspaper published Feb. 22 shows her party is expected to lead in the first round of voting in the local, departmental elections next month.

‘No. 1'

The National Front would win 30 percent of the vote, ahead of a combined 28 percent for the conservative UMP and centrist parties. The ruling Socialist party comes in third place with 20 percent, Ifop said.

After its victory in last year’s European elections, the National Front’s boasted in billboards over bridges and near highways that said “National Front: France’s No.1 Party.”

Le Pen sought to visit Israel last year to meet potential political allies and French Jews who emigrated there. She wasn’t welcomed by Israeli authorities and canceled her plans.

In 2011 her lieutenant and partner Louis Aliot visited Israel to meet with local politicians.

“The more numerous we are, the better,” Le Pen said in the Paris conference on Tuesday.

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