French extreme-right leader Jordan Bardella distances party from antisemitic roots on Israel visit

MARSEILLE, France (CN) — Jordan Bardella, the president of France’s extreme-right National Rally party whose founder called Holocaust gas chambers a “detail” of history, traveled to Jerusalem to speak Thursday at a government conference on antisemitism.

In recent years the National Rally, known as the RN, has been running a de facto normalization campaign to distance the party from its late founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. He was a notorious figure in the French imagination, commonly known as “the devil of the French republic” for his extreme xenophobic and antisemitic rhetoric.

Marine Le Pen, his daughter, took over the party in 2011. A few years later, she changed its name from the Front National to the National Rally. Then, in 2022, she appointed Bardella as its president.

Bardella — who is 29 years old, charismatic and not a Le Pen — has been a key driver in the normalization campaign. The RN gained unprecedented momentum under his leadership and now has more political weight than ever before.

Experts argue Israel is handing the RN an opportunity to further legitimize a once-taboo party.

Marion Maréchal, an extreme-right member of the European Parliament and the niece of Marine Le Pen, is also attending the conference. She’s the first member of the family to visit Israel.

“It has been a goal [of the RN] for years to be invited to Israel,” Pierre-Stéphane Fort, who wrote “Le Grand Remplaçant” after investigating Bardella for a year, told Courthouse News. “It’s this Netanyahu government, which also has far-right allies, which is giving this gift to the far right.”

Fort said Netanyahu’s government likely was waiting for the death of Jean-Marie Le Pen to begin normalizing relations with the National Rally. He died on Jan. 7.

Denis Charbit, a Franco-Israeli researcher and professor of political science at the Open University of Israel, was shocked by Bardella’s presence at the conference.

He told Courthouse News that, regardless of whether the part has evolved, giving the RN a podium to talk about antisemitism was completely unwarranted.

Charbit explained: “Imagine someone who raped a woman, but today is completely repentant. He recognizes that what he did was odious, filthy, serious, et cetera — very well, I’d say, ‘OK, that’s good, he’s come a long way.’ But I’m not going to invite him to a conference to fight against rape!”

Critics are questioning whether the RN’s courting of Israel is part of a strategy to combat the Muslim world. Its anti-immigrant platform chiefly targets France’s North African population, which is largely Muslim. On Mar. 26, one of the first lines of the party’s newsletter said, “The National Rally, for its part, does not procrastinate. We say no to hatred, no to Islamism, no to the trivialization of the intolerable.”

François Burgat, a retired former research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research’s IREMAM, told Courthouse News the RN’s newfound alignment with Israel is not so much support for the Jewish state for an anti-Muslim one.

“It’s a movement of rejection, of refusal of the affirmation of Muslims in the national fabric,” he said.

On Wednesday in Netiv Haasara, where 17 civilians were killed by in the terrorist attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, Bardella told French journalists that Israel and France had the “same adversaries” and said the fight in Gaza, where Israel’s bombing campaign has killed more than 50,000 people since the Hamas attack, was one of “civilization versus barbarism.”

Jean-Yves Camus, a political scientist, researcher and author specialized in far-right movements in Europe, told Courthouse News it’s critical to look at Bardella’s visit from the Israeli point of view.

He said many people in Israel felt alone after Oct. 7, and there was a sense that the magnitude of the attacks — in which 1,195 people were killed by Hamas — was not understood in Europe, both on the center left and center ride ends of the political spectrum.

“The National Rally was wise enough, clever enough, to take a very much pro-Israeli stance,” he said. “And many Israelis who do not have a very deep knowledge of French politics said, ‘OK, this used to be an extremist party, Jean-Marie Le Pen said awful things about the Jews, but that was in the 1980s, and Bardella is a new fellow, he’s much younger, he’s not an anti-Semite.”

Fort explained that after Oct. 7, when Marine Le Pen and Bardella participated in Paris’ big protest against antisemitism, it was the first time they were accepted into the cortege; previously, they had been kicked out. It was a turning point.

“Since then, the National Rally’s communication has systematically focused on supporting Israel in the face of Hamas terrorism,” he said. “There’s a form of convergence in the struggles, somewhat against radical Islam, between the Netanyahu government and the National Rally.”

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