French Jews caught between two extremes in polarizing snap elections

PARIS: As French Jews, Maury and Alain Fischler feel caught between equally unpleasant extremes as France rushes into snap elections with the far right leading in polls, followed by a left-wing bloc that, according to them, harbors anti-Semites.

President Emmanuel Macron called legislative elections on June 9 after his centrist Ensemble alliance was defeated in European elections by the anti-immigration National Rally (RN), which is now the favorite to form France’s next government.

This is deeply worrying for the Fischlers, who loathe far-right ideology and see the RN going from a party that once openly flirted with anti-Semitism to one that denounces it as a cynical ploy to create a veneer of respectability.

“Just because they painted the door glossy and produced 10 beautiful people with impeccable rhetoric doesn’t mean we have to believe them,” said Alain Fischler, 61, a furniture designer, speaking in the couple’s apartment in Paris.

RN leader Marine Le Pen has worked hard to detoxify the party’s image since taking the reins from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party’s founder, who was convicted of inciting racial hatred for claiming that the gas chambers used to kill Jews during the Holocaust were “a detail” of World War II history.

She joined demonstrators who marched through Paris in November to denounce a surge in anti-Semitic incidents following Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7 and Israeli retaliation against Gaza. The RN has adopted a resolutely pro-Israeli position.

His efforts have won over some French Jews, including prominent lawyer and Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, 88, who said on June 15 that in a runoff between the RN and the left, he would vote for the RN, which he called “pro-Jewish.”

But for others, including Fischler, the son of a Holocaust survivor, that doesn’t hold. He accused the RN of courting Jews to cover up the stigmatization of Muslims.

“ANTISEMITISM IS NOT RESIDUAL”

Equally frightening for the Fischlers is the New Popular Front, a left-wing coalition hastily assembled to counter the rise of the far right and currently second in the polls, ahead of Macron’s centrist camp.

That group includes La France Insoumise, a far-left party that its opponents say has repeatedly crossed the line between criticism of Israeli military action in Gaza and anti-Semitism, something it denies.

“I feel like I’m caught between the plague and cholera,” said Maury Fischler, a 61-year-old optician, using a colloquial expression to describe a choice between equally unpleasant alternatives.