Israel-Hamas war is changing the political landscape in France – POLITICO Europe

Robert Zaretsky teaches at the University of Houston and Women’s Institute of Houston. His latest book is “Victories Never Last: Reading and Caregiving in a Time of Plague.

The shock waves from Hamas’ attacks on Israel last week continue to resonate across Europe’s political landscape — and the effects have been especially worrisome in France.

Fearing a “rise in tensions” at home, President Emmanuel Macron met with representatives from all political parties last week to discuss potential responses to the situation. His fears are well founded. France is home to the world’s third largest Jewish population, as well as Europe’s largest Muslim population. Moreover, the country’s past as a colonial power in North Africa and the Middle East — no less than its past as a collaborator with Nazi Germany in the Final Solution — makes the risks all the more real.

In fact, tensions have already risen. On the same day Macron met with political parties, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin met with the press. More than 100 antisemitic acts had occurred in France since the Hamas massacre, he announced. And when asked if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be “exported” to France, Darmanin replied oui et non — yes and no. There was no evidence of this on the streets, but it was a different matter on the screens, where the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) is “not trying to avoid the importation of the conflict,” he said.

Clearly, French politicians don’t need to import conflicts any more than French bakers need to import croissants. As seen in Darmanin’s implicit accusation of LFI, French antisemitism is an essential ingredient for the current political conflict. Indeed, the reality of antisemitism has long been explicit in modern French politics and culture. As the French historian Eugen Weber remarked, antisemitism has been, well, “as French as croissants” since the late 19th century.

The extreme right wing in France has been especially fond of this toxic ideology. Over the course of a century — from l’affaire Dreyfus, when the French-Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus was unjustly accused of treason, through l’affaire du détail, when former political leader Jean-Marie Le Pen was justly accused of Holocaust denialism, insisting it was just a historical detail — antisemitism has been the cornerstone of French reactionary thought.

However, antisemitism in France hasn’t been a uniquely right-wing affair. From Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to Georges Sorel, influential thinkers on the French left have fastened on the figure of the Jew as the source of all social and economic ills of the modern age. Not only was the cosmopolitan Jewish banker the driver of capitalism, but the immigrant Jewish laborer was a competitor for jobs. Yet, by the 1930s, the French left had matured enough to name Jewish politician Léon Blum its leader (and future prime minister).

All of which brings us back to the current unfolding of l’affaire Mélenchon. The day after Hamas’ slaughter of 1,300 men, women and children, LFI’s volatile leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon defied demands to describe the attack as “terrorist.” Instead, he insisted that “the violence unleashed against Israel and Gaza proves just one thing: violence begets more violence.”

Mélenchon’s claim — one both he and his close circle still refuse to repudiate — sparked a firestorm of criticism. Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, whose father survived Auschwitz only to take his life several years later, denounced Mélenchon’s “revoltingly ambiguous” statement. One cannot equate, she declared, a democratic state with a terrorist organization that has just attacked it — a stance, Borne suggested, that smacked of antisemitism.

More tellingly, the leaders of the other parties belonging to the New Ecological and Social People’s Union (Nupes) along with LFI were equally outraged. “Stunned” and “disgusted” by Mélenchon’s stance, the Socialist deputy Jérôme Guedj warned that it “poses the question” of whether the Socialists should remain in the coalition. The party’s leader Olivier Faure echoed Guedj’s anger, but he also refused to withdraw from the coalition. (On Tuesday, Faure changed his mind, announcing that the Socialists would observe a “moratorium” from participating in weekly meetings held by Nupes.)

Marine Tondelier, the head of the newly baptized Ecologist Party, also hesitated. She lamented that the coalition, which “had been a source of hope for so many people, has now become a source of despair,” and confessed she “no longer knows what to say about Jean-Luc Mélenchon.” Nevertheless, Tondelier insisted her party isn’t yet at the point of separation from Nupes.

The hesitation isn’t surprising. With relatively meager parliamentary representation, the Socialists and Ecologists need the LFI more than the LFI needs them. But Mélenchon’s position has angered even members of his own party — most notably François Ruffin, who won nationwide fame as a journalist, filmmaker and activist before becoming a deputy. Distancing himself from Mélenchon’s stance, in an interview with Le Monde, Ruffin was blunt. What Hamas wrought, he said, “was an abomination.” And in a barely veiled criticism of Mélenchon, he stated that “our words have not matched the gravity of events.”

Even more telling, and disturbing, is that the words of Marine Le Pen, the leader of the extreme-right National Rally — founded by her father as the fascist-adjacent National Front a half-century ago — have matched the gravity of events. At the National Assembly, Le Pen announced that “we have seen what we thought we would never again see in the history: pogroms where women, children, and men were killed uniquely because they were Jews.” Following a loud round of applause from both the right and many in the ruling party, she then denounced “those who support, excuse, or relativize the insupportable, some of whom are sitting this chamber.”

There was no reason for Le Pen to name names — just as there is no reason to look far to find her reasons for taking this stance. Ever since she inherited the party, Le Pen has sought to transform it from a movement led by an antisemite and steeped in nostalgia for French Algeria into a political party comme les autres — like the others. We can rightly question the sincerity of the words she spoke at the National Assembly, but what is beyond question is her sense of political timing.

There is good reason to be worried about this strange moment in French history. First, it reminds us that the country requires a political left that is electorally viable and morally reliable. More disturbingly, it also reminds us that a morally unreliable party on the extreme right is now a bit more viable.