The French Election

On June 16, in the French city of Courbevoie, a suburb in the north of Paris, a 12-year-old girl was beaten, tortured and raped by three boys her age for being Jewish.

According to the procureur (the French DA), the girl had been advised by her parents due to heavy pressures at school since Oct. 7 to hide her Jewish identity and pretend to be a Muslim. Her main aggressor, whom she’d met online and had a flirting relation with, was a 13-year-old Portuguese kid who had converted to Islam and was in the nearby city of Rueil.

Nobody knows how he learned the girl’s real identity. But when he did, he set up a trap for the girl with two of his friends. The three kids showed up in the Courbevoie hood where the girl lives, found her in the street, and took her to an abandoned nursery nearby where she was called a liar, a “dirty Jew” taking part in “the genocide in Gaza.” They then beat and raped the girl for two hours and threatened her with death if she did not give them 200 euros the next day and if she talked to the cops. Pictures of the Palestinian flag and of the slogan “Free Palestine,” that had been obsessively hammered on in every left-wing demonstration since Oct. 7, and again during the campaign for the European election that had just ended, were found in the main perpetrator’s phone.

We know these details because of the traumatized Jewish girl’s courage and moral strength. According to her parents’ legal counsel, the lawyer Muriel Ouaknine-Melki, she refused to keep silent about her treatment. Instead, she immediately reported the facts home and insisted on filing a complaint. Accordingly, she also had to undergo a battery of medical examinations the following days. At the age of 12, she was prescribed a preventive treatment for AIDS and a morning-after pill; she’s suffered from harrowing flashbacks and insomnia ever since.

How was her courage rewarded? Anyone curious about the details of what happened had to rely on media labeled “right wing” (Le Point, Le Figaro). Prestige left outlets like Libération and Le Monde, on the other hand, covered the story as soberly and quietly as they could, with the latter taking so many precautions in its presentation of the facts that the journal sometimes seemed to doubt the victim’s version.

Did the left—and more specifically, did Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left party La France Insoumise (LFI) with its obsessive “anti-Zionist” agitprop—bear some responsibility for the crime? The question was of course on everybody’s mind. But in the stormy political context it was a question people found too problematic to ask.

One week before the rape, on June 9, Marine Le Pen’s party, the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), came in on top in the EU election with 31.37% of the votes—more than double the votes gained by the presidential list (Réveiller l’Europe, 14.60%), and more than triple the ones given to the left (LFI, 9.89%). Led by Raphaël Glucksmann, the socialist ticket (in fact a mix of the old Parti Socialiste and of the small formation of Glucksmann’s called Place Publique) had attracted 13.80% of the votes. This was seen as a success, but only because nobody expected Glucksmann to score that much. In any case, Glucksmann’s victory and his intention to build in two years a “new political space” in France was killed off by Macron the very evening of the election when the French president appeared on TV to announce the dissolution of the Parliament and new elections in three weeks’ time.

Political analysts still speculate on Macron’s motives for a decision that was sure to plunge the country into a political storm on the eve of the Paris Olympics and with a war raging on in Ukraine, and the tangible prospect of Le Pen’s openly pro-Russian party taking hold of the government. (During the campaign, the RN produced no less than 19 candidates with official ties to the Kremlin; the most notorious of them, but by no means the only one, the lawyer Pierre Gentillet, is close to the spirited new RN president and potential PM Jordan Bardella; the RN also made public its intention to forbid high-ranking sensitive jobs to civil servants with dual nationalities except when they’re Franco Russians).

To stop any prospect of seeing the RN come to power, the panicked left quickly gathered together in a coalition of sort called the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP, New Popular Front). Glucksmann’s voters—among them many Jews—saw with dismay their candidate align himself with the Socialists, the Communists and the Greens around the NFP’s political and economic program largely based on the LFI’s populist and “anti-Zionist” views. To argue even remotely that LFI could have a responsibility in any antisemitic violence became anathema. All the more so, of course, because it was so obvious.

Antisemitism had been at the center of France’s political life ever since August 2023, when both LFI and the Greens invited rapper Médine, a former supporter of the antisemitic Black clown Dieudonné, to be a guest star at their “Summer Universities.” A one-month debate ensued in the media to decide whether Médine was antisemitic. Then came Oct. 7.

In a different context, the giant pogrom that occurred in Israel that day would have probably had the same effect on the French public opinion as 9/11—when, seven months after the al-Qaida attack on New York and D.C., during the presidential election of April 22, 2002, an anxious electorate put Jean-Marie Le Pen in the position of challenging then-President Chirac at the second round. But there is hardly a question today that by making support for Hamas in Gaza its main political issue—and after the Israeli response started, the only issue—the leftist LFI boosted that anxiety—and its correlative, public support for the RN—to stratospheric levels.

As soon as the EU campaign started, LFI’s political main star, Mélenchon’s protégée Rima Hassan, totally eclipsed the party’s official head Manon Aubry. Hassan’s only public topic was and is to denounce the “Zionists” in France—that is to say any public figure with a Jewish name—while repeating the slogan “Free Palestine”—and, more recently, to threaten anyone she labels “colonizer” on Twitter.

Mélenchon’s racist taste for Arab women is the source of many jokes among the left. Perhaps that can explain both LFI’s obsession with the Palestinian “cause” and also Rima Hassan’s sudden surge on the political scene. Oddly, Hassan, a so-called “Palestinian refugee” born in France but whose father lives in Syria, seems to be the only personality across the whole world able to enter and leave the Syrian police state as she pleases. (Affection for Syria and its dictator being a common thread that unites the LFI and the RN).

Hassan is only the most enigmatic figure among LFI parliamentarians who have been obsessed by “the Zionists” to the exclusion of any other political or social issue. For his part, Mélenchon has made multiple public allusions to the “sectarian,” “arrogant” Jews, helping to fan the flames of leftist hatred. LFI members have been spotted at the Egyptian border with pro-Hamas activists, and LFI has received members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in Paris. More recently, the PFLP issued a long statement congratulating the NFP for its good results in the legislative election, and encouraging the left to stand up to “the Zionist lobby” in France. Coupled with the general thuggish attitudes of the LFI group during most of the debates at the National Assembly last year, this toxic dynamic has done more to put the RN at the center of French politics than has the RN itself (the RN gained points in the polls in 2023 each and every time LFI’s main public figures spoke on TV, regardless of the subject).

On June 20—four days after the rape at Courbevoie, and while further antisemitic incidents were daily registered across the country—two intellectuals, the far-left lawyer Arié Alimi (who’s Jewish) and the historian Vincent Lemire published a long and very successful op-ed in Le Monde exonerating the left from its antisemitism, which the authors did not bother to deny. The central idea in a nutshell was this: While antisemitism has exploded in France since Oct. 7, “there is no equivalence between contextual, populist and electoralist anti-Semitism instrumentalized by some members of LFI, and the founding, historical and ontological anti-Semitism of the Rassemblement national.” The former was instrumentalized to undermine the left and help the RN. In other words: Don’t denounce anti-Jewish leftism, or else you’ll end up with the RN in power.

How did French Jews react? Rumor had it that they would vote en masse for the RN—helped by pro-Israel and harsh judgments against antisemitism in statements clearly phrased by Marine Le Pen herself. Serge Klarsfeld publicly stated that the RN had learned from the past and now “protected the Jews” while Alain Finkielkraut said in a interview that he could be “constrained” to vote RN if the alternative was Mélenchon’s party.

But Klarsfeld, today 89, is known for being under the influence of his son the lawyer Arno; and Finkielkraut later nuanced his angry statement in a very Finkielkrautian way. In fact, the RN did not score better in Jewish neighborhoods than anywhere else in the country, a result that was probably helped by the RN candidates themselves—a mix of pro-Russian, bizarre, inexperienced, wildly incompetent, and, yes, in more than one case, racist and Nazi-nostalgic individuals who collectively suggested at best a cruel lack of preparation inside of the RN. At the polling booths, Jews dutifully took part in the “Republican Front” that limited Le Pen’s party’s victory in the National Assembly.

So where do we stand now? In any other country, the new National Assembly would logically lead to a coalition government. Not in France, though.

In the French centralized system, you are required to get 289 National Assembly seats (out of 577) in order to have the absolute majority allowing you to form a government, making bipartisanship close to impossible. The so-called “return of the right/left conflict” is the result of that simple fact.

Which is why everyone understood these elections as a Qui-perd-gagne game, as we say in France: Whoever wins, loses. The country faces a 1,000-billion euro debt and is heading toward an unprecedented crisis next fall. Its social system is in shambles, its political regime in crisis, and no one knows for sure if the institutions of the Fifth Republic founded in 1958 by de Gaulle still work. Any political party forced to confront that mess alone next fall when the budget is being voted on, while working in tandem with the country’s narcissistic king of unpredictability, Emmanuel Macron, is bound for political suicide. The upshot being that nobody wanted to win the French elections, and nobody did—while everybody claims that they have.

With its 182 seats the NFP is a coalition made up of left-wing formations that hate each other. Taken separately, each of the NFP’s component parties is weak (the Socialists have only 59 seats, while the LFI has 74). Yet, with 189 seats altogether, the NFP can safely claim to be the biggest group of all, and pretend that Macron has to pick France’s next Prime Minister from among their ranks. Interestingly enough, the last name they came up with, the unknown Huguette Bello, president of the region of La Réunion island, was opposed to the law legalizing gay marriage in 2012 and to the law reinforcing laïcité (secularism) in 2004. Her chances to be appointed PM are dim, in part because the NFP insists that their radical economic program must be implemented in full, which is of course the best guarantee that they will never find an ally to put them in power.

The liberal right, for its part, has made clear that they will of course support any measures necessary to save the country—as long as they’re taken by a government that they do not intend to be a part of. The Macronists’ 150 seats are divided between a left and a right wing who beg impossible deals with whomever will want them. The RN, with 142 seats, can wait for everything to crash, so they can pick up the crown effortlessly.

Only one thing is certain in France: September will be a bad month, and somehow the Jews will be at the center of it.