Will Macron Team Up With an Increasingly Antisemitic Left To Keep France’s Surging Conservatives From Power?

A populist France — a country dominated by anti-Establishment parties — is likely to emerge from the coming general election, on June 30 and July 7. According to the latest polls, National Rally, the right-wing populist party led by Marine Le Pen as presidential candidate and Jordan Bardella as chairman, may garner 35 percent or 36 percent of the vote nation-wide in the first round and win 200 to 240 seats out of 577 at the National Assembly on the second round. The left-wing New Popular Front led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon may get 29 percent or 30 percent of the vote this coming Sunday, and end up with 180 to 210 seats.A hypothetical populist coalition between the National Rally and the New Popular Front would thus total about 65 percent of the vote and 380 to 350 seats — way beyond an absolute majority of 289 seats. Whereas Ensemble, President Macron’s centrist coalition, would fall to 21 percent of the vote and 80 to 110 seats, from 250 seats in the outgoing National Assembly. Admittedly, the “great populist RN-NFP coalition” cannot and will not materialize, even if there are some intriguing similarities on some issues between RN and NFP. The bottom line is immigration. The National Rally’s driving force is a nativist reaction against Islamic mass immigration from Africa and the Near East, and its implications. On the contrary, Mr. Mélenchon’s Rebel France party, the backbone of the New Popular Front, has basically transmogrified into an Islamist immigrant party.Will Monsieur Macron, who wields considerable powers under the 1958 Gaullist constitution, be able to set up a viable cabinet even without a majority in Parliament? Technically, yes. He may pick up a prime minister outside the National Assembly and set up a technocratic cabinet of sorts that would rule the country by executive orders for one full year, until being allowed to call a further snap election. He may also set up a coalition with at least part of the right or part of the left, depending on the outcome on June 7. As the iconic socialist president from 1981 to 1995, François Mitterrand, used to say: “First you win (or lose) elections. Then you see what can be done out of your victory (or your defeat).”A left-leaning coalition that may include New Popular Front legislators wary of Mr. Mélenchon’s extremism and authoritarianism, seems more likely. Labor chief, Laurent Berger, the chairman of France’s comparatively moderate Democratic Confederation of Labour, might be a suitable prime minister — but he does not seem to be interested so far. Another option would be the former socialist president, François Hollande — Mr. Macron’s predecessor — who to everyone’s surprise is running for a National Assembly seat in his one-time constituency in South-West France.Mr. Macron’s major drawback (and the key for his party’s precipitous fall) is his unpopularity. The country seems to have developed an intense personal aversion for him. In one telling incident a few days ago, a senior citizen on the campaign trail told the prime minister, Gabriel Attal, “You are OK. But we are fed up with your boss.” Even more tellingly, the president’s wife, Brigitte Macron, was booed during the funeral of a beloved pop singer, Françoise Hardy, while the former conservative president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was applauded, along with his wife Carla Bruni.Both Messrs. Bardella and Mélenchon insist they are ready for the premiership and swear they will instantly engage in many reforms if provided with an absolute majority. However, Mr. Bardella is getting more no-nonsense and mainstream by the day, whereas Mr. Mélenchon doubles down on demagogic, unaccounted for, promises. The revised platform that the National Rally leader presented today in a press conference focused on important and at times bold issues — including substituting citizenship by jus sanguinis, meaning based on the ancestry of the parents, to citizenship by jus soli, or on the basis of the territory of birth. The platform also speaks of cutting to size France’s contribution to the European Union budget, but was shorn of unnecessarily contentious proposals. According to an Ipsos poll released by the Financial Times, the National Rally, once seen as amateurish in economic matters, is now more trusted in this respect than any other French political party.Jewish issues happen to play an important role in the present general election as well and may contribute decisively to a National Rally breakthrough: according to some estimates, the combined Jewish and Judeophile votes in France — the “Jewish audience” — amount to 4 percent of the national vote. From the moment Marine Le Pen took over the party from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011, she has made sure to purge it from any hint of antisemitism. Since October 7 last year, the National Rally has taken a strongly pro-Israel and pro-Jewish stand, in sharp contrast to the far left’s descent into anti-Zionist and antisemitic activism, and even to Mr. Macron’s ambivalent approach. The French Nazi-hunter, Serge Klarsfeld, is now opining that “there is no reason anymore not to vote for RN.” Madame Le Pen has replied in kind, underlying last Saturday in an op-ed for Le Figaro her personal commitment in these matters.Two recent incidents have dramatically highlighted this shift in French public opinion. French Jews and their friends were incensed by Mr. Macron’s arbitrary decision, last month, to expel 74 Israeli firms from EuroSatory, the yearly World Armament Fair at Paris. Even more appalling was, ten days ago, the case of a Jewish little girl, 12 years old, who was brutally raped, as a Jew, by pro-Palestinian peers at Courbevoie: a direct consequence of the Mélenchonists’s hate campaigns.From a Jewish perspective, there was only one argument left against the National Rally: the party’s antiquated demand to make Jewish and Muslim ritual slaughtering illegal, as it is the case in Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, and most of Belgium — a measure that, considering the differences between kosher and halal food, would hurt the Jews much more than the Muslims. The National Rally just dropped the issue entirely.

Will Macron Team Up With an Increasingly Antisemitic Left To Keep France’s Surging Conservatives From Power?

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