PARIS — Days before France’s crucial parliamentary election, renowned Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld is following his advice that if voters face a duel between Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party and a far-left competitor, they should choose the extreme right.
The advice of Klarsfeld, an 88-year-old Jewish historian who has dedicated his life to bring fugitive Nazis to justiceruns counter to many other Jewish leaders and intellectuals in France who see the fight against the National Rally as a top priority in Sunday’s second round.
But Klarsfeld told The Associated Press in an interview at his Paris apartment that the far-left France Insoumise party has militant pro-Palestinian supporters and “anti-Semitic overtones,” while Le Pen’s party supports Israel and the Jewish people.
“Marine Le Pen is the leader of a party that supports Israel and supports the Jews,” Klarsfeld said in Tuesday’s interview. “So we gave this advice to those who will face this runoff between the far left and what used to be the far right, which for us is now a populist party, to vote right,” he said.
Klarsfeld surprised many people in France, including those in the Jewish community, when he first stated this position on French television earlier this month.
Klarsfeld said he himself will vote for President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance, but not all voters in the 577 French districts will have that option in the second round of the elections on Sunday, where many will only be able to choose between a National Rally or a candidate from Unbreakable France.
The three main blocs are the nationalist and anti-immigration National Rally, Macron’s alliance and a broad left coalition that includes the Socialists, the Greens and France Insoumise.
The National Rally obtained the best results in the first round, propelling the party and its allies closer to the government than ever. But Sunday’s result remains uncertain as other political parties are trying to block the National Rally’s path. An unprecedented number of candidates qualified for the second round they have stepped aside to favor the competitor they believe is most likely to win against a National Rally opponent.
“I fear the far left. The far left has a deep-seated hatred of Israel and has… militants who are pro-Palestinian,” Klarsfeld said, describing France Unbowed as “a violently anti-Israel party with certain anti-Semitic ideas.” nuances.”
France approximately half a million people Jews represent only a small portion of the country’s 66 million people, but they have been pushed into the electoral race by the country’s bitter divisions over The Hamas-Israel war. Opposing sides in legislative elections have leveled accusations of anti-Semitism at each other.
France Unbowed leaders have strongly condemned Israel’s conduct of the war against Hamas and accused it of carrying out genocide against the Palestinians. But they have strongly denied accusations of anti-Semitism.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, co-founder of the National Front, the precursor to the National Rally, has multiple convictions for racism and anti-Semitism, including for repeatedly saying that the Nazi gas chambers were “a detail” of World War II history. Pierre Bousquet, another founder, was a member of the French Waffen-SS division of Nazi Germany.
Jean-Marie Le Pen He was expelled from the party in 2015 as part of a makeover by his daughter and successor, Marine Le Pen, to make him acceptable to traditional voters.
Klarsfeld said he believes Marine Le Pen has transformed the party after ousting her father, adopting a French law that prohibits denying the Holocaust and making pro-Jewish statements.
“We truly believe she is sincere,” he said. “People change. We met with Marine Le Pen and asked her to say and make totally pro-Jewish statements, that she accepts the Gayssot law, which is a law that protects Jews.”
Klarsfeld managed to escape from the Gestapo in Nice as a child in 1943. His father was captured and deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. He never returned.
Together with his wife, Beate, “we have always fought for the defense of Jewish memory, for the prosecution of Nazi criminals, against the anti-Semitic extreme right and for persecuted Jews around the world,” Klarsfeld said.
The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France, known as CRIF, has asked French voters “to mobilize to prevent the National Rally from coming to power by voting en masse for candidates of the democratic and republican parties, and to categorically reject any compromise with Unbreakable France.” .”
The French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy expressed his “respect” for Klarsfeld and his sadness at seeing his position. “Defeatism? Ill-advised? In any case, a political mistake. And, for those tempted to listen, a trap,” Levy wrote in X.
Klarsfeld said: “If the National Rally does not go in the direction I foresee, I will fight the National Rally and admit that I was wrong.”
“But for now. I may be right or I may be wrong, but no one can prove me wrong,” he concluded.
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