Mobilizing the Narrative of Civilizational Clash: The French Far Right and the Fight Against Antisemitism

How did the Rassemblement National (RN) transform from one of Europe’s most notoriously antisemitic parties into an apparent ally of Israel? The recent participation of Jordan Bardella and Marion Maréchal in a Jerusalem conference on antisemitism highlights a strategic repositioning within the French far right.

This shift serves broader political objectives: enhancing the party’s legitimacy, reframing debates around antisemitism, and redirecting criticism toward leftist opponents and Muslims. By emphasizing discourse on “new antisemitism,” the RN seeks to deflect attention from its own extremist ties and promote a narrative of civilizational conflict. This development invites closer examination of how liberal values are being appropriated and distorted within contemporary far-right discourse.

 

France’s far-right leaders have been on the move in 2025, from Eric Zemmour’s tour of Washington D.C. during Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration in January to Marine Le Pen’s attendance at a Patriots for Europe meeting in Madrid the following month. Much like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and German AfD leader Alice Weidel, French far-right leaders are trying to capitalize on the tectonic shifts currently happening in the transatlantic space.

Another recent trip, however, has drawn more international commentary. In late March, key politicians from France’s far right were featured guests at a conference on combating antisemitism in Jerusalem, organized by Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli with the support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Due in large part to the participation of Jordan Bardella—Marine Le Pen’s right-hand man and the likely candidate to represent the Rassemblement National (“National Rally,” RN) in the 2027 presidential election—as well as Marion Maréchal, Le Pen’s archconservative niece and a close RN ally—the conference was boycotted by numerous high-profile invitees. Citing their refusal to speak alongside the heirs of Vichy regime collaborationists and other controversial politicians (like Republic of Srpska president Milorad Dodik), figures such as German government antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein, French philosopher Bernard-Henry Levy, and Anti-Defamation League head Jonathan Greenblatt stepped back from the conference.

In explaining his own withdrawal, sociologist David Hirsh, head of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, noted in a statement, “In an increasingly hostile world, the State of Israel is hungry for allies, but it must be disciplined in keeping some distance from those who do not share its values. […] It should not offer the populist right, which has fascistic antisemitism in its heritage and amongst its support, an official Jewish stamp of approval.” This statement echoes the suspicions voiced by several invited guests who ultimately declined to attend, as well as by numerous media organizations, regarding the possible motivations of both the current Israeli leadership and members of the European far right. But how did a party like the RN transform from one of the most famously antisemitic parties in Europe to an apparent Israeli ally? This blog article explores both the historical context and the strategic motivations behind this shift, contributing to the broader conversation about a newly emerging “front” within the global far-right’s narrative of civilizational clash.

The Antisemitic Heritage of the Rassemblement National

The French electoral far right as we know it today, most obviously represented by the RN under Le Pen and Bardella’s leadership, seems to many observers like the worst possible entity to speak out against antisemitism. Previously named the Front National (“National Front,” FN), the party was founded in 1972 as a coalition of various far-right factions in postwar France, from Vichy sympathizers to former Waffen SS members to reactionary Catholic monarchists. The FN’s launch was initially undertaken by a neofascist activist organization named Ordre Nouveau (“New Order”), strongly shaped by its antisemitic and anti-communist ideology, before Jean-Marie Le Pen split away from them and assumed full party leadership in 1973. Despite attempts to shed the most “objectionable” of the party’s members, this initial schism nonetheless left FN leadership filled with neofascist activists like François Duprat, a key figure in the development of Holocaust denialist (or négationniste) thought in 1970s France. Duprat also played a foundational role in shaping the party’s anti-immigration platform, which would go on to define its core policies and rhetoric.

In the decades following the FN’s formation, Le Pen earned a reputation for making antisemitic remarks. In addition to personal attacks and ambiguous puns targeting Jewish politicians and celebrities—especially Simone Veil, a centrist politician who had spearheaded the decriminalization of abortion in France, and a Holocaust survivor—Le Pen was also known for engaging in négationnisme. The most obvious example of this occurred during a televised interview in 1987, in which he infamously called gas chambers in Nazi extermination camps a mere “detail in the history of the Second World War” and cast doubt on the scale and nature of the Holocaust. These comments led to condemnation from politicians across the spectrum and further solidified the FN’s reputation as a threat to democracy in the eyes of the French public.

 

Taking note of the FN’s “image problem,” various party leaders throughout the FN’s history have endeavored to “clean up” their discourse, seeking to distinguish their platform from other more mainstream parties while also appearing competent and electable. Often referred to as “de-demonization” (dédiabolisation), as per the FN’s own parlance, this process kicked into high gear after Marine Le Pen assumed party leadership from her father in 2011. In her quest to transform the FN into a party of governance, one which could join parliamentary coalitions or even win the presidency, she pushed for a partial break with the party’s past, with a particular emphasis on antisemitism.

A Tactical Break: Antisemitism and the FN-RN’s Normalization Strategy

With regard to the party’s normalization strategy, it is worth noting that Marine Le Pen and her allies did not view “de-demonization” as necessary on all fronts. As her close associate Louis Aliot openly told an interviewer in the early 2010s, “We must be clear about ’de-demonization’: it only concerns our alleged antisemitism, nothing else. Not immigration, nor Islam, for which, in the end, it’s not a bad thing to be demonized…”[1] The party thus maintained and even sharpened its anti-immigration critique throughout the decade, associating crime, violence, and a purported disintegration of national values and societal cohesion with immigrants and Islam. Simultaneously, Marine Le Pen sought to distance herself from her father by denouncing any ambiguity on the history of Holocaust and declaring it “the height of barbarism” in a 2011 interview, though her record on admitting the responsibility of the French state in round-ups and deportations during World War II has been mixed. Nonetheless, after Jean-Marie Le Pen doubled down on his “detail” remarks and later stated that condemned Vichy leader Marshal Pétain had been unfairly treated, his daughter led the FN in ousting him from the party in 2015. This act opened up new opportunities for the FN to seek out allies, and notably allowed it to build a stable coalition with other far-right parties in the European Parliament.

Marine Le Pen’s efforts to distance the FN (renamed the RN in 2018) from antisemitism have simultaneously included attempts to win over allies connected with the French Jewish community—which, with over 400,000 people, is the largest in Europe. Since the mid-2010s, party leadership has insisted that the FN is the meilleur bouclier (“best shield”) or the meilleur rempart (“best bulwark”) against antisemitism. In 2014, Le Pen stated in an interview, “I keep repeating it to French Jews, who are increasingly turning to us: not only is the National Front not your enemy, but it is undoubtedly the best shield to protect you in the future, it is at your side to defend our freedoms of thought and worship against the only true enemy: Islamist fundamentalism.” Meanwhile, important members of the French Jewish community have expressed optimism about the party leaving antisemitism behind; the most notable of these is Serge Klarsfeld, a lawyer and Holocaust survivor famous for tracking down Nazi war criminals along with his wife, Beate. In 2022, Klarsfeld shocked colleagues and friends by accepting a medal awarded to him by Louis Aliot, the RN mayor of Perpignan. A venerated figure in the commemoration of the Holocaust in France, Klarsfeld noted that he detected an “evolution” in the FN-turned-RN’s ideology which deserved recognition—a notable departure from his earlier stance. Nonetheless, several progressive French Jewish organizations have rejected the RN’s strategic outreach, denouncing it as an attempt to “exploit the legitimate fears of French Jews.”

To be sure, the RN’s apparent commitment to the fight against antisemitism is called into question by the actions of its own executives as well as by the party’s alliances. During the 2024 legislative elections in France, media organizations brought public attention to hate speech present in the social media accounts of numerous RN candidates, including antisemitic statements; one legislative candidate quickly dropped out of the race when a picture of her posing in a Luftwaffe cap bearing a swastika resurfaced online. The RN still has several core members known for Holocaust denialism within its ranks, such as Bruno Gollnisch, while Marine Le Pen is known to have maintained personal connections to a now-banned neofascist activist group until at least 2023. Party leadership has also had a hard time contending with members’ past behavior, as when Bardella stated twice in a televised interview in 2023 that he “didn’t believe” Jean-Marie Le Pen was an antisemite—an assertion he was later forced to retract. Regarding its transnational alliances, the RN sat in a European parliamentary group for years with Germany’s AfD, despite the latter’s previously known connections to neo-Nazis and its World War II revisionism. It wasn’t until May 2024 that Marine Le Pen finally cut ties with the AfD, yet the RN continues to maintain relations with Austria’s FPÖ—a close AfD ally founded by former Nazi officers and known for its overtly conspiratorial rhetoric.[2]

Finally, and importantly, the RN continues to engage in propaganda that perpetuates antisemitic tropes, from blaming George Soros and “globalists” for undermining popular sovereignty to disseminating variations of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory (by which a “shadowy elite” is intentionally orchestrating the demographic replacement of white European populations with “invading” non-European ones). This rhetoric, however, continues to find currency with the RN’s voting public. In its 2024 antisemitism report, the Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme (“National Consultative Commission on Human Rights”) highlighted that, of all political persuasions, far-right sympathizers consistently demonstrated by far the most antisemitic views.[3]

A Valuable Strategy in More Ways than One

The far right’s appropriation of the fight against antisemitism, while rife with contradictions and logical quandaries, does not only help the RN in its quest for normalization and electoral alliances. Importantly, it also allows the RN and far-right media to focus national discussion around what many French scholars and journalists call le nouvel antisémitisme, participating in a broader global discussion on “new antisemitism.” The “newness” of this antisemitism, as posited by political theorist Pierre-André Taguieff in 2002, is that it revolves around an anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian bent; the implied perpetrators of this antisemitism, as per this logic, are therefore Muslim or left-wing. Indeed, these two group identifiers are treated as indelibly linked in the widespread use of the term islamo-gauchisme, “Islamo-leftism” (a term coined by Taguieff), which has flourished in recent years as a way to stigmatize and condemn a broad variety of identity-based, leftist, or seemingly sectarian demands. Through this lens, and against the backdrop of rising levels of antisemitic violence in France, the appropriation of the fight against antisemitism becomes the far right’s justification to further stir up fears of the French Muslim community and delegitimize its role as an integral part of the French body politic; it also serves as a means of beating back leftist opposition. Semantically, references to “new antisemitism” also divert attention away from the practitioners of a supposedly “old” or “obsolete” form of antisemitism, downplaying the far right’s own problematic connections, rhetoric, and history.

This ongoing debate—much like the RN’s professed commitment to fighting antisemitism—intensified following the October 7^th, 2023 Hamas attack against Israel. Accusations of left-wing antisemitism have since multiplied, coalescing in large part around the far-left movement La France insoumise (“France Unbowed,” LFI) and its pugnacious symbolic leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. LFI’s response to the war in Gaza has repeatedly drawn negative media coverage and public condemnation, from its initial refusal to label Hamas a terrorist organization to Mélenchon’s controversial claim in his blog that antisemitism remains merely a “residual” phenomenon in France that has been “completely absent from popular demonstrations.” Despite intense scrutiny, the party’s leadership has largely remained unapologetic about some of its most troubling rhetoric. Furthermore, left-wing parties—and especially LFI—have expressed strong support for the Palestinian cause, and the visibility of their activism in major French cities has, for many French Jews, contributed to an already deep sense of unease.

This ever-more polarized context weighs heavily on the deeply fractured French left, already on its back foot, which since 2022 has intermittently sought to hold together a shaky electoral coalition. As LFI’s negative reputation as a radical party and even a threat to democracy (a view held by 69% of IPSOS survey respondents in August 2024) continues to grow, the coalition’s socialist, green, and communist co-members are continually tainted by association. Election cycles since 2022 have also seen centrist and right-wing candidates call on voters to practice a ni-ni (“neither one, nor the other”) strategy toward “the extremes”—neither the RN nor the LFI—not least because of the accusations of antisemitism frequently leveled against LFI and its leadership. This constant comparison, putting the two sides of the political spectrum dos à dos (“back to back”), inevitably leads to constant questioning as to which presents a more serious danger. This problem became particularly apparent during the 2024 legislative elections, when voters in numerous districts were called upon to choose between the two parties. As Serge Klarsfeld suggested at the time, this forced the question—which is the greater threat to French Jews?

The response, according to Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, and Marion Maréchal, is emphatically the left. Backed by a rapidly expanding hard-right media ecosystem—most notably the private television network CNews—RN leaders and their allies have gone on the offensive on this issue, while also asserting a pro-Israel stance that has sharpened in terms of rhetoric and substance to more closely resemble that of U.S. President Donald Trump. This has helped them to find common cause with ultranationalist stakeholders in the current Israeli government while dividing the left-wing opposition, setting traps for centrist politicians, and accentuating preexisting fractures in the Jewish community. Indeed, Le Pen has become so confident in asserting her party’s self-designated role as the “best shield” against antisemitism that she has taken to chastising key Jewish leaders. When Yonathan Arfi, head of the CRIF (Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France, “Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions”), reacted negatively to Bardella’s participation in Israel’s antisemitism conference, she stated, “Mr. Arfi is a left-wing man. The CRIF is a left-wing organization that takes positions based on its political convictions rather than on the interests of our Jewish compatriots. It is up to our Jewish compatriots to ‘de-left-ify’ the CRIF so that it truly resumes the role that it should play.” Arfi, for his part, pointed to criticisms coming from both the RN and LFI, asserting that his organization was clearly correctly aligned and would “not allow anyone, anyone, to instrumentalize the issue of the fight against antisemitism.”

A Focus on Cultural Clash and Division

The invitation of Jordan Bardella and Marion Maréchal to Jerusalem in March, while surprising in view of the RN’s antisemitic past and present, fits well within the party’s broader strategy to improve its public image, all while stigmatizing its left-wing opponents and scapegoating Muslims. This strategy is made abundantly clear when these leaders comment on the problem of antisemitism. As Maréchal recently stated when asked about her grandfather in an interview with the Israeli outlet i24News, “I would venture to say […] that I think that if Jean-Marie Le Pen had been listened to more, specifically on the issue of immigration, there would probably be far fewer acts of antisemitism in our country today.” For his part, Bardella used his conference speech in Jerusalem to emphasize the presence of a post-October 7^th “honeymoon between Islamism and the far left,” warning of a “new antisemitism” which has “replaced the forms [of antisemitism] we knew before.”

Incidentally, the fight against antisemitism is only one of the campaigns on behalf of liberal values that the RN has appropriated in recent years. Despite the longstanding presence of Catholic traditionalists in its ranks—including Maréchal, who led opposition against the legalization of gay marriage in the mid-2010s—the RN has recently sought to hijack debate about laïcité, or French secularity, by insisting on its fundamental importance at every turn. This strategy, which has also been adopted by the more mainstream “republican” right, allows the RN to constantly focus attention on the problematized visibility of Muslim customs and dress; it has also made laïcité more difficult to discuss for the French left wing, traditionally its best defenders. In sum, the RN’s leaders have become adept at reframing liberal values to advance an illiberal agenda.

Examples of this strategy can easily be found elsewhere in the world. In the U.S., since the start of Donald Trump’s second term, his administration has exploited antisemitic incidents on college campuses as a pretext to cut federal funding and pressure university leadership into complying with new rules. Similarly, Germany’s AfD has seized on tensions following the October 7^th massacres to rail against so-called “imported antisemitism” and to denounce what it describes as a “serious and growing threat to our entire Western value system,” a threat it attributes to immigration. In these cases, far-right political actors are essentially pursuing long-held goals, all while cloaking their agenda in the language of human rights and a manufactured moral legitimacy.

This rapidly emerging front in the far right’s narrative of “civilizational clash” serves one final—and crucial—purpose for the RN, and indeed for many of its global allies: it keeps public attention fixed on allegedly irreconcilable differences rooted in religion and ethnicity. In contemporary France, the conflict over “cultural” identity offers the RN far more political traction than, say, the ideological struggle between authoritarian approaches to governance and liberal democracy. As the party scrambles to obscure its longstanding ties to Russian state-linked institutions and politicians, define its stance on the chaotic second Trump administration, and downplay its own crimes (such as embezzling public funds), we can expect it to continue to steer the national narrative toward cultural conflict at every possible opportunity.

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[1] Dominique Albertini and David Doucet, Histoire Du Front National (Paris: Editions Tallandier, 2013), 315.

[2] Neither the AfD nor the FPÖ were invited to send representatives to the conference in Jerusalem, as both are—for the time being—considered too objectionable by the current Israeli government. Nonetheless, diaspora minister Amichai Chikli recently conveyed a hopeful outlook about the future of the AfD under Alice Weidel’s leadership on his X account: https://x.com/AmichaiChikli/status/1894093925570548023

[3] Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme, “La Lutte Contre Le Racisme, l’antisémitisme et La Xénophobie: Année 2023” (Paris: Direction de l’information légale et administrative, 2024), 265.

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Therese Mager is a doctoral researcher at the Research Centre Global Dynamics (ReCentGlobe) at Leipzig University, affiliated with the Leipzig branch of the Research Institute Social Cohesion (RISC/FGZ). Her research focuses on contemporary French history and right-wing populism, with particular attention to far-right political actors and their transnational networks. She earned a joint M.A. in Global Studies from Ghent University and Leipzig University in 2019.

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