(Paris) Eleven days before the legislative elections in France, the far right wanted to reassure its foreign policy on Wednesday while the campaign was hit by the rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl, which caused shockwaves policy.
As the early elections of June 30 and July 7, of which it is the favorite, approach, the National Rally (RN, far right) has tried to reassure France’s partners while its adversaries claim that its arrival in power would lead to an exit of the European Union.
“I do not intend to call into question the commitments made by France on the international scene,” declared its president Jordan Bardella on Wednesday, visiting the Eurosatory defense exhibition near Paris,
“There is a credibility issue with our European partners and our NATO allies,” he said. There is no question of leaving the integrated command of the Atlantic Alliance, at least not as long as the war in Ukraine “is still ongoing”, according to Mr. Bardella who is trying to erase the pro-Kremlin image of his party.
The young president of the RN has also confirmed his intention to maintain France’s military support for Kyiv, with however a “red line” on “long-range missiles” which would make it possible to “strike Russian territory”.
Jordan Bardella, who could become prime minister if his camp wins, also worked to provide guarantees of neutrality by committing to dissolving “all ultra-left and ultra-right organizations”. The RN also announced that it was withdrawing its support from one of its candidates, who had written on Twitter in 2018 that “gas (had) brought justice to the victims of the Shoah”.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who called these legislative elections after his camp’s debacle in the European elections on June 9, continues to find the program of the far right “unreasonable” both “financially and in its relationship to the policy “.
But he reserves his sharpest arrows for the left-wing New Popular Front coalition which brings together socialists, ecologists and France Insoumise (LFI, radical left) and whose “totally immigrationist” program and certain societal measures he denounced.
The President of the Republic thus denounced “completely ludicrous things like going to change one’s sex in town hall”, provoking outraged reactions on the left. “The President of the Republic is losing his nerve,” replied Communist Party boss Fabien Roussel.
Already marked by political tensions on the right and left, the campaign was hit by the gang rape on Saturday in Courbevoie, near Paris, of a 12-year-old Jewish teenager, also a victim of anti-Semitic violence.
The day after the indictment of two 13-year-old minors for these acts, President Macron denounced on Wednesday the “scourge of anti-Semitism”.
The RN, for its part, pointed out “the stigmatization of Jews for months by the far left through the instrumentalization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.
Since the October 7 attacks in Israel, the La France Insoumise party has been accused by its detractors of having underestimated anti-Semitism in France and has been criticized for refusing to label the Palestinian Hamas movement as terrorist, contrary to the position of France and the EU.
At the beginning of June, LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon created controversy by judging anti-Semitism in France to be “residual” while figures show a fourfold increase in anti-Jewish acts in 2023 over the year.
On Wednesday, he denounced “anti-Semitic racism” after the Courbevoie rape. “Horrified by this rape in Courbevoie and everything it highlights regarding the conditioning of criminal male behavior from a young age, and anti-Semitic racism,” he wrote on X.
The legislative elections, the second round of which is being held at the start of the summer holidays, are also causing a record rush for proxies. More than 700,000 French people have already chosen this route to vote, “6.3 times more” than during the last legislative elections in 2022, according to the authorities.
