France before presidential elections: RN leader Bardella is said to have been “obsessively” anti-Semitic

The French online magazine Mediapart attributes blatant anti-Semitic statements to the current RN party leader Jordan Bardella. They come from the time when he began his political career in the National Front as a 17 and 18-year-old right-wing extremist. Bardella denies these compromising sentences and accuses Mediapart of wanting to start a smear campaign against him with “blunt forgeries”.

Without hesitation, the Rassemblement National (RN) presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen, and all the party spokespersons rallied behind him to counterattack and discredit Mediapart's revelations. The journalists of the online magazine speak of documented “obsessive anti-Semitism”.

Nobody is actually completely surprised. On Tuesday, the French European Minister Benjamin Haddad said laconically about this polemic: "Who can be surprised? The extreme right is the extreme right." And his government colleague Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot commented: "To everyone who has too short a memory: Anti-Semitism in the RN is not a blip, but the history of this party. This is the true face of the extreme right."

Behind the smoothly polished image of Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National, despite all attempts to trivialize it, there was still the National Front, founded by the notorious racist and anti-Semite Jean-Marie Le Pen together with a former member of the Waffen-SS. This was actually no secret in France.

But how many today would apparently be willing to brush this period under the table as a forgiven and forgotten past and vote for Marine Le Pen as the next President of the Republic in the presidential elections? But do we have to accept that she and the party are today a bulwark against hatred of Jews and anti-Zionism?

The quotes published by Mediapart on Monday testify to the anti-Semitism of the young FN member Bardella in the style of his role model Jean-Marie Le Pen. Back then, according to Mediapart in 2013 - when Marine Le Pen had already taken over the party leadership from her father - it seemed almost self-evident that Bardella had expressed the belief, for example, that "the banks all belong to the Jews" or that "the Jews want to dominate, subjugate and steal from other peoples".

At that time, Bardella was largely under the influence of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Alain Solal. Today, Bardella might protest that it was mean to use such remarks from his youth against him for a political campaign. Instead, he denied on X that he ever made or even thought of such statements. If, as is to be expected, Mediapart substantiates the allegedly written quotes, with its vehement counterattack it runs the risk of being exposed as a political impostor and liar.