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By Yves Coleman, WORKERS LIBERTY

Since 2011, when Marine Le Pen became the leader of the Front National, the presence of antisemitism (but not of racism) has decreased in its official public declarations. Marine Le Pen has tried several times to make an official visit to Israel; she has contacted the leaders of the American Jewish community, made appeals to Jewish voters, and so on.

But evidence about what the activists and the local cadres of the FN say in internal meetings shows that antisemitism and even Holocaust denial are still current in the National Front. Moreover, all the polls confirm that the FN is the party that attracts the most antisemitic and racist voters. Only, it is now forbidden to express anti-Jewish sentiments on Facebook, on FN websites, in public meetings or at press conferences. Antisemitism is thriving in the FN, only it is reserved for the internal discussions of the party.

In the short term, if a mass fascist party appears in France, a large part of its militants and sympathisers will most certainly come from the ranks of the Front National. For the time being, Marine Le Pen is trying to make the same kind of political mutation as Gianfranco Fini made when he transformed the Italian neo-fascist MSI into Alleanza Nazionale, but we cannot see the FN or even the RBM [the Rassemblement Bleu Marine, a broader “front” organisation] transforming into a classic centre-right party in the short term. Even if many neo-fascist groups criticise the National Front as too moderate, as “Zionist”, or as “pro-American”, those neo-fascist groups still have many friends and allies within the National Front.

The FN does not control any trade union at the national level or even any significant fraction in a trade union, even if it has trade unionists in its ranks, which it prefers to organise in external networks rather than as fractions within the unions, probably for lack of effective organisers… It plays no role in strikes or struggles for better living conditions in low-income suburbs. It is not in a position – for the moment – to control entire areas of the territory such as Social Democratic or Communist Parties have done in their history, or as the Nazis did in the 1930s before taking power.

We must of course be concerned about its growing electoral and ideological influence (for example, its electoral results have encouraged the “Republican” right to adopt part of its programme on immigration, “insecurity” and Islam; the Socialist Party government even took up one of its measures, selective revocation of nationality, after the attacks of 13 November 2015 [and then dropped it]).

In 1972, the FN had about 2,000 supporters, but ten years later (1982 and 1983) fewer than 250. Its influence began to increase in 1984 thanks to the national television channels and the “socialist” president Mitterrand, who cynically hoping that the FN would undermine the mainstream right helped Jean-Marie Le Pen after the leader of the National Front had complained that national radio and TV …read more

Source:: Israpundit

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