The leading far-left party in France has refused to join a bi-partisan march against antisemitism in Paris on Sunday amid accusations of siding with the “fifth column” of Islamists in the country.
La France Insoumise (LFI), the far-left parliamentary party founded by socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is often compared to Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, announced that it will not join a cross-party organised demonstration against antisemitism called by President of the Senate Gérard Larcher of the centre-right Les Républicains and President of the National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet of President Macron’s neo-liberal Rennaisance party.
The leftist party justified its decision to not attend the protest because of the inclusion of the right-wing populist National Rally (RN), which they accused of racism and having a history of “collaboration with Nazism”, Le Figaro reports.
This was likely referencing comments questioning the Holocaust made in the 1980s by former National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was expelled from the party by his daughter Marine Le Pen over his controversial remarks, such as minimizing Nazi gas chambers as merely a “detail” of history and expressing doubt about six million Jews being killed during the Holocaust.
However, current RN party president Jordan Bardella said that while he believes that Jean-Marie Le Pen was not antisemitic, he claimed that the present right-wing “political movement is perfectly irreproachable”.
“The political break between Marine Le Pen and Jean-Marie Le Pen took place precisely on the question of anti-Semitism, even going so far as to exclude her own father from the National Front,” he added.
Bardella went on to accuse the LFI of representing a new form of antisemitism that is “tinged with the green of Islamism and the red of cultural leftism”.
He accused the leftist party of being “collaborators of an ideology which has constituted itself as a fifth column in our society” and Jean-Luc Mélenchon of being the “spokesman for Hamas in France”.
In its statement refusing to join the demonstration against antisemitism in Paris, the LFI renewed its call “ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas, while also calling for “the release of the hostages”.
The call for a bi-partisan protest comes amid rising antisemitic acts throughout France, with 1,040 antisemitic incidents being recorded since the October 7th Hamas terror attacks.
Jewish areas of Paris have also seen vandals stencil the Stars of David symbols on buildings in a grim reminder of the Nazi era.