French hard-right leader accuses opponents of 'total war' after claims of antisemitism
National Rally President Jordan Bardella says he will sue for libel over comments he is accused of making as a young activist.
French hard-right leader accuses opponents of 'total war' after claims of antisemitism
Jordan Bardella, the president of France’s hard-right National Rally (RN), said he would bring a libel case after a report published antisemitic remarks that it claimed he had made as a young activist.
The Mediapart website said its findings came after "several months" of investigation into "dozens of written conversations" Bardella allegedly took part in during 2013.
With seven months remaining before France’s presidential election, Bardella denounced "the beginnings of a total war" meant to destabilise his party, while RN presidential candidate Marine Le Pen said she had complete confidence in him.
The alleged comments contained overtly antisemitic tropes, and Bardella said they were designed to ruin his political future.
Mediapart did not provide screen-grabs of any of the alleged remarks. It said it had "independently authenticated" the conversations, which came from "a bigger documentary base corroborated by witness statements".
But Bardella, 31 – who would likely become prime minister if Le Pen wins the presidential election – said the accusations were invented to derail the RN’s increasingly confident push for power.
"Everything is going to be done to destabilise the campaign," he told CNews television on Monday night. "Either Mediapart is running this operation itself, or it is being manipulated by interested parties.
"Of course I have instructed my lawyer to sue for libel."
Le Pen said the alleged remarks "seem so weird that they can only be a forgery – one of those dirty tricks for which Mediapart appears to hold the secret".
Among the statements Mediapart says Bardella made when he was 17 or 18 are: "All the banks are owned by Jews"; "The Jew has to dominate other people, crush them and rob them"; and "What they want is a new world order dominated by Israel, with of course Jerusalem as its capital."
Mediapart is an openly leftwing website that has uncovered numerous scandals over the years, although its targets have included politicians from across the spectrum.
The French hard right is performing better than ever in pre-election polls, and the latest this week, from Toluna-Harris, showed Le Pen as a clear winner over whichever rival she faces in the decisive second round in May.
The survey said Le Pen would win 35-36% in the multi-candidate first round. Her likely opponent in the head-to-head runoff would be Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the radical left, whom she would defeat with 69% of the vote.
But in a sharp warning to the political establishment, the poll also showed she would comfortably beat the most popular centrist candidate, Edouard Philippe, by 57%.
On Sunday, the RN gained another lift when partial election results for the upper house of parliament, the Senate, gave it enough seats for the first time to establish an official group.
Under Marine Le Pen, daughter of the party’s historic founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, the RN has worked hard to distance itself from the French far right’s antisemitic origins.
Last year Bardella became the first senior party figure invited to Israel, where he attended a conference on antisemitism.
Today the party sees militant Islam as a leading threat – a view it shares with many Jews. The RN even describes itself as a "shield for the Jewish community".
The alleged Bardella comments recall a strand of far-right thinking that Mediapart says has never been eliminated, only concealed within the party’s new image.
Leftwing politicians urged Bardella to step down, and the head of the Jewish umbrella group Crif, Yonathan Arfi, said the alleged comments "were an illustration of the limits of the RN's clean-up act".
But RN deputy Jean-Philippe Tanguy said the allegations came from disgruntled former party members who were expelled years ago because of their antisemitic views.
"From what I know, it is the antisemitic rabble that were so bravely purged by Marine Le Pen. At the start of the 2010s, they were numerous and well-organised, but they were defeated. These people have always had it in for us."