Marine Le Pen holds a press conference at the EU Parliament | Epa

Marine Le Pen has a plan to court Jewish voters

New group will try to counter criticism of far-right National Front party.

PARIS — Marine Le Pen has set her sights on a novel potential group of backers as she tries to build support for a presidential bid next year: France's Jewish voters.

Her anti-EU National Front party has given arms-length blessing to the launch of a nonprofit group that aims to drum up support among France's 500,000-strong Jewish minority and counter criticism from mainstream religious groups.

Le Pen locked horns last year with the head of France's main Jewish umbrella group, the CRIF. Its president, Roger Cukierman, had warned that French Jews would leave the country en masse if the National Front ever came to power, the same response if Islamic religious law were ever imposed on the population.

That's the sort of criticism that the nonprofit group, whose name is to be announced within coming days, aims to counter, the group's founder told POLITICO.

"In France's Jewish community there are lots of people who disagree with the views of the CRIF and don't want to follow them like sheep," said Michel Thooris, a police union member who advised Le Pen on security matters during France's 2012 presidential election and remains a party member. "We want to give them an alternative voice."

The National Front, which has taken to targeting specific voter groups despite its public opposition to defining ethnic or religious minorities, won't be funding the group directly. It will be officially launched and named within coming days and will "not exert pressure" on Le Pen, added Thooris, who Le Monde reported was linked to Israeli far-right groups.

However, two senior National Front officials said they supported the initiative. Vice President Louis Aliot told Europe 1 Le Lab this week that it was important to offer an alternative narrative about his party to French Jews. 

"The idea is to fight the dictatorship and constant defamation of the CRIF against the National Front," Aliot said. "This collective will not make pronouncements on foreign policy or religious issues like the CRIF does. It's there to fight against people who try to smear the Front."

A complicated relationship

Whatever publicity the group manages to generate, it won't erase the National Front's complex and tortured past when it comes to France's Jewish community.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, who headed the party before Marine's takeover in 2011, gave the National Front a reputation for racism and anti-Semitism which has yet to be entirely scrubbed, despite his daughter's attempts to make a clean break with her father and his acolytes.

Last year, the elder Le Pen reignited controversy about the Front's anti-Semitic leanings when he repeated that the Nazi gas chambers were merely a "detail of history" — a comment that sparked a row with Marine, and resulted in him being officially kicked out of the party. Jean-Marie, who has repeatedly been tried and convicted on charges of inciting racial and anti-Semitic hatred, is also known as an apologist for France's wartime Vichy regime, which collaborated with Nazi occupiers in rounding up and deporting French Jews to concentration camps.

While retaining much of her father's basic policy mix, including calling for a "national preference" in distributing social housing and jobs, Marine Le Pen has sought to make a clean break with her father's racist and xenophobic legacy. She avoids attacking minorities, saying: “I defend all the French people in France, regardless of their origin or religion.”

But her strongly worded critiques of fundamentalist Islam have even won her a measure of support among French Jews, some of whom fear being targeted by Islamist terrorists.