In the run up to the electoral campaign for the snap parliamentary elections in France, a number of candidates for the far-right Rassemblement National party (RN) – the former Front National – expressed blatantly anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, racist, homophobic and sexist comments, but nevertheless succeeded in garnering high scores in first-round voting held on Sunday.
These results confirm both the polarisation of the elections around the figure of the RN chairman, Jordan Bardella, and also the tolerance, and even support, among a large section of the French population for the most despicable ideas.
The most significant example is that of the candidature of Louis-Joseph Pecher in a constituency in the north-east Meurthe-et-Moselle département (county). Pecher is the son of Pascal Gannat – a veteran figure of the Front National, who was once chief of staff to FN founder Jean-Marie Le Pen and a senior party activist in north-west France. Le Pen’s daughter Marine, who succeeded her father as head of the party in 2011, made Gannat a member of its political bureau.
After Emmanuel Macron dissolved parliament on June 7th, prompting the elections, Pecher was nominated as a joint candidate for the RN and the conservative Les Républicains (LR) party (an alliance decided by LR chairman Éric Ciotti and which is opposed by many among the party’s faithful). But on June 19th, both Ciotti and the RN announced that they had withdrew their support for Pecher after discovering the nature of some of his posts on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter).
The posts (see examples below), in which he obscenely insulted Jews, women and homosexuals, were revealed by the French investigative website StreetPress. They were published on an anonymous account on X which Pecher finally admitted was his own. The comments included “Jew who talks, mouth that lies, said Voltaire”, in response to a post by Jewish politician Julien Dray on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “With the influx that continues of degenerate and racist migrants nothing’s likely to get better,” and “Stupid Islam always plays into the hands of the USA, the Jews and the Mossad” read two others.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
He took aim at the rotund conservative head of the Senate, Gérard Larcher. Replying to a post on X by the latter, Pecher wrote: “The useless pig fattened at our expense should have paid the price of a battue a long time ago.” Replying to a post also on X by the conservative outgoing culture minister Rachida Dati, on the subject of the parliamentary elections, he wrote: “You led your career on all fours and bawling. Keep your advice to yourself.”
But in one he also attacked the RN, which he said was “a party led by second-raters and the easy living who have renounced everything that presided over the FN”.
Even though he was finally disowned by the RN and its conservative allies, it was, by law, too late for that to be officially recorded at the prefecture, and so Pecher remains officially a candidate for the FN. Despite numerous other candidates who have published offensive posts on social media, Pecher is one of the very rare candidates to have been publicly distanced by the far-right party. But that has had little effect on the voters in the constituency he is standing in. In the first round last Sunday, turnout there was 67.6%, and he garnered 30.45% of votes cast, sending him into the second and final round next weekend in a duel with the socialist candidate.
Pechet’s score was three percentage points more than the RN achieved in the last parliamentary elections in 2022. While that is well below the national average increase in votes cast for the RN (plus 15%), he can count on collecting a significant number of votes from another far-right candidate who has not qualified for the second round. That is Pierre-Nicolas Nups, who stood for the Parti de France, whose activists had stuck up posters in the area showing a blue-eyed and blonde-haired boy, to a backdrop of the countryside, behind the slogan “Give a future to white children”. Nups attracted a 10.06% share of the vote, much of which, if not all, could now go to Pechet.
Meanwhile, in a constituency in the south-west Pyrénées-Atlantiques département bordering Spain, which includes the French Basque region, the RN candidate Monique Becker garnered 31.14% of the vote on Sunday, almost doubling the far-right party’s score in 2022 (16.44%). The constituency includes a part of the town of Pau, the fiefdom of centre-right MoDem party leader François Bayrou, whose close ally and MoDem party candidate Jean-Paul Mattei came in behind Becker.
Becker, a retired teacher, had caused recent controversy over her posts on Facebook expressing support for the OAS, the far-right French paramilitary terrorist organisation of the early 1960s which led a murderous campaign of shootings and bombings – estimated to have claimed up to 2,400 lives –in opposition to the Algerian independence movement. Despite the strong local history of the constituency as a land of refuge for Republican refugees during and after the Spanish civil War, her posts also included approval of the late Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco. Yet last Sunday she came in first position, ahead of second-placed Mattei.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
The Brittany region of north-west France had for long remained immune to the growing success of the far-right over recent years elsewhere in the country. In a constituency centred on the town of Saint-Brieuc, in the Côtes d'Armor département which lies in the northern tip of the region, RN candidate Françoise Billaud went to ground a few days before last Sunday’s elections, closing her Facebook account and cancelling planned interviews with the local press, following revelations of her social media posts that contained racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and transphobic comments. But Billaud nevertheless won a 25.75% share of the vote on June 30th, doubling the 12.4% score she obtained in the same constituency in 2022.
In a neighbouring constituency, it was a similar story for her far-right colleague Noël Lude, whose posts on X include a cartoon of a man dressed in Islamic dress proclaiming that the family social benefits office (CAF) is the third holy site of Islam, and another of two men lying in separate hospital beds, one dark-skinned and the other white, with the latter asking a nurse to keep the light on because he’s afraid of “the black”. On Sunday, Lude also doubled his 2022 score, garnering a 34.30% share of votes cast, coming in ahead of the leftwing NFP alliance candidate.
In the Breton département of Finistère, RN candidates Tony Bihouée, Renée Thomaïdis and Christian Perez all reached scores of between 25%-30% of the vote in their constituencies on Sunday, despite campaigns marked by questionable social media posts. In the case of Bihouée, these included a rant prompted by incidents of pupil disturbances in schools during homages to teacher Samuel Paty, murdered and beheaded by an Islamic extremist, in which he criticised the parents of those concerned: “Easy to spread thighs to lay scumbags, harder to look after them!” Bihouée removed the posts after he was questioned about them by Mediapart.
In the neighbouring Morbihan département, RN candidate Joseph Martin garnered 25.37% of the vote in his constituency, which includes the town of Vannes, more than double the score of his predecessor in 2022 (at 11.58%). Martin was last month excluded from the party over the revelation by French daily Libération that he had in 2018 tweeted, “Gas has rendered justice to the victims of the Shoa”. The RN reinstated Martin after he denied any anti-Semitic intent in his comment, claiming that it referred to the then recent death of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, which Martin said he thought had been caused by a gas leak.
In a neighbouring constituency, RN candidate Gregory Renard on Sunday scored 31.31% of votes cast (compared with 16.12% for the RN candidate in 2022). Renard has notably published numerous offensive posts on social media. These include his repeated use of the word “bogmoule” – an obvious reference to the word “bougnoule”, a racist term designating someone of Arab origin – and which is invented to avoid censorship by the platform operators. Others contain racist visual posts of migrants and Muslims.
First elected in 2022, Roger Chudeau is a Member of Parliament for the RN in one of the three constituencies of the Loir-et-Cher département in north-central France. Seeking re-election, he narrowly missed outright victory in his bid in the first round on Sunday, when he garnered a 49.72% share of the vote (his first-round score in 2022 was 24.04%). A former conservative party member and advisor to prime minister François Fillon, Chudeau joined the RN in 2021.
The 74-year-old former education ministry inspector and advisor, caused outcry when, last Thursday, speaking on BFMTV, he cited the case of former socialist education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem who, because of her dual French-Moroccan nationality, he said should not have been given the post. Chudeau’s remarks followed those of RN chairman Jordan Bardella who announced that if the RN formed a government, dual nationals would be refused certain posts in France’s administration. “I think it was an error, and that it was not a good thing for the [French] republic,” he said of Vallaud-Belkacem’s appointment as minister under the presidency of François Hollande. “Ministerial posts must be held by the Franco-French, full stop,” he insisted, adding: “There is a problem of dual loyalty at a given moment.”
Further west, in Burgundy, in a constituency close to Dijon in the Côte-d’Or département, RN candidate René Lioret obtained a 45.31% share of the vote on Sunday, close to twice the 23.7% he obtained in 2022 when he came second to the outgoing centre-right MP Didier Paris. Lioret’s contributions on social media include comments about a video of several youths assaulting another who is handicapped. “African lowlifes, it’s always three or four against one,” he wrote, “that’s how we recognise them!”. In another post on Twitter he reacted to images supposedly showing the gruesome killing of a camel by individuals in Africa. “No doubt is possible,” he wrote, “we are up against barbarians. If the EU counts upon ‘That’ to re-populate the Old Continent…”
In a neighbouring constituency to that of Lioret’s, his far-right colleague Sophie Dumont, who notably spread claims that Ukraine was “the biggest supplier of children for paedophile networks” is also on course for possible election next weekend after gaining 42.24% of votes cast.
In Paris – as in a number of other cities and large towns in the country – the RN has much more difficulty in gaining support than in rural and peri-urban areas. One of its candidates in the capital last Sunday was Agnès Pageard, who is openly anti-Semitic (Libération revealed how she has purported that a number of Jewish personalities are paedophiles) and anti-abortion (“Abortion kills much more than Covid,” she once said). A candidate for the far-right in a constituency in the south of the capital, and which incorporates parts of the 13th and 14th arrondissements, she nevertheless almost doubled the RN score of 5.51% in 2022 by garnering 11.39% on Sunday.
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- The two articles upon which this report is based, originally published in French, can be found here and here.
English version by Graham Tearse.