A recent study published by the Foundation for Political Innovation has dealt a blow to the legitimacy of France's Front National, establishing a strong relationship between the NF and anti-Semitism in France, EurActiv (France) reports.
The study of anti-Semitism in French public opinion, published by the Foundation for Political Innovation (Fondapol) threatens to undermine attempts by the Front National to enter the French political mainstream. Anti-Semitism has little foothold in French society as a whole, but the study found a strong undercurrent of anti-Semitic feeling among the FN electorate.
"We can say that French society as a whole is relatively unaffected by anti-Semitic prejudice, with four major areas of exception: the Front National electorate, French Muslims, supporters of the Left Front and videos on the sites YouTube and Dailymotion, where anti-Semitism is more visible than in other media," the director of Fondapol, Dominique Reynié, explained.
A sample of 1005 French citizens over the age of 16, and a further 575 people born into Muslim families, were surveyed for the study by the organisation IFOP.
The study was based on the observation that anti-Semitism accounts for over half the acts of racially motivated violence in France, while people of Jewish descent make up only around 1% of the French population. The authors arrived at the opposite conclusion to a 2004 study carried out by Jean-Christophe Rufin, which identified an inverse correlation between the extreme right and anti-Semitic feeling.
While 84% of those questioned thought that a French Jew was just as French as any other French citizen, the figure is 61% among FN supporters, and 91% among French Muslims. 53% of Front National voters would not be happy to vote for a Jewish President, compared to 21% of the overall population, and 22% would actively avoid having Jewish neighbours, compared to 6% of all French citizens.