Marine Le Pen’s rhetoric is convincing French Jews to trust the Front National

A report in today’s Times suggests that French Jews are ready to discard their long-standing distrust for the Far Right and vote for the Front National. In January, Rachel Halliburton described how Marine Le Pen’s public condemnation of anti-Semitism had won her votes, as had her insistence that the party was the only one that defends secularity and democracy against Islamisation. A key part of her strategy has been to use the threat of radical Islam to court the sort of people that the far right has traditionally persecuted, including the gay community and the Jewish community.   That gay men now feel comfortable with the Front National is the result of a deliberate effort by its leader, Marine Le Pen, who has pursued a programme of detoxification (the French term is ‘de-diabolisation’) ever since she took control of the party in 2011. Her father, Jean Marie Le Pen, who led the FN from its founding in 1972 until Marine took over, described homosexuality as a ‘biological and social anomaly’.