The far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party and its allies have backed multiple candidates for the legislative elections who have made anti-Semitic, pro-Russian, anti-vax or anti-abortion remarks, contrary to statements by the party's leadership, which did not respond to Le Monde's requests for explanations.

Vichy nostalgia and anti-Semitic statements

For several weeks now, RN president Jordan Bardella has been posing as the enemy of an "atmospheric anti-Semitism," which he claims is fueled by the radical left party La France Insoumise (LFI). For her part, Marine Le Pen denounced – in reaction to the rape of a 12-year-old girl in the Paris suburb of Courbevoie which was coupled with anti-Semitic insults, according to the initial findings from the investigation – a "stigmatization of Jews for months by the far left."

Yet the RN has endorsed several candidates with a keen interest in the Vichy regime that collaborated with the Nazis in World War II. In the 1^st constituency of Côtes-d'Armor, Françoise Billaud, involved with the Front National (now the RN) since 1986, paid tribute on her Facebook page to Philippe Pétain, leader of the collaborationist regime, but also to Abbé Perrot, an emblematic local collaborationist figure. Frédéric Boccaletti, an incumbent MP who was re-nominated in the Var, in 1997 founded a far-right bookshop whose name, Anthinéa, refers to a book by the anti-Semitic writer Charles Maurras (1868-1952). In 2000, he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for "violence with weapons" while putting up posters, when he was a member of the political party of Bruno Mégret – a former leader, with Jean-Marie Le Pen, of the Front National. In Paris, the RN candidate in the 10^th constituency, Agnès Pageard, was nominated despite previous warnings about her use of anti-Semitic slogans. Nominated in Côte-d'Or, Sophie Dumont, a legislative advisor for the RN group in the Assemblée Nationale and a close associate of Marine Le Pen, has shared articles from an anti-Semitic media outlet, and referred in a since-deleted tweet to alleged Jewish funding of the far-right Reconquête! party, as revealed by the newspaper Libération.

On Wednesday, June 19, the RN withdrew its nomination for Joseph Martin, in the 1^st constituency of Morbihan. In 2018, he wrote on Twitter that "gas did justice to the victims of the Holocaust." He has since claimed that this was an allusion, in no way anti-Semitic, to the death of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. On the same day, Eric Ciotti, head of the right-wing Les Républicains (LR) party, announced that Louis-Joseph Pecher, a candidate in the alliance between the RN and LR and better known as Gannat, had had his nomination withdrawn after the discovery of "anti-Semitic, homophobic and foul-mouthed remarks" published on social media. Streetpress reported that his account (under a pseudonym), which was deleted this week, contained multiple highly violent, racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic comments. He responded, for example, to a tweet from former Socialist MP Julien Dray by writing: "Jew who speaks with a lying mouth."

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