In the 11th arrondissement of Paris, a thick crowd surrounded anti-racist activist Albert Herszkowicz on the evening of Thursday, November 9. Wrapped in their tricolor scarves, several MPs from La France Insoumise (LFI) joined several hundred others to listen to the commemoration of the 85th anniversary of the victims of the 1938 Nazi-led Kristallnacht. At the mic, Herszkowicz – president of Memorial 98, the association organizing the event – expressed his sarcastic "delight" at the evening's success: He usually struggles to gather even 50 people. "We're not completely naive, and we know that the timing of the event has something to do with the attendance ," he continued, mainly directing his comment at the LFI members.
A few hours earlier, the leading left-wing party – which has increasingly been the subject of controversy since the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7 and the subsequent Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip – had announced its intention to attend this gathering in order to "reaffirm the rejection of anti-Semitism, racism and fascism." The move is meant to make up for their conspicuous absence from the march against anti-Semitism planned on Sunday, November 12, by President of the Assemblée Nationale Yaël Braun-Pivet and President of the Sénat Gérard Larcher. The march will be attended by the other left-wing parties: The Socialist Party, Europe Ecologie-Les Verts and the Communist Party.
"It's important to be there because there's a rise in anti-Semitism in France," asserted LFI MP Aurélie Trouvé, flanked by other members of the party's leadership, such as MPs Clémence Guetté and Sarah Legrain, as well as MEP Manon Aubry.
To justify its decision to boycott the November 12 march, LFI had deemed it "impracticable" to march "alongside a Nazi party," after Rassemblement National (RN, far-right) leaders Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella had rallied to the call to march. While this decision was supposedly discussed at a group meeting at the Assemblée Nationale, LFI founder Jean-Luc Mélenchon had already directly set the tone, describing the march as being driven by a "pretext of anti-Semitism." "The friends of unconditional support for the massacre have their day," he wrote, in reference to the bombings in Gaza, sparking further outcry.
On Thursday evening, Robert Hirsch, of the Network of Actions against Anti-Semitism and All Racisms (RAAR), criticized Mélenchon's remarks, deeming it "unacceptable" to cast participants in this march as "accomplices to the massacre," and therefore in the war waged by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "It is first and foremost Jews who will be going," said Hirsch, while warning the handful of LFI representatives present. "It's not enough to show up tonight," he judged, inviting them "to propose something else."
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