Paris, February 19, 2024. In the vast apartment in the 8th arrondissement, not far from the Elysée Palace, Marine Le Pen's heels echoed on the Hungarian herringbone wooden floor. Arno Klarsfeld, the son of Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, the couple famous for hunting down Nazi criminals to bring them to justice, ushered the leader of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) into his living room. He introduced her to his two cats. Le Pen, who breeds cats, did not need to fake her joy at meeting Heaven and Malka.
The lawyer told her the RN needs a big speech, like Jacques Chirac's 1995 speech on the Vél'd'Hiv round-up of Jews in 1942, about protecting "the Jews of France." Le Pen nodded in agreement. Moments later, she was in Serge Klarsfeld's office, in front of reconstructed plans of the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps and a lifetime of work on the archives and the names of Holocaust victims. Here again, as she met the senior Klarsfeld, it was the love of animals that brought them together: A long-haired Chihuahua and a little Romanian dog made their appearance.
Four months later, President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the Assemblée Nationale and the far-right party finds itself on the doorstep of power. In the eyes of Le Pen, the Klarsfeld family is an immense symbol. An anointment from such a respected figure among French Jews could shatter one of the last obstacles between the RN and its accession to power.
On June 16, two weeks from the first round of the legislative elections, Serge Klarsfeld declared in an interview with the news channel LCI that in the event of a duel between the left-wing alliance and the RN, between "an anti-Semitic party and a pro-Jewish party, I would vote for a pro-Jewish party." The former Front National, cofounded by a former Waffen SS member, pro-Jewish? Embarrassment, sadness and consternation spread throughout the organizations of Holocaust survivors, among whom there is infinite respect for the legacy of the Klarsfeld couple.
'A respectable party'
The RN was delighted. Eric Ciotti, the head of the right-wing Les Républicains party who has just rallied to Le Pen, was quick to hail the setback for what he calls the "alliance of the far lefts."
It was the RN that had proposed the February meeting. "We'd come a long way, each in opposite directions. Now, we agree on the fact that there have been two Frances, a France that resisted, with the Church and the population, not responsible for the deportation of the Jews," embellished the architect of this rapprochement, the RN mayor of Perpignan, Louis Aliot, born of an Algerian-Jewish mother.
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