'Black sheep' embarrass French far right before vote

Some RN members are an embarrassment to Le Pen and Bardella

Efforts by France's far right to cultivate an image of respectability before legislative elections have been hurt by a number of racist and other extremist incidents involving its candidates.

National Rally (RN) heavyweights Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella rushed to take a stance against what they both called "black sheep" in the party to limit the damage.

The RN is projected to emerge as the biggest party in the National Assembly, with Bardella tipped as France's next prime minister if it wins an absolute majority, or gets close enough.

But some RN candidates in Sunday's second round of voting have fuelled suspicions that xenophobic, racist and anti-Semitic attitudes in the party are perhaps not just a thing of the past.

On Wednesday, Bardella was confronted on live television with a sound recording of RN deputy Daniel Grenon saying that anybody of French-North African double nationality "has no place in high office".

Bardella quickly condemned the remark, calling it "abject", and announced the creation of a "conflict committee" within the party to deal with such cases.

"Anybody who says things that are not in line with my convictions will be excluded," he said.

Earlier Laurent Gnaedig, a parliamentary candidate for the RN, caused uproar by saying that remarks by discredited party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, who called Nazi gas chambers "a detail of history", were not actually anti-Semitic.

Gnaedig later presented his "sincere apologies" and said he had never meant to question the reality of "the horror of the Holocaust". He would accept any decision by the party's conflict commission, he added.

In November, Bardella himself got into hot water on the same topic when he said he did "not believe that Jean-Marie Le Pen was an anti-Semite". He later walked back the remark, saying Le Pen "obviously withdrew into a kind of anti-Semitism".

- 'Inadmissible' -

Another candidate, Ludivine Daoudi, dropped out of the race for France's parliament on Tuesday after a photo of her allegedly wearing a cap from Nazi Germany's air force, the Luftwaffe, sparked furore online.

And Brittany region candidate Francoise Billaud deleted her Facebook account after she was found to have shared a picture of the grave of French Vichy collaborationist leader Philippe Petain with the caption "Marshal of France".

RN deputy Roger Chudeau meanwhile got into trouble with the party leadership for saying that the 2014 appointment of Moroccan-born Najat Vallaud-Belkacem as the Socialist government's education minister had been "an error".

Marine Le Pen has over the past years moved to make the party a mainstream force and distance it from the legacy of Jean Marie Le Pen, her father and its co-founder, in a process widely dubbed "dediabolisation" (un-demonization).

"What really matters is how a political party reacts", she has said, adding that the party commission's would be "harsh" in dealing with such cases of extremism.

She added there was a distinction to be made between "inadmissible" statements for which sanctions were "highly likely", and cases of mere "clumsiness".

The latter category, she said, included an attempt by candidate Paule Veyre de Soras to defend her party against racism charges by saying that "I have a Jewish ophthalmologist and a Muslim dentist".

Le Pen said most candidates "are decent people who are in the running because the National Assembly needs to reflect France and not reflect Sciences Po or ENA", two elite universities.

The RN has acknowledged that President Emmanuel Macron's decision to call a snap election left little time to select candidates in the numbers needed to fill the seats it expects to win.

The far right has also noted that other parties have similar problems, citing the case of hard-left National Assembly candidate Raphael Arnault, who was found to be on a French police anti-extremist watchlist.

Arnault was suspected of terrorist sympathies and questioned after tweeting on October 7 that "the Palestinian resistance has launched an unprecedented attack on the colonialist state of Israel".

A recent poll by Harris Interactive projected the RN and its allies would win 190 to 220 seats in the National Assembly, the leftist coalition NFP 159 to 183 seats and Macron's Ensemble (Together) alliance 110 to 135.

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