PARIS: 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 fueled 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.”

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 furor 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 “dediabolization” (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.
 

LONDON: UK Labour leader Keir Starmer is an ex-human rights lawyer and public prosecutor who will have to focus his relentless work ethic and methodical mind to fixing the country.

If exit polls are confirmed, at 61, Starmer will be the oldest person to become British prime minister in almost half a century — and comes just nine years since he was first elected to parliament.

The married father-of-two is unlike most modern politicians: he had a long and distinguished career before becoming an MP and his views are rooted in pragmatism rather than ideology.

“We must return politics to service,” Starmer said repeatedly during the campaign, promising to put “country first, party second” following 14 chaotic years of Conservative rule under five different prime ministers.

That mantra chimes with supporters’ lauding of him as a managerial safe pair of hands who will approach life in Downing Street the same way he did his legal career: seriously and forensically.

Detractors, though, label him an uninspiring opportunist who regularly shifts position on an issue and who has failed to spell out a clear and defining vision for the country.

Football-mad Starmer, a devoted Arsenal fan, has struggled to shed his public image as buttoned-up and boring and only recently started to appear more at ease in the public spotlight.

Supporters admit that he fails to ooze the charisma of more flashy predecessors like Boris Johnson, but say that therein lies his appeal: a reassuring and strait-laced presence following the turbulent, self-serving years of Tory rule.

With his grey quiff and black-rimmed glasses — Starmer, named after Labour’s founding father Keir Hardie — is also the center-left party’s most working-class leader in decades.

“My dad was a toolmaker, my mum was a nurse,” he tells voters often, countering depictions by opponents that he is the epitome of a smug, liberal, London elite.

Starmer’s purging of left-wingers from his party highlights a ruthless side that has propelled him to Britain’s highest political office, but he is said to be funny in private and loyal to his friends.

He has pledged to maintain his habit of not working after 6:00 p.m. on a Friday to spend time with his wife Victoria, who works as an occupational therapist in the National Health Service, and their two teenage children, who he does not name in public.

“There’s something extraordinary in him still being quite normal,” Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin wrote in the Guardian.

Born on September 2, 1962, Keir Rodney Starmer was raised in a cramped, pebbledashed semi-detached house on the outskirts of London by a seriously ill mother and an emotionally distant father.

He had three siblings, one of whom had learning difficulties. His parents were animal lovers who rescued donkeys.

A talented musician, Starmer had violin lessons at school with Norman Cook, the former Housemartins bassist who became DJ Fatboy Slim.

After legal studies at the universities of Leeds and Oxford, Starmer turned his attention to leftist causes, defending trade unions, anti-McDonald’s activists and death row inmates abroad.

He is friends with human rights lawyer Amal Clooney from their time together at the same legal practice and once recounted a boozy lunch he had with her and her Hollywood actor husband George.

In 2003, he began moving toward the establishment, shocking colleagues and friends, first with a job ensuring police in Northern Ireland complied with human rights legislation.

Five years later, he was appointed director of public prosecutions (DPP) for England and Wales when Labour’s Gordon Brown was prime minister.

Between 2008 and 2013, he oversaw the prosecution of MPs for abusing their expenses, journalists for phone-hacking, and young rioters involved in unrest across England.

He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, but rarely uses the prefix “Sir,” and in 2015 was elected as a member of parliament, representing a seat in left-leaning north London.

Just weeks before he was elected, his mother died of a rare disease of the joints that had left her unable to walk for many years.

Just a year after becoming an MP, Starmer joined a rebellion by Labour lawmakers over radical left-winger Jeremy Corbyn’s perceived lack of leadership during the EU referendum campaign.

It failed, and later that year he rejoined the top team as Labour’s Brexit spokesman, where he remained until succeeding Corbyn after he took the party to its worst defeat since 1935 in the last election five years ago.

Starmer moved the party back to the more electable center ground, purging Corbyn and rooting out anti-Semitism.

Dominic Grieve, who as Conservative attorney-general worked closely with Starmer as DPP, said he “inspires loyalty because he comes across as being so transparently decent and rational.”

“These are quite important features even if you disagree with a policy. And he comes across as man of moderation,” he told The Times.

Nevertheless, the left accuses him of betrayal for dropping a number of pledges he made during his successful leadership campaign, including the scrapping of university tuition fees.

But his successful strategic repositioning of Labour is indicative of a constant throughout his life: a drive to succeed.

“If you’re born without privilege, you don’t have time for messing around,” Starmer once said.

“You don’t walk around problems without fixing them, and you don’t surrender to the instincts of organizations that won’t face up to change.”