“For many French citizens of Jewish faith, our party is a shield against Islamist ideology.” If we believe Rassemblement National (RN) president Jordan Bardella, speaking shortly after the October 7 attacks, his party has turned from an enemy of France’s Jews, to an ally. Its claimed stance against antisemitism today takes the form of “unconditionally” supporting Israel’s war on Hamas — and condemning the Left’s failure to do the same. Interviewed on Sunday, Bardella insisted that the “antisemitism” label doesn’t fit — noting that perennial candidate Marine Le Pen distanced herself from her father Jean-Marie over this exact issue. Pushed to comment on the party’s historic founder, Bardella replied that he “does not believe Jean-Marie Le Pen was antisemitic.”

The verb tense was odd: convicted Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen is still alive. But in working to “mainstream” its brand, the RN must retouch its own past. In her 2017 memoir, Marine Le Pen insists her father did “not mean to hurt anyone” when he dismissed the gas chambers as a “detail of history”; twenty-eight-year-old Bardella deflects this controversy by saying he is “too young” to have witnessed it. But not only the RN is shifting the goalposts. Take Marion Maréchal. On Tuesday she insisted that if her grandfather Jean-Marie Le Pen “was more listened to on immigration and Islamization forty years ago, there would certainly be less antisemitism today.”

Maréchal, a leader of Éric Zemmour’s Reconquête party, is heading a rival campaign to Bardella’s RN list for June’s European elections. But both make a similar claim about where antisemitism comes from: the Left, especially Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise, has cozied up to Islamists in the interests of winning the “Muslim vote,” while those who defend national identity and support Benjamin Netanyahu are the real friends of Jews. This Sunday, both far-right parties will join a march against antisemitism in Paris; France Insoumise will be absent, insisting that it refuses to march alongside “Nazis” or even that the march is a “rendez-vous for friends of unconditional support for the [Israeli] massacre” in Gaza.