Far-right candidate bedeviled by France’s Nazi history
PARIS — The horrors of the World War II Nazi death camps moved front and centre in France’s presidential campaign on Friday, nine days before the election, reawakening the anti-Semitic stigma that has clung to the party of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen and that she has spent more than six years trying to erase.
Transforming the National Front into a voter-friendly party without compromising its anti-system essence — which is her banner — has been perhaps her toughest battle preparing for her dream job as chief of state.
Her efforts, that included showing her father, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, the door in 2015, took a hit after remarks questioning the Holocaust allegedly made in 2000 by the man chosen to temporarily replace her as party chief surfaced in the French press. The reports threatened to undo her work nudging the National Front from pariah status to respectability.
Le Pen — who once called Nazi death camps the “height of barbary” — firmly denied that anyone in the party leadership would cast doubt on the extermination of six million Jews and others, some deported from France.