Head of French Jews Pleased with Election of Jacques Chirac

The head of the French Jewish community expressed satisfaction over this week’s election of Jacques Chirac as president of France’s Fifth Republic.

Conservative Chirac, 63, was chosen by 52.7 percent of the voters in Sunday’s second round of national elections. His opponent, Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin, won 47.3 percent of the votes.

In spite of the heated campaign, close to 20 percent of the French electorate Abstained, an unusually high number for a presidential election, in France.

Chirac, currently the mayor of Paris, will be inaugurated in the coming days for his seven-year term as president. He replaces outgoing Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, who will step down after 14 years in office.

For Jean Kahn, the president of CRIF, the body representing French Jewry’s secular organizations, Chirac’s election came as a relief.

“Jacques Chirac has been leading for many years the struggle against all forms of intolerance,” said Kahn, who also serves as president of the European Jewish Congress.

Kahn, speaking about the election results in an interview, noted that Chirac and France’s Jewish community shared at least one point in common: a distaste for Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the extreme right-wing National Front.

Le Pen, who has been known to make anti-Semitic statements and campaigned on an anti-immigrant platform, received a surprising 15 percent of the vote last month in the first round of the presidential elections.

“Chirac has always stated his opposition to any alliance with Le Pen’s National Front,” Kahn said. “I hope he will stick to this position.”

Although Le Pen has claimed that he is not anti-Semitic, he has made frequent statements in the past denying that the Holocaust took place.

Last week, a Moroccan was deliberately drowned in the Seine by a group of skinheads during a rally of Le Pen’s National Front.

After the first round of elections in late April, Le Pen declared that “Chirac it worse than Jospin,” though he later refused to give his backing to Jospin.

“Le Pen has some reasons to say that Chirac is ten times worse than Jospin,” said Kahn, who noted that Chirac is against the idea of proportional elections to the French National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament. Members of the Assembly are currently chosen in direct elections, with a runoff held if no candidate wins a majority.

Proportional elections, which are favored by Jospin, would have meant the presence in the next Assembly of over 100 representatives of the National Front,” out of 600 parliamentarians, Kahn said.

“This would have been a catastrophe, because it would have permanently installed on the french political scene a party calling for the exclusion of certain categories of people.

“Had Jospin been elected, I would have feared a development of the National Front,” Kahn said. “This risk is minor now with Chirac as president. It is one more reason to rejoice for the election of someone we know well and who will stand in the way of the National Front.”

“This was undoubtedly one of the reasons why certain Jews didn’t vote for Jospin,” Kahn said.