Marine Le Pen stirs up storm with announcement she will take part in march against anti-Semitism

(Patria) - French far-right leader Marine Le Pen has sparked a wave of criticism over her plans to attend a weekend march protesting rising anti-Semitism in France.

Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, numerous political parties and citizens will attend Sunday's march. Le Pen said she and her National Rally party would also be there, in what some see as an attempt to exploit the war between Israel and Hamas to make herself more palatable to mainstream voters, AP reports.

The party's founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, her father, has been convicted multiple times for anti-Semitic hate speech and has downplayed the scale of the Holocaust.

The daughter, runner-up in the last two presidential elections and likely the main candidate in 2027, has worked to clean up the party's image, expelling her father and changing its name from the National Front to the National Rally.

The current party president, Jordan Bardella, said this week that he does not think Jean-Marie Le Pen is an anti-Semite, a remark that revived the link between the past and the present.

Government spokesman Olivier Veran said on Wednesday that Marine Le Pen's party has "no place" at what is being called a "great civic march." However, he noted that the march is public and that "everyone is free to participate or not according to their conscience."

The march was called by the leaders of the Senate and the lower house of parliament, the National Assembly, amid an alarming rise in anti-Jewish acts in France since the start of Israel's war against Hamas.

By Wednesday, officials had counted 1,159 anti-Semitic acts since October 7, nearly three times the total of all acts against French Jews in 2022, according to the Interior Ministry. France has the largest Jewish population in Europe.

"Of course I will participate. Bardella will be there. All our elected officials will be there and I call on all our members, all our voters to come," Le Pen said on RTL radio.

The Jewish umbrella group known as CRIF is among those saying Le Pen is not welcome. President of the National Assembly Yael Braun-Pivet, who called for the march with the Senate president, said on Wednesday that no political party was invited, but that she would not march "next to" Le Pen.

President Emmanuel Macron, addressing the far right without naming anyone, said in a speech on Wednesday that "some pretend to support our Jewish compatriots by confusing the rejection of Muslims with support for Jews."