Benoit Hamon, a left-wing politician, who was elected Sunday be the candidate of the Socialist Party in the upcoming presidential election in April and May, was reportedly endorsed by the founders of anti-Zionist and anti-Semitivc party.

Hamon won the Socialist primaries with 59 percent of the votes against former Prime Minister Manuel alls who got 41 percent. Valls, a friend of the Jewish community and of Israel, immediately conceded defeat in the face of the result that appeared to sanction President Hollande’s policies. .

49-year-old former Junior Minister and, briefly, Education Minister, Hamon has seduced his leftist electorate with a promise of a “universal salary” of 750 euros to each citizen, regardless of his or her income or employment status.

He also preaches for increasing taxes for the rich, increasing taxes on polluting factories and legalizing cannabis.

He has called for the Socialist Party to support Palestinian causes to increase its appeal to Muslim voters.

Recently, Hamon tried to re-equilibrate to some extent his Israel-Palestine positions, saying that Israel must be integrated into the region. While supporting the anti-settlement UNSC resolution 2334, Hamon told the French TV station BFM that, “I consider that Europe has an historic responsibility to integrate Israel into a non-hostile framework... Today, this environment is hostile, and it will stay so as long as Palestine is not a state.”

Ahead of Sunday’s ballott, anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala and the extreme-right author Alain Soral — who founded the Anti-Zionist Party and have multiple convictions for Holocaust denial and inciting racial hatred against Jews, endorsed Hamon publicly. Hamon disavowed Soral and Dieudonne.

Soral wrote on his website that voting for Hamon was necessary to “knock Valls out of the race” because he is “a candidate who swore allegiance to the CRIF (the umbrella representative group of French Jews) and to Israel be it through policy, media exposure, judicial means or by deploying the police

Soral and Dieudonne cited Valls’ commitment to defending Jews against anti-Semitic violence. The National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism called on Hamon to react to the endorsement, prompting Hamon to publish a statement about it two days later. Hamon said he “opposes the deceit of the far-right and the conspiratorial and anti-Semitic streams” the two represent.

Manuel Valls is married to Anne Gravoin, a Jewish musician. In 2011 he said his marriage connected him “in an eternal way” to Israel and the Jewish people. He is also the only French Prime Minister who has said publicly that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism.

The National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism called on Hamon to react to the endorsement, prompting Hamon to publish a statement about it two days later. Hamon said he “opposes the deceit of the far-right and the conspiratorial and anti-Semitic streams” the two represent.

Valls has accused Hamon of “having an accommodating approach” to radical Islam. The two me have also clashed about Israel.

Since the terrorist attack on the Hyper Cacher supermarket in 2015, then-Prime inister Valls repeatedly declared how much his government was engaged in fighting extreme Islamist terrorism and how much his government was committed in the fight against anti-Semitism.

On the Israeli-Palestinian issue, contrary to Hamon and other socialist leaders, Valls was in no hurry to recognize a Palestinian state. He also didn’t express much enthusiasm over his government’s Paris Conference initiative, leaving the bulk of it in the hands of Foreign Minister Jean- Marc Ayrault.

Hamon will contend in the presidential elections in May against Francois Fillon, the conservative candidate of the rightist The Republicans party of former President Nicolas Sarkozy, the extreme-right National Front candidate Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron, a centrist independent and former minister in the Socialist-led government, and extreme-leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon.