The Observer (2022-01-09)

The Observer
44 09.01.22

 Emmanuel

Macron has

found himself

impossibly

squeezed.

Comment & Analysis

Once Europe’s liberal hope,

Macron is now prey to

France’s toxic populism

Racist contenders are

stirring Islamophobic

fears in their rush to

take the presidency

France is both beautiful

and brutally bleak. It is a country

studded with towns and rural

vistas that take your breath away,

but pockmarked with districts

of soulless, desolate concrete,

especially in the suburbs of its cities,

the banlieues. It’s as though French

planners and architects, in their

embrace of modernity, lost touch

with what it means to be human. It

has been an important trigger for

a toxic brew of Islamophobia and

wider cultural despair.

The political consequences,

now playing themselves out, will

ricochet around Europe and the

west. The presidential elections this

spring will be dominated by the

right, overtly mouthing implacable

opposition to immigration that even

Nigel Farage, who shares similar

sentiments, dares not use so openly

in Britain.

French socialism has collapsed

before the onslaught, while the

mainstream right candidate –

Valérie Pécresse – is compelled to

shore up her position by echoing the

same tropes.

The pace is being set by

presidential candidate and TV

celebrity Éric Zemmour , who burst

on to the scene last autumn. He

is a hard line Islamophobe who

argues that France is about to be

overrun by Islam, dignifi ed as “the

great replacement”. He is joined by

the longstanding representative

of the nativist right, Marine Le

Pen, who has been saying similar

things, echoing her father, for

years. Extraordinarily, together they

command just over 30% of opinion

poll support.

President Emmanuel Macron, seen

only fi ve years ago as representing

a new, self-confi dent majoritarian

blend of liberal social democracy

and liberal conservatism, is only

just ahead of them both, polling

around 24%. It is hardly a ringing

endorsement of his years in offi ce or

his aim to transcend left and right.

Macron may have governed

competently, but the abolition of the

wealth tax and an attempt to create

more consensual trade unions have

trashed whatever reputation he

had on the left, while on the right

he is seen to temporise too much

on immigration, asylum and Islam.

France is home to Europe’s biggest

Muslim population , but many

French people think Islamic values

are incompatible with core French

values – notably laïcité, born of the

1789 revolution, that religion should

be kept out of public and cultural

life, to which a fading Catholicism

presents no threat. Islam should

fade too.

French Muslims, for their part,

are disproportionately crowded

into the soulless concrete jungles

of the banlieues – marginalised,

segregated and isolated into what

the former prime minister Manuel

Valls called “ territorial, social and

ethical apartheid ”. Add to the mix

the fallout from the rise of militant

Islam in the Middle East and there is

the perfect recipe for a dark, vicious

circle of marginalisation that is

feeding Muslim extremism.

Macron has found himself

impossibly squeezed. No extra

powers to deport, to investigate,

to arrest, to attempt to assimilate

before this evident threat are enough

for the Islamophobes. Speeches

proclaiming faith in republican

western values seem beside the

point. And all against a wider sense

that France is in decline. It is potent

material for ideologues. Terrorism

has risen exponentially – the fastest

rise of any country in Europe. France

arrests four times more Islamic

suspects than any other country in

Europe, according to the Institute

of Economics and Peace. At the

last count, 47,000 out of a prison

population of 67,000 were Muslim.

The unemployment rate of 14%

among Muslims is almost twice the

national rate.

France’s political and media

culture exacerbates the problems.

Zemmour made his name on cheap

chat shows on the multiplicity of

tiny TV stations that screen current

affairs discussion as infl ammatory

infotainment; think a plethora of

GB News channels, only worse. An

electoral system organised around

presidentialism, with a fi rst and

second round of voting, encourages

a fi gure such as Zemmour to build

a personality cult, just as Macron

himself did in 2017. Macron created

En Marche. Zemmour has created

Reconquête. It is sheer racist

poison. Reconquête is so named

to “reconquer” a France at risk of

being “overwhelmed” by Muslims.

Zemmour celebrates the “great

leader” doctrine of history, a France

led by Napoleon, Joan of Arc and

de Gaulle. The country now needs

another great leader – not the weird

centrist Macron but passionate

Zemmour – to recover its lost

greatness, but based on racial and

cultural purity. Assimilation should

be complete, down to changing

forenames. Immigration should

cease. All welfare support and

budgetary aid for anything foreign

should stop. Free trade is anathema.

He would freeze relations with the

EU and pursue an independent

foreign policy. Only the disaster of

Brexit has checked the ambition for

a “Frexit”, once pushed by Marine

Le Pen.

Somehow, the politics

of tolerance and of mutual

respect have to surface, and

triumph, otherwise western

democracies, with their multiracial

populations, are in real trouble.

Macron’s compromised decency

and competence are of course

preferable to the politics of hate and

exclusion that can only lock France

• and Britain, if it were in any way
  repeated here – into a self-fulfi lling
  vortex.
  Aid to Europe, France and even
  Britain is coming unexpectedly
  from the unfolding, self-defeating
  debacle of Brexit, driven by parallel
  anti-immigrant instincts morphing
  into near racism. Without its grim
  warning, Zemmour and Le Pen’s
  grip on French politics, even if they
  lose to Macron or his probable
  rightwing challenger Pécresse,
  might undermine France as a pillar
  of the EU. As it is, the threat remains
  all too real.
  Equally, in post-Brexit Britain,
  opinion polls show some softening
  in anti-immigration views. We may
  live in rightwing times, but one
  of the right’s greatest triumphs –
  Brexit – may prove to be the trigger
  for a rebirth of a better, less hateful
  politics. Pray Macron, battered
  perhaps, survives.

Muslims are

crowded into

the soulless

concrete

jungles of the

banlieues

Will

Hutton

 Emmanuel

Macron has

found himself

impossibly ibly

squeesqueezed.

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