Opinion
The Guardian Weekly 14 January 2022
46
F
rance 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 late last year. 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 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.
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 aff airs discussion as infl ammatory infotainment.
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 Le Pen.
Somehow, the politics of tolerance and of mutual
respect have to surface, and triumph, otherwise western
democracies 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
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 • Observer
Somehow the politics of
tolerance and of mutual
respect have to triumph,
or western democracies
are in real trouble
Will Hutton
is an Observer
columnist