The scapegoating of immigrants (those of Algerian origin in particular) has become so mainstream in French society that it’s almost like the government can’t function without indulging in it, writes Daniel Lindley. [GETTY]
France’s political crisis has been given a reprieve this week after Francois Bayrou’s government survived a no-confidence vote, allowing it to pass a budget without holding a vote in parliament. This came after budget talks had broken down when Bayrou made comments lamenting that France was being ‘flooded’ with immigrants, which gave the Socialist Party cold feet about entering into some kind of coalition deal with him. The Socialists still submitted their own no-confidence motion against his government for these comments (knowing the National Front would oppose it so it wouldn’t pass), leaving them on very shaky ground.
The Socialists are currently part of the New Popular Front electoral coalition, which came first in the last French Parliamentary election but in contravention to all precedent, were not permitted a chance to build a governing coalition by President Macron. If Bayrou is to form any kind of stable government, he will ultimately have to convince the Socialists to break with this coalition to support him, which will likely cost them dearly in the next elections.
You’d think in such a time he’d avoid making comments that’ll antagonise the very politicians he’s trying to swoon, but scapegoating of immigrants (those of Algerian origin in particular) has become so mainstream in French society that it’s almost like the government can’t function without indulging in it.
They have no answers for the dreadful economic woes that France finds itself in after decades of neoliberal reforms only worsened problems it was supposed to solve. Macron and his National Rally party have burned much of their political capital pushing through very unpopular increases in the state pension age. It’s not clear how forcing more people in their 60s to continue working is supposed to help an economy that long been burdened by high youth unemployment.
Abroad, France has the most incoherent foreign policy of any EU state. On Gaza for example, we had bizarre scenes of President Macron proposing that France be part of an international military coalition to fight Hamas, only to swing to the opposite extreme (by European political standards of course) within two weeks by supporting a ceasefire and demanding Israel stop killing babies. And just this week we’ve heard that Macron offered to send French troops to Greenland to deter the United States – this coming less than a year after he declared willingness to send French troops to Ukraine to fight Russia.
A normalised far-right
Leaving aside the morality of any of these stances, it all comes across as a government which has no clue what it’s doing. This leaves them particularly vulnerable to the influence of the far-right National Front, who do have a coherent plan that they’ve been working towards for many decades now, and now have a leader who is less prone to counter-productive outbursts.
In somewhat related news, there were condemnations across the political spectrum last week when the grave of French fascist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen was vandalised. Le Pen was buried last month in a private family funeral; the relatively lowkey ceremony contrasted with his boisterous and inflammatory political career, where for decades he was the leader of the National Front and face of the French far-right, before being succeeded by his daughter Marine at the age of 82.
His death was met with street celebrations across France; thousands of people sang songs and set of fireworks in scenes reminiscent of events in Britain after the death of Margaret Thatcher.
Another similarity in these celebrations is they’re marking the death of a political figure who – it has to be said – left an indelible imprint on their society. Even if Le Pen never took executive power himself, his politics and ideology have become so mainstreamed in today’s France that he almost didn’t have to. He has been transformed from a near-demonic figure in French culture to Francois Bayrou praising him as a ‘fighter’ in his tribute.
Considering Le Pen was arguably France’s most influential open anti-semite and was convicted in a French court for Holocaust denial as recently as 2016, it really exposes how utterly fraudulent the French state’s crackdown on the Palestine solidarity movement for alleged antisemitic elements is.
Jean-Marie Le Pen’s political career can be traced back to his days in the French Army. A year after being elected to the National Assembly wanting to protest the government’s insufficiently violent repression, Le Pen volunteered for the Foreign Legion to help suppress the Algerian Independence struggle. He was accused of torturing Algerian detainees during his brief time as an intelligence officer. In 1962 he admitted to the newspaper Combat that he had tortured people “because it had to be done.”
It was on his return to France that Le Pen started to become a national political figure. He soon founded the National Front of Combatants (FNC), a veterans’ pressure group that campaigned to continue the Algeria War until total French victory. Modelled after Mussolini’s March On Rome, the FNC organised a convoy of military trucks journeying from the south of France to Paris, getting significant press coverage. On the sides of the trucks were draped slogans such as “Algeria is France” and “Abandoning Algeria is National Suicide.”
While Le Pen “lost” that war, in the sense that France withdrew from Algeria, his political movement came out stronger. Having built a movement around fighting the Muslim Arab in Algeria, shifting it to fighting Muslim Arab in France was a mostly seamless transition. It is through this lens that the politics of Le Pen and the National Front can best be understood.
Even its recent (and wholly disingenuous) turn to seeking support from the Jewish community is really another way for them distance themselves from their true Nazi-collaborationist origins and to reinvent themselves as the vanguard of an alliance of anti-Muslim/Arab crusaders.
And what could be a greater vindication of their role in the vanguard than French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin accusing Marine Le Pen of being soft on Islam, or Higher Education Frederique Vidal claiming that “Islamo-leftism is eating away at our society”?
In a way, Bayrou’s praise for Le Pen has some logic to it. Le Pen was saying 50 years ago the kinds of things mainstream French politicians regularly say nowadays. If we are to take these politicians at their word, surely what they’re really saying here is that “Le Pen was right”, right?
If there’s one legacy of Le Pen that has been dismantled, it’s the cordon sanitaire of French politics, that the left, centrist and centre-right parties would consider themselves to be legitimate opponents in the political sphere, but would join forces where necessary to prevent ‘illegitimate’ fascists from winning. The most famous example of this was the 2002 French Presidential election, where Jean-Marie Le Pen unexpectedly made the second round run-off election against the incumbent centre-right Jacques Chirac. Very begrudgingly, the slogan of the left in that election was “Vote for the crook, not the fascist”.
Despite similar scenes in the most recent French election, where candidates of various parties stood down in order to bolster the candidate most likely to defeat the National Front, the result has been up-ended by President Emmanuel Macron refusing to countenance his party entering a coalition with left-wing New Popular Front, who finished in first place but without an overall majority.
Instead, Macron has responded to the election of a far more left-leaning Assembly by appointing a right-wing Prime Minister whose party got a whopping 5.4% of the vote and is dependent on fascist support to stay in office, breaking a taboo which had held since 1945 on fascists holding direct sway over the government. And Jean-Marie Le Pen lived just about long enough to see it happen.
While the centre has dismantled the cordon sanitaire, the end result may be discrediting itself as an independent political force. Many French voters (who may otherwise have supported the New Popular Front) may have voted for Macron as the best way to keep out Marine Le Pen, it’ll be a lot harder to maintain that argument now that the main centre party has shown itself to be closer to the National Front than its left-wing opposition.
Everything rests on whether the New Popular Front can remain intact and build on its current support base to be able to win power in the years to come, and finally put Jean-Marie Le Pen’s legacy in the grave. It’d be quite ironic if Bayrou’s attempts to break up the NPF fail because he was unable to – even tactically – stop overtly appealing to racist forces in a critical juncture.
Daniel Lindley is a trade union activist in the UK.
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.
