View from abroad: The rise of the French right

IN France over May Day, I found the media full of coverage of Marine Le Pen’s speech at Bastille in Paris. Le Monde, one of the great daily newspapers of the world, devoted a full page to Le Pen’s speech and the prospects of her party, Front Nationale (FN), in the EU parliamentary elections on May 22. Last week, I wrote in these pages about the rise of Nigel Farage and his UKIP on Britain’s political scene. Le Pen’s steady march for respectability has been more impressive as she has had to shed the extreme right-wing image the FN had acquired under her father Jean-Marie Le Pen. Strongly anti-Semitic and openly racist, his actions and rhetoric made it difficult for decent, ordinary people to sign up to the FN’s ideology. Since taking over the party after an internal election in 2011, she has worked hard to position it as a respectable alternative to the mainstream left and right-wing parties. And while she has shed her father’s complete rejection of immigration, critics point to her anti-Muslim bias. For instance, during her campaign for party leadership, she claimed that the Muslim practice of taking over squares and streets in some cities for Friday prayers was akin to ‘foreign occupation’. More recently, in the wake of the FN’s local council victories in a string of French cities, Le Pen has suggested that in keeping with the French tradition of secularism, a uniform menu should be available to all French students at school. The implications of such a move are inflammatory: when we were at a private school in Paris, my brothers and I would be given an alternative when the other kids were served with pork at lunch. What Le Pen is proposing is that there be no halal option for Muslim children. If carried out, this policy would inflame France’s large Muslim population. Unfortunately, messages such as these resonate across France where, increasingly, many are coming to resent the presence of so many Muslim immigrants. While French laws do not permit the state to ask questions about a person’s faith, the number of Muslims in France is estimated to be somewhere between 3.5million and 5m. Most of them are from ex-colonies in North Africa, and a large percentage were born in France. The popularity of the French ban on the full niqab in public places is an indication of the annoyance many feel towards the insistence of their Muslim neighbours to import backward social practices to their country. So clearly, integration has not been smooth, with constant tensions between immigrants and their hosts. Frequent clashes in the terrifying cheap housing, or banlieues, on the periphery of large cities, have highlighted the large divide. Young Muslims see themselves as marginalised and subjected to constant harassment by the police. Ordinary Frenchmen view this large and noisy community as being troublesome uninvited guests. These are the voters Marine Le Pen is targeting. While election to the EU Parliament does not bring much power, Le Pen wants to convert the election to a referendum on the EU itself: strongly against the Union, she, like Nigel Farage, wants to lead her country out of its restrictive constraints. She also hopes to expose the French president’s weakness on May 22. In her May Day speech, she denounced Francois Holland as a ‘sad accountant’, and announced that “the French are lions, unless they are led by donkeys”. Such words are likely to bring her votes in cities, but French farmers benefit from the highest subsidies in the EU, and would hardly vote to have these handouts cut. Similarly, large corporations are unlikely to support her desire to leave the euro “before it collapses”. Liberals, long the backbone of the intelligentsia, are appalled by Le Pen’s anti-immigrant, covertly racist agenda. But despite her divisive message, the fact is that it is appealing to growing numbers in France. So much so that she is expected to gain up to a third of the vote in the first round of the next presidential election. Such a result would transform the French political scenario, and put the country on an unexplored path. In a sense, both Le Pen and Farage reflect the growing anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim tide across Europe. With a long, hard recession has come a fear of losing jobs to immigrants willing to work for less than the average pay. But whatever the reason, it will be a sad day if France, once the bastion of tolerance and secularism, should surrender its rational values to the right. I should mention here that my short visit to France was made possible by the generosity of the French embassy in Islamabad, which issued me a six-month Schengen visa. Actually, having flown there from Karachi to have my fingerprints and eyes scanned, I had hoped for a longer visa as it’s so easy to go across to France from England where I spend part of the year. And I expected that being fluent in French would be a further qualification. But I suppose that post 9/11 paranoia robs diplomats of initiative, and the ability to discern friend from foe.