At the heart of the rapid rise of the nationalist right, which sees immigrants as a direct threat to the essence of France, appears to be a growing sense among many French people that they are no longer at home in their own country.
This feeling, a vague but powerful unease, has many elements. They include a sense of dispossession, of neighborhoods transformed in terms of dress and habits by the arrival of mainly Muslim immigrants from North Africa, and of loss of identity in a rapidly changing world. The National Rally, whose anti-immigration stance is at the heart of its growing popularity, has benefited from all this.
“No French citizen would tolerate living in a house without doors or windows. » Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old symbolic smooth talker of the National Rally’s advance to the brink of power, told France 3 last week. “Well, it’s the same thing with a country.”
In other words, nations need effective borders that can be hermetically sealed.
This message, taken up by emerging nationalist parties across Europe and a central theme of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign in the United States, has proven powerful. In France, he propelled Marine Le Pen’s National Rally to victory over President Emmanuel Macron’s party in European Parliament elections this month.
Mr. Macron was so shaken by the defeat that he opened up the country’s political future by making a risky bet. He called legislative elections, the first round of which will take place on June 30. France could have a far-right nationalist government with Mr Bardella as prime minister before the start of the Olympic Games in Paris on July 26.
The unthinkable has become thinkable. Nearly ten years ago, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel immortalized the words “Wir schaffen das.” or “we can do this”, while she admitted more than a million Syrian refugees to Germany. Today, his support for immigration seems supernatural, as attitudes have completely changed in Europe and the United States.
A similar gesture of “Wilkommenskultur,” or welcoming culture, would spell the death knell for most Western politicians today.
Once a central theme of the xenophobic right, the desire to control or arrest migrants has moved to the center of the political spectrum. The idea that immigrants dilute national identity, rely on social safety nets and import violence has become widespread, often fueled by thinly veiled bigotry. The once absolute French taboo against the Front National, now Rassemblement National, has collapsed.
Centrist leaders, including President Biden and Mr. Macron, have been forced to shift from an openness on immigration to a harder line in an attempt to steal the spotlight from nationalist movements. They had to recognize that many conservatives, who are not “far right”, identify with Mr. Trump’s comments during a visit to Poland in 2017: “Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders?
Earlier this year, Mr. Macron’s government passed an immigration bill that removed protection against expulsion for certain foreigners residing in France who engaged in a “serious violation of the principles of the Republic.” . He imposed the immediate expulsion of rejected asylum seekers. This involved removing the automatic right to nationality for children born in France to foreign parents, before the Constitutional Council annulled it.
If the intention of these and other measures was to curb the rise of the National Rally, the legislation backfired. For the left, it was a betrayal of French humanist values; for the right, it was too little, too late.
Similarly, citing a “global migrant crisis,” Mr. Biden, for whom the United States as a nation of immigrants has been a constant refrain, temporarily closed the southern border to most immigration seekers. asylum this month. It’s a radical turnaround, and many Democrats have accused him of adopting Mr. Trump’s politics of fear. But Mr. Biden’s decision reflects the fact that many Americans, like many in France, want tougher policies in the face of record numbers of migrants entering the country.
Why this change? Western societies, characterized by ever-increasing inequalities, have left many people behind, fueling anger. In France, a social model that has worked for a long time has failed to resolve the problems of lost hope and bad schools in the suburbs where many immigrants live. This fuels additional frustration. Tensions regularly flare up between Muslims and the police.
“The government always protects the police, a state within a state,” Ahmed Djamai, 58, said at a protest last year. For him, being Arab or black, even with a French passport, often meant feeling second class.
Immigration, in this context, easily becomes a recurring theme. “This French feeling of losing their country to immigrants is in many ways illusory,” said Anne Muxel, deputy director of the Center for Political Research at Sciences Po University in Paris. “It’s linked to disorientation, loss of control and life becoming more and more difficult. The National Rally has this in its DNA, while it is not in Macron’s DNA.”
The cultures of the United States and France differ profoundly. One is a nation formed by immigration with a self-renewing core; the other, France, is a more rigid country where the integration of “visible minorities”, a term mainly referring to Muslims, has called into question the image of the nation.
Yet many people in every country fear, to some extent, a loss of identity, an anxiety that leaders like Ms. Le Pen or Mr. Trump can play on. In the United States, there is the specter of a non-Hispanic white America becoming a minority by mid-century. Americans’ sense of the sanctity of the law is offended by the illegal entry of millions of migrants. The French are focused on a threat to their way of life, a feeling compounded by repeated acts of Islamist terrorism over the past decade.
The consensus that “the situation of Muslim immigrants has become insoluble” is now so anchored in the political spectrum that “there is no serious debate on immigration although it is at the center of the campaign” , said Hakim El Karoui, a prominent immigration consultant. problems.
Ms Le Pen has worked hard for more than a decade to normalize her father’s fringe racist party. She suppressed anti-Semitism, quashed calls to leave the 27-member European Union and adopted a generally moderate tone.
Yet the party’s core view that immigrants dilute the national body – presented as something glorious and mystical – endures. She said the party, if elected, would seek to ban the use of Muslim headscarves in public.
She and Mr. Bardella adhere to the idea of “national preference” – essentially systematic discrimination between foreigners and French citizens in access to employment, subsidized housing, certain health benefits and other social assistance.
Mr. Bardella said last week that immigrants legally in France “who work, pay their taxes and respect the law have nothing to fear from my arrival at Matignon,” the prime minister’s residence. It was a reassuring presentation for the top job.
But France’s unemployment rate is 7.5 percent, with 2.3 million people out of work. This rate is higher among immigrants, around 12% in 2021, according to a study carried out last year by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies. Many of them could be vulnerable.
Around 140,000 migrants requested asylum last year, according to the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons. That’s double what it was ten years ago. Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, estimated last year that there were between 600,000 and 900,000 illegal immigrants in France.
“An attack on individual freedoms from Le Pen and Bardella is likely,” said Célia Belin, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Paris.
At a Bardella gathering in Montbéliard, eastern France, Laurent Nansé, 53, who runs a funeral home, said he had recently inherited a family home and had looked through albums of his youth. “There were no veiled women, no one from the Maghreb, no Africans,” he said. “At the time of Ramadan, supermarkets are full of advertisements for this. I don’t see any advertising for Lent.
He said he believed Mr. Bardella had what it took to lead the country. “I’m so fed up with Macron’s little of this, little of that,” he said.
At a news conference last week, Mr. Macron seemed grappling with his own failures. He linked the rise of the “far right” to “doubts about what we are becoming, to existential anxiety.”
In response, he said, it was essential to remain firm. He cited his immigration bill and called for “reducing illegal immigration,” but acknowledged that “our efforts in this area have not been sufficiently seen, felt or understood.”
On Tuesday, Mr Macron accused the new left-wing New Popular Front alliance of socialist, green and far-left parties of being totally “immigrationist” – a word often used by Ms Le Pen’s party to describe politicians who encourage uncontrolled immigration. In the past, the National Rally has described Mr Macron as an “immigrationist”.
All this is clearly an attempt by Mr. Macron to halt the National Rally’s march to power by toughening immigration and security policies. The problem is that, just as Mr. Trump occupied the anti-immigration political terrain in the United States, that terrain is occupied in France by Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Bardella.
Mr. Macron tried during his seven years in office to hover in the middle of a virulent debate. Mr. Biden offset his border closure to asylum seekers by announcing shortly afterward that he would protect 500,000 undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens from deportation and provide a path to citizenship for them.
It’s unclear whether such carefully measured navigation around an explosive issue can work. The atmosphere in France today is restive. “We tried everything,” Ms. Muxel said. “We need to try something new – that’s what’s in the air.” It was all the rage in the United States in 2016.
Of course, it is precisely the measures taken to build and preserve a homogenous society that are at the heart of the most heinous crimes of the last century. One of the fundamental ideas of post-war Europe was that borders had to be dismantled to save Europe from its repetitive wars. Ever closer union meant ever greater peace.
However, these ideas seem to have faded. We live in a time of resurgence of the nation, whatever the perils.
A cartoon last week on the front page of the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné showed a Frenchman with his beret, a baguette and a bottle of wine, pointing a large-caliber hunting rifle bearing the inscription “Rassemblement National” at his face. head.
“We’ve never tried it!” says the legend.
