At the heart of the rapid rise of the nationalist right, with its view of immigrants as a direct threat to the very nature of France, there seems to be a growing feeling among many French that they are no longer in their homeland.
That feeling, a vague but strong unease, has many factors. These include a sense of dispossession, of neighborhoods changing in dress and habits with the arrival of mainly Muslim immigrants from North Africa, and a sense of loss of identity in a rapidly changing world. The national protest, whose anti-immigrant stance lies at the core of its rapidly growing popularity, has benefited from all of this.
“No French citizen could endure living in a house without doors or windows.” Jordan Bardella, the smooth-talking 28-year-old icon about the National Rally Party’s move towards the brink of power, told France 3 TV last week. “Well, it’s the same with a country.”
In other words, countries need effective borders that can be tightly sealed.
This message, echoed by rising nationalist parties across Europe and a central theme of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign in the United States, has proved effective . In France, it propelled Marine Le Pen’s National Rally to victory over President Emmanuel Macron’s party in this month’s European Parliament vote.
Mr. Macron was so confused by the defeat that he opened up the country’s political future with a risky bet. He called for legislative elections, the first round of which took place on June 30. France could have a far-right nationalist government with Mr. Bardella as prime minister before the Olympic Games start in Paris on July 26.
The unthinkable has become the thinkable. Nearly a decade ago, Angela Merkel, then the German chancellor, immortalized the saying “Wir schaffen das.” or “we can do it this,” as she admitted more than a million Syrian refugees into Germany. Today, her views on immigration seem so otherworldly that her attitudes have changed radically in Europe and the United States.
A gesture similar to “Wilkommenskultur,” or welcoming culture, today would sound the death knell of most Western politicians.
Once a core theme of the xenophobic right, efforts to control or prevent migration have become central to the political spectrum. Views of immigrants as diluting national identities, burdening social safety nets and importing violence have spread, often fed by thinly veiled bigotry. The former absolute French taboo against the National Front, now the National Rally, has collapsed.
Centrist leaders, including President Biden and Mr. Macron, have been forced to shift from openness on immigration to a harder line to try to steal the tide of nationalist movements. They must admit that many conservatives, with nothing “far right” about them, resonate with Mr. Trump’s words during his 2017 visit to Poland: “Do we respect our citizens enough to protect my border?”
Earlier this year, Mr. Macron’s government passed an immigration bill that removed deportation protection for certain foreigners residing in France who had “seriously violated the principles of the Republic ”. It imposes immediate deportation on rejected asylum seekers. It tried to revoke the automatic right to citizenship for children born in France to foreign parents, before the Constitutional Council abolished it.
If the purpose of these and other measures was to prevent the emergence of the National Protest, then this law has been counterproductive. For the left, it was a betrayal of French humanist values; for the right it’s too little, too late.
In a similar vein, citing the “worldwide migration crisis,” Mr. Biden, for whom the United States as a nation of immigrants has been a consistent refrain, temporarily closed its borders. southern border for most asylum seekers this month. It was a dramatic reversal, and many Democrats accused him of pursuing Mr. Trump’s policy of fear. But Mr. Biden’s decision reflects the reality 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’ growing inequality has left many people behind, sparking resentment. In France, a social model that has worked well for a long time has failed to solve the problem of lost hope and poor schools in suburban projects where many immigrants live. This added to the frustration. Tensions frequently flare up between Muslims and police.
“The government has always protected the police, a state within a state,” Ahmed Djamai, 58, said last year during a protest. For him, being Arab or black, even with a French passport, was often considered second-class.
Immigration, in this context, easily becomes a controversial topic. “The French sense of losing their country to immigrants is in many ways an illusion,” said Anne Muxel, deputy director of the Center for Political Studies at Sciences Po University in Paris. “It is associated with disorientation, loss of control and life becoming more and more difficult. The national protest has that in its DNA, whereas it is not in Macron’s DNA.”
The cultures of the United States and France are profoundly different. One is a nation formed through immigration with a self-renewing core; the other, France, is a more hardline country where the integration of “visible minorities,” a term that primarily refers to Muslims, has challenged the nation’s image.
However, to some extent, many people in each country still fear losing their identity, worrying about what leaders like Ms. Le Pen or Mr. Trump can take advantage of. In the United States, the specter is that non-Hispanic white Americans will become a minority by mid-century. Americans’ sense of the sanctity of the rule of law is outraged by the illegal entry of millions of migrants. The French are focused on the threat to their way of life, a feeling complicated by repeated acts of Islamist terrorism over the past decade.
The consensus that “the situation with Muslim immigrants has become untenable” is now deeply embedded in political opinion, said Hakim El Karoui, a prominent immigration consultant. to the point that “there is no serious debate on immigration even though it is the focus of the campaign”. problem.
Ms. Le Pen has worked for more than a decade to normalize her father’s fringe racist party. She has eradicated anti-Semitism, reversed calls to leave the 27-nation European Union and adopted a moderate tone.
Yet the party’s core view that immigrants dilute the national establishment – seen as a glorious and mystical thing – persists. She said the party, if elected, would seek to ban the use of Muslim headscarves in public.
She and Mr. Bardella support the idea of “national priority” — essentially the systematic discrimination between foreigners and French citizens when it comes to access to jobs, housing subsidies , certain health benefits and other social assistance.
Mr. Bardella said last week that legal immigrants in France “who work, pay taxes and respect the law have nothing to fear when I go to Matignon,” the prime minister’s residence. This is intended to reassure the head of work.
But the unemployment rate in France is 7.5%, with 2.3 million people unemployed. The rate is higher among immigrants, about 12% in 2021, according to a study last year by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Research. Many of them may be vulnerable.
According to France’s Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons, about 140,000 migrants applied for asylum last year. That’s double the number from a decade ago. Gérald Darmanin, the Interior Minister, estimated last year there were between 600,000 and 900,000 illegal immigrants in France.
“It is likely that Le Pen and Bardella will attack individual freedoms,” said Célia Belin, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Paris.
At a Bardella rally in Montbeliard, eastern France, Laurent Nansé, 53, who runs a funeral home, said he had recently inherited a family house and had been looking through albums from his time. young. “There are no veiled women, there are no Maghreb people, there are no African people,” he said. “During Ramadan, supermarkets are filled with advertisements for it. I don’t see any ads for Lent.”
He said he believes that Mr. Bardella has what it takes to lead the country. “I’m so fed up with Macron’s little things, little things,” he said.
At last week’s press conference, Mr. Macron seemed to be grappling with his own failures. He links the rise of the “far right” to “doubts about who we are becoming, existential anxiety.”
In response, he said, it is necessary to stand firm. He cited his immigration bill and called for “cutting illegal immigration,” but admitted that “our efforts in this area have not been fully seen, felt or understood.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Macron accused the new left-wing New Popular Front coalition of Socialist, Green and far-left parties of being entirely “immigrants” — a word often used by Ms. Le Pen’s party to describes politicians who encourage uncontrolled immigration. Previously, National Rally called Mr. Macron an “immigrant.”
All of this is clearly an attempt by Mr. Macron to stop the march of the National Rally for Power by tightening immigration and security. The problem is that just as Mr. Trump has taken an anti-immigrant political position in the US, that position is being taken by Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Bardella in France.
Mr. Macron has tried for more than 7 years in power to hover in the middle of a fierce debate. Mr. Biden offset the border closure to asylum seekers by announcing shortly afterward that he would protect 500,000 spouses of undocumented U.S. citizens from deportation and provide their path to becoming citizens.
It’s unclear whether carefully navigating around an explosive problem will be effective. The atmosphere in France today is very unstable. “We tried everything,” Ms. Muxel said. “We need to try something new – that’s what’s going on.” It was broadcast in the United States in 2016.
Of course, the very measures taken to build and preserve a homogenous society are at the core of the most heinous crimes of the last century. A core postwar understanding in Europe was that borders needed to be dismantled to save Europe from repeated wars. Ever-closer union means ever-expanding peace.
However, those ideas appear to have faded. This is the time when the nation rises up, despite all those dangers.
Last week, a cartoon on the front page of the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchainé depicted a Frenchman wearing a beret, holding a baguette and a bottle of wine, pointing a large-caliber pistol emblazoned with the word “National Rally” in his face. head.
“We have never tried it!” the caption said.
