BY MICHEL GURFINKIEL.
There is one thing every
French citizen agrees upon: the second and final round of the presidential
election will have far-reaching consequences. It will not just decide between
two candidates, or two parties, or even two political or economic philosophies.
Rather, it will settle the fate of France as a nation.
For clarification,
examine the 18th district in northern Paris. It voted heavily for the left in
the first round on April 22, and is poised to do the same in the second round.
François Hollande, the socialist candidate, garnered 43% of the vote there,
much more than the 28% he received nationally. Far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon
received 15% there but only 11% nationally. The other left candidates received
a combined 7% both there and nationally. All in all, the left won a staggering
65% of the vote in the 18th, about 20 points higher than the national returns.
Incumbent Nicolas
Sarkozy took only 19% of the vote in the 18th; nationally he took 27%.
Far-right contender Marine Le Pen won only 6.5% there, a huge difference from
her 18% nationally. Centrist François Bayrou received 7.7% locally and 9%
nationally. With the addition of 2% won by conservative dissenter Nicolas
Dupont-Aignan, the combined strength of the local right and center amounted to
no more than 35%, compared to the national take of 55%.
A completely different
picture emerged in the neighboring northwestern 17th district of Paris. There,
Sarkozy was the undisputed frontrunner, with 44% of the vote. While Hollande
lagged with 26%, Bayrou finished slightly better than he did nationally, with
over 10%. Mélenchon stayed near 7%; Le Pen fell to 6%. The far left took 3%.
The right and the center took 60% of the vote in the 17th, while the left did
not even reach 40%.
Politically speaking,
why are these neighboring districts worlds apart? The 17th is a bit richer as a
whole, a bit more bourgeois than the 18th, but there are both affluent and
working class areas in both districts. The actual differences are ethnic and
cultural.
The 18th is essentially
a “neo-French” stronghold: a place
where most inhabitants are immigrants (or children of immigrants) from non-European
countries and where Islam is the dominant religion. Admittedly, two major
tourist spots with a distinct French flavor — Old Montmartre, the
Disneyland-style artists’ village near Sacré-Cœur Basilica atop Montmartre
Hill; and Pigalle, nowadays merely a sex shop row — are to be found here. But
they are just enclaves in an otherwise increasingly alien environment.To
understand what the 18th district really is, one must examine everyday life.
For instance, note the street prayers that Muslim Arabs and sub-Saharan Muslims
have been routinely organizing on Fridays. Though an illegal practice — it
blocks cars and even pedestrian traffic for hours — the socialist mayor of
Paris and the police have had no option (so say they) other than tacitly
tolerating it.
On the contrary, the
17th remains staunchly French in outlook. Its inhabitants, whatever their race,
ethnicity, or religion, prefer France to be Western, Judeo-Christian, and
democratic. They do not want it to become a post-Western, “globalized” nation. (Or,
to use a formerly rude and now politically correct French expression: “Une société métissée” – a mongrel
society). Quite remarkably, the 17th district today hosts — along with more
districts and communes in western Greater Paris — the largest French Jewish
community. Many of the local Jews are Sephardic immigrants (rather, refugees)
from Arab countries who upon coming to France lived in the same areas as Muslim
immigrants from North Africa or sub-Saharan Africa. They were forced over the
years to migrate to areas where they could expect to be both physically and
emotionally safer.
What is true of Paris is
equally true of the rest of France, except that in many places the National
Front gets a much larger share of the conservative vote. Anywhere the left is
winning, the neo-French factor makes the difference. Anywhere the right is
ahead, opposition to métissage and
Islamization is the key mobilizing argument. The political class, right or
left, does not like to mention it too loudly. Even Marine Le Pen sees to it not
to dwell only on “national identity” matters, but rather to also run as a
champion of the poor and the outcasts. Still, this is the real issue. A
Hollande victory on Sunday will resonate as a great leap forward for the
neo-French and as the beginning of the end for traditional France. A Sarkozy
victory will mean that the case is deferred for at least another five years.
Just how many do the
neo-French number? Under French law which bars global and interlinked
statistics to race, religion, or ethnic origin, it is very difficult to compute
reliable figures. An additional difficulty stems from the special character of
the French polity, which consists of France proper (European France including
Corsica) and distant overseas territories from the French West Indies to French
Polynesia. Technically, overseas-born citizens or their children cannot be
referred to as immigrants, though most of them are cultural aliens in many ways
and tend to behave much as foreign immigrants when they settle in metropolitan
France.
A further difficulty:
there are marked differences among immigrants, between Europeans and
non-Europeans on one hand, and even among non-Europeans on the other hand. Some
of them came to France to be French, some to turn France into their own thing.
We may rely on some
figures. According to Eurostat (the statistical office of the European Union),
metropolitan France was in 2011 the most immigration-oriented of all EU
countries: 26.6% of its inhabitants were either immigrants or the children of
immigrants. A similar figure is provided by Insee, the French National
Institute of Statistics: they found that 23.9% of all babies born in
metropolitan France in 2010 had at
least one parent born outside of Europe, including the overseas French
territories. Roughly speaking, this amounts to one quarter of the 63 million
population, or about 15 million people.
Some 40% of the global
immigrant community must be subtracted from these figures: the European, East
Asian, or Latin American immigrants, as well as the Christian or Jewish
refugees from the Middle East or North Africa, see themselves as French rather
than as neo-French. On the other hand, the five million French citizens from
overseas territories tend to identify with the neo-French and
the post-Western project (overseas France voted overwhelmingly for
Hollande on April 22). Which brings us back to 15 million.
By and large, this is a
rapidly growing community. Its birthrate is much higher than the average French
birthrate, and further immigration is constantly reinforcing it. Legal
immigration only amounted to 180,000 individuals in 2011, which means that
almost two million new citizens, most of them neo-French, might have aggregated
to the French population as a whole by 2010. Illegal immigration is said to be
as important, which would lead to a net immigration surplus of four million
people, most of them neo-French. All in all, half the population of France writ
large — the younger half — can be forecast to be neo-French at some point
between 2020 and 2030.
While not all neo-French
are Muslim (the French polity’s Muslim population amounts to less than 10
million people, and some French Muslims are in fact quite secular), militant
Islam — endowed as it is with a purpose, a will to power, networks, foreign
money, and leverage — is clearly the driving force behind the neo-French
project. But what makes Islam irresistible is a tactical alliance with the
left. In France, like everywhere, the transition from an industrial to a
post-industrial economy has eroded the left’s largest voting blocks: the
working class and the civil service. Immigrants and the so-called minorities
are however providing an alternative and potentially more important
constituency. Philosophers like Toni Negri, Michael Hardt, Alain Badiou, and
Slavoj Zizek, as well as“anti-globalist“ pamphleteers like Stéphane Hessel
(a guru of the Occupy movement), have revamped the old Marxist topoi in order
to make the switch palatable. The proletariat is known nowadays as the
“Multitude,” and the West as the “Empire.” Jews, once the chosen people of the
revolution, have been recast as Zionists, the spearhead of counter-revolution.
The killings in southern
France a few weeks ago were a moment of truth in this respect. As one will
remember, a neo-French jihadist of Algerian origin named Mohamed Merah murdered
in cold blood three non-Caucasian soldiers (whom he saw as traitors) and then four Jews: a teacher and
three children of 7, 5, and 4. For about 36 hours, there was some reason to
believe that the killer was in fact a far-right extremist, similar to the
Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik. The left parties and various Muslim
groups started organizing mass rallies against racism, anti-Semitism, and
Islamophobia throughout France. When the killer’s identity was finally
established, and when it appeared that the French Muslim community nurtured
ambivalent feelings, if not sympathy, towards him, the whole idea was dropped.
Some democratically minded Muslims, led by Hassen Chalghoumi, the mufti of
Drancy in northern Paris, set up an anti-racist and anti-terrorist
demonstration on April 29, the French national Shoah memorial day. They
attracted less than one hundred followers.
In between the two
presidential rounds, Nicolas Sarkozy constantly mentioned France’s national
identity as one of his priorities. France, he said in Toulouse on April 29,
“was twenty centuries old. … It was the combined produce of Christianity, the
Enlightenment, the Revolution, and the anti-Nazi resistance. … It was the land
of Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Joan of Arc. … It was keeping the memory of the Shoah
and of the thousands of North African Muslims who had fought in its armies
during WW2.” Clearly, he was wooing both Marine Le Pen’s and François Bayrou’s
supporters, the key voters in the second round. But his words rang true.
Hollande has also
undertaken winning at least some of Le Pen’s votes. During his debate with
Sarkozy Wednesday evening, he repeatedly said that he would be as tough as
anybody on immigration matters, and would uphold a strict separation between
state and religion. He even said that his most controversial and most
pro-immigration proposal — granting electoral franchise to legal foreign
residents in local ballots — was not to be taken seriously, since it implied a
complex and unlikely constitutional revision in the first place.
But such cynical
short-term tactics cannot change that the long-term future of the left lies
with the neo-French only.
Michel Gurfinkiel is the founder and
president of the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute in Paris.
© Michel Gurfinkiel & PJMedia, 2012
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