Friday, April 22, 2022

Tensions over race, religion in France’s presidential race

By ARNO PEDRAM

 Women wait in line before voting for the first round of the presidential election at a polling station Sunday, April 10, 2022 in the Malpasse northern district of Marseille, southern France. French voters head to polls on Sunday in a runoff vote between centrist incumbent Emmanuel Macron and nationalist rival Marine Le Pen, wrapping up a campaign that experts have seen as unusually dominated by discriminatory discourse and proposals targeting immigration and Islam.
(AP Photo/Daniel Cole, File)


PARIS (AP) — From attacks on “wokeism” to crackdowns on mosques, France’s presidential campaign has been especially challenging for voters of immigrant heritage and religious minorities, as discourse painting them as “the other” has gained ground across a swath of French society.

French voters head to polls on Sunday in a runoff vote between centrist incumbent Emmanuel Macron and nationalist rival Marine Le Pen, wrapping up a campaign that experts have seen as unusually dominated by discriminatory discourse and proposals targeting immigration and Islam.

With Le Pen proposing to ban Muslim headscarves in public, women like 19-year-old student Naila Ouazarf are in a bind.

“I want a president who accepts me as a person,” said Ouazarf, clad in a beige robe and matching head covering. She said she would defy the promised law should Le Pen become president and pay a fine, if necessary.

Macron attacked Le Pen on the headscarf issue during their presidential debate Wednesday, warning it could stoke “civil war.”

In the first-round vote, far-right candidates Le Pen and Eric Zemmour together collected nearly a third of votes. An elementary school teacher in the ethnically diverse Paris suburb of Saint-Denis on Thursday described pupils who are “scared to death” because of the campaign.

Le Pen’s National Rally party, formerly called the National Front, has a history of ties with neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers and militias that opposed Algeria’s war for independence from colonial France. Le Pen has distanced herself from that past and softened her public image.

But a top priority of her election program is to prioritize French citizens over immigrants for welfare benefits, a move that critics see as institutionalizing discrimination. Le Pen also wants to ban Muslim women from wearing headscaves in public, to toughen asylum rules and to sharply curtail immigration.

She has gained ground among voters since 2017, when she lost badly to Macron. This time around, Le Pen has put a greater emphasis on policies to help the working poor.

Saint-Denis student Yanis Benahmed, 20, said he was unconvinced by the candidate’s attempt to broader her appeal.

“We live in this city, and we know exactly how things are, the kind of people you have here,” he said. Le Pen “wants to ‘clean’ everything. With everything she’s said and her family history, we know exactly what her plan is. And Zemmour didn’t make it any better.”

The rabble-rousing Zemmour, who placed fourth in the first-round vote, boosted Le Pen’s popularity by making her seem softer. He has multiple convictions for inciting racial or religious hatred in France.

Zemmour also has promoted the baseless “great replacement” conspiracy theory, used as justification by the white supremacists who committed massacres in New Zealand’s Christchurch and in El Paso, Texas, and attacked a California synagogue.

“Eric Zemmour’s presence placed the issue (of Islam and immigration) on the side of aggressive and violent stigmatization,” Cecile Alduy, a Stanford semiologist who has studied Zemmour’s language, told The Associated Press. “Meanwhile, there is a decline in humanist values: words such as equality, human rights, fight against discrimination, or gender are qualified as politically correct or ‘wokeism’ by a large swath of media, public intellectuals, and ministers of the current government.”

For some experts and anti-racist groups in France, Macron, too, is at fault for the current climate. His administration has adopted legislation and language that echoes some far-right mottos in hopes of eating into Le Pen’s support.

Racial profiling and police brutality targeting people of color, which activists in France have long decried, have also remained a concern. During Macron’s presidency, France saw repeated protests against police violence after George Floyd, a Black American, died at the hands of police in the U.S.

Also under Macron’s watch, France passed a law against terrorism that enshrined in common law a state of emergency imposed after the deadly 2015 attacks on the Bataclan theater, Paris cafes and Charlie Hebdo newspaper.

The law extended the government’s right to search people, conduct surveillance, control movement and shut down some schools and religious sites in the name of fighting extremism.

Human rights watchdogs warned the law was discriminatory. “In some cases, Muslims may have been targeted because of their religious practice, considered to be ‘radical,’ by authorities, without substantiating why they constituted a threat for public order or security,” Amnesty International said.

In 2021, the government passed another law targeting what Macron labeled “separatism” by Muslim radicals. The measure extended the state’s oversight of associations and religious sites. The government’s own watchdog argued that the law’s scope was too broad.

Abdourahmane Ridouane has seen this firsthand. In February, two police officers handed him a notice of closure for the mosque he manages in the southwestern town of Pessac in Bordeaux wine country.

Authorities argued the mosque’s criticism of “state Islamophobia” allegedly encouraged and justified Muslim rebellion and terrorism. The authorities also criticized anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian posts on the mosque’s social media page.

Ridouane challenged the action and won on appeal. The appeals court found the closure was a “grave and manifest illegal infringement on religious liberty.” The state took the case to France’s highest court, which is expected to rule in the case soon.

“I felt deeply saddened by a process I deemed unworthy of a democratic state,” Ridouane told the AP.

Islam is France’s No. 2 religion, though there are no hard data on the races and religions of voters because of France’s doctrine of colorblindness, which sees all citizens as universally French and encourages assimilation. Critics say the principle allows authorities to ignore deep-seated discrimination, both on the French mainland and in overseas French territories where most voters aren’t white.

France has also seen the rise of criticism of “Islamo-leftism” and “wokeism,” and Macron’s government has commissioned a study into its presence in French universities. Yet race or colonial studies research departments don’t exist in French universities, because they are seen as contrary to French universalism.

“The election comes in this climate, the increasing right-wing and conservative discourse, a retreat into a white, universalist, colorblind discourse blind to all discriminations and systemic racism in French society,” said Nacira Guénif, an anthropology and sociology professor at Paris VIII University who focuses on race and gender.

On the left, meanwhile, “denial prevails,” Guénif said, because many left-wing French voters are “profoundly uncomfortable with the question of race because they think that talking about race makes you racist.”

The criticism of so-called “wokeism,” championed in particular by Zemmour’s campaign, is reminiscent of attacks on critical race theory in the U.S. Critical race theory is an academic framework that analyzes American history through the lens of racism. It centers on the idea that racism is systemic in U.S. institutions, which maintain the dominance of white people.

Despite concerns over some of the policies adopted in France under Macron, Ridouane, the Pessac mosque director, has no doubt for whom he will - and for whom he won’t - cast his vote for president on Sunday.

“If Le Pen manages to take the levers of power, it will be the worst thing we will have ever seen,” he said.

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Elaine Ganley in Paris and Sylvie Corbet and Alex Turnbull in Saint-Denis contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the French election at https://apnews.com/hub/french-election-2022


Love thy enemy: Critics key for Macron in France’s election

By JOHN LEICESTER

A demonstrator holds a banner that reads: 'Neither Macron nor Le Pen', during a protest in Paris, April 16, 2022. Disgruntled left-wing voters whose candidates were knocked out in the first round of France's election are the wild cards in the winner-takes-all runoff on Sunday April 24, 2022. How they vote — or don’t vote — will in large part determine whether incumbent Emmanuel Macron gets a second five-year term or cedes the presidential Elysee Palace to far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen. 
(AP Photo/Christophe Ena, File)


PARIS (AP) — As France elects a president, Paris-based artist Vincent Aïtzegagh is going to ground, escaping to a bucolic village to avoid what for him — and millions of other left-wing French voters — is a painful, even impossible, electoral choice. For the first time in his life, the 65-year-old has decided to not vote at all in the decisive ballot this Sunday.

“I am fleeing,” he says. “Because it stinks.”

Disgruntled voters like Aïtzegagh whose favored candidates were knocked out in the election’s first round on April 10 are the wild cards in the winner-takes-all runoff. How they vote — or don’t vote — on Sunday will in large part determine whether incumbent Emmanuel Macron gets a second five-year term or cedes the presidential Elysee Palace to far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen, a seemingly unlikely but not impossible outcome that would be seismic for France and Europe as they deal with the fallout of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

With the stakes high, never has the decision been so difficult for leftist voters who view both Macron and Le Pen as anathema — a choice that some describe as “between the plague and cholera.”

“It’s horrible, enough to make one cry. I have spent sleepless nights in tears not knowing what to do,” says Clek Desentredeux, a disabled and queer artist and live-streamer who voted for hard-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon in round one.

With 7.7 million votes, Melenchon finished just 420,000 votes shy of the runoff, in third place behind Le Pen. Le Pen and Macron have since expended much time and energy trawling for support in Melenchon’s now orphaned and disappointed reservoir of voters. It is an uphill battle for them both.

Generally speaking, many leftist voters resent Macron for having dynamited France’s political landscape with his get-things-done middle-way method of governance, siphoning ideas, supporters, government ministers and political oxygen away from mainstream parties on both the left and right.

His pragmatism is too vanilla and opportunistic for many leftist voters hungry for a sharper and more ideological political divide. More specifically, many describe the 44-year-old former banker as friend to the rich and oppressor of the poor. Some also blame him for Le Pen’s rise, saying that in trying to undercut support in France for the extreme right, Macron swerved too far right-ward himself.

Macron’s saving grace, however, is also Le Pen. After years of drum-banging about immigration and Islam’s influence in the country with the largest Muslim population in Western Europe, the 53-year-old is reviled by many on the left as a racist xenophobe, too dangerous for France’s stated principles of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” to ever vote for. In conceding defeat in round one, Melenchon said his backers “must not give a single vote to Madame Le Pen” — repeating the exhortation four times.

But he stopped short of asking his electors to shift their votes to Macron, instead leaving them to wrestle alone with what Melenchon described as a choice between “two evils.”

Some will deliberately spoil their ballots, even putting toilet paper in the voting envelope instead of a candidate’s name to show how dimly they view the options. Some won’t vote. Some will cast ballots with no name.

They include 22-year-old Emma Faroy in Paris.

“I’m going to vote because some women died for my right to do so,” she said. “But I’m going to cast a blank ballot because I don’t want to choose between either of them.”

Others will, almost literally, hold their noses and vote for Macron to keep out Le Pen. Some will back Le Pen, in a poke at the president. Multiple polls indicate that Macron, who won round one, is now building a significant runoff lead, larger than the polling margin of error. Melenchon voters from round one appear to be shifting in greater numbers behind him than Le Pen. But the outcome remains uncertain because many have yet to choose.


Demonstrators hold a banner that reads: "Against Le Pen", during a protest against the far-right in Paris, April 16, 2022. Disgruntled left-wing voters whose candidates were knocked out in the first round of France's election are the wild cards in the winner-takes-all runoff on Sunday April 24, 2022. How they vote — or don’t vote — will in large part determine whether incumbent Emmanuel Macron gets a second five-year term or cedes the presidential Elysee Palace to far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen.
 (AP Photo/Christophe Ena, File)

“I’ll decide at the last moment,” said retired power worker Pierre Gineste. Having voted Melenchon in round one, round two for him is the dilemma of a ballot for Macron, a blank ballot or not voting. He said he won’t vote Le Pen.

The choice is so difficult and divisive that friendships and families are being tested. Aïtzegagh voted for the green party candidate in round one; his daughter chose Melenchon. She then told her dad that she might vote Le Pen in the runoff because she cannot stomach Macron. Aïtzegagh said he responded by warning: “If you vote Le Pen, I will repudiate you.”

In 2002, when Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, stunned France by advancing to the runoff, Aïtzegagh was among the 82% of voters who came together behind conservative Jacques Chirac, in a powerful rejection of the extreme right.

In 2017, Aïtzegagh voted for Macron in the run-off — once again solely to be a barrage against a Le Pen, this time Marine. Macron won handily — 66% to 34% — but in the knowledge that many of his votes were simply ballots against her. The same will be true on Sunday.

In a first for him and with “sadness and disgust,” Aïtzegagh will abstain, because Macron’s first term has been “five years of cholera, five years of crap, five years of destruction” and Le Pen isn’t an option for him.

“I don’t want to be a barrage any more,” he said. “I have had enough.”

Desentredeux, who uses the gender-neutral pronoun they, agonized long and hard over their choice — and then decided that Le Pen’s presence again in the runoff left them with no choice at all.

This is the first presidential election that Desentredeux has been old enough to vote in and it will end with a reluctant vote for Macron.

“Macron winning would be a catastrophe, but Le Pen getting through would be criminal,” Desentredeux said. “I don’t want to do it but I feel obliged.”

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Associated Press journalist Alex Turnbull contributed.

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Follow AP’s coverage of the French election at https://apnews.com/hub/french-election-2022

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