Far-right ideas

There are two themes that have taken centre stage in the run-up to the first round of the French presidential election. One is a naked nationalism and the fear of foreign invasion. The other is ‘the enemy within’, the label the far Right has imposed upon France’s Muslim community.

Set in a reactionary climate, this presidential campaign is poised to descend into a racist and nationalistic quagmire by the time people cast their votes on 10 April, that is if it has not already.

Even by the rancid nature of this particular campaign, a new low was reached last Sunday when the conservative candidate, Valerie Pecresse of Les Republicains, warned of the danger of a ‘Great Replacement’ at a Paris rally.

According to this conspiracy theory, the predominantly white and French Catholic population will soon be replaced by non-white immigrants coming from Africa and the Middle East, which in France is largely seen as a ‘Muslim threat’. So preposterous and extremist is this conspiracy theory that even far-Right candidate Marine Le Pen has refused to engage with it. By contrast, Eric Zemmour, another far-Right hopeful, has made the ‘Great Replacement’ theory the central issue of his campaign.

The conspiracy theory, which has been cited by those who carried out mass killings in Christchurch and El Paso, was developed by French writer Renaud Camus, who described it as a ‘genocide by substitution’ of the French indigenous population, and compared it to the genocide of the European Jews during the Second World War. In the epilogue of his 2011 Le Grand Remplacement book, Camus cites Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech as a major influence on his work.

It can also be argued that the French far Right’s obsession with the ‘Muslim threat’ is reminiscent of Edouard Drumont’s Jewish France. In the late 19th century, Drumont, an antisemite, argued that there was allegedly a ‘Jewish plot’ to destroy Europe. Today, Muslims have seemingly replaced Jews in the so-called clash of civilisation against European culture.

This white supremacy theory, which in truth originates from a larger and older ‘white genocide’ conspiracy theory popularised in American neo-Nazi circles has now entered the mainstream of French politics through Pecresse, a conservative candidate. What is more, her speech was punctuated with thinly veiled attacks on Muslims and immigrants. True to the French elites’ obsession with the hijab, she declared that “Marianne [the name given to the female symbol who embodies the French Republic] does not wear a veil”.

Pecresse’s intervention, billed as a major campaign speech, underscores France’s dramatic shift to the right. Critics have argued that the race now has three far-Right contenders who are credited with almost 50 percent of voting intentions altogether. That said, Pecresse may be ultimately vindicated: according to a recent opinion poll, up to 67 percent of French people worry about the ‘great replacement’.

In her speech, Pecresse went as far as distinguishing between ‘French of the heart’ (ie ‘white Catholic French’) and ‘French of paper’ (ie foreigners who gained French nationality through naturalisation or whose children were born in France and who gained French nationality through the ‘right of soil’). The racialisation of citizenship runs counter the most basic principle of French republicanism which categorically detaches nationality from people’s ethnic or religious backgrounds.

Excerpted: ‘French Presidential Election: the Mainstreaming of Far-Right Ideas’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org