THE FRENCH CORRECTION
The next president of France must first fight what’s fueling terrorism in the country
FORTY seven million French voters are going to the polls today to choose between Emmanuel Macron, a 39-yearold former investment banker, and Marine Le Pen, 48, standard bearer of the extreme-rightist National Front.
On the surface, the French presidential election has a flavor of déjà vu for Americans, as it may remind them of the Trump-Clinton contest, which was hacked in the run up to voting day, just like this one. In France, the candidates’ genders are in reverse, pitting a female rightist against a male centrist.
Le Pen depicts her adversary as a rootless globalist, a heartless establishment figure who couldn’t care less about outsourcing jobs to China or Eastern Europe and pushing up unemployment (already towering at 10 percent), thus aggravating the white worker’s plight.
Macron, in turn, portrays his opponent as a fraud who would cut jobs and precipitate France into bankruptcy as she pulls the country out of the European Union with her “Frexit” threat. Hepaints her as a moral traitor to France’s core values, with her xenophobic ideas reminiscent of the WWIIVichy government and in particular her Muslim-bashing rhetoric. (People of Muslim descent make up roughly 5 to 8 percent of the 60 million French, though not all identify as religious.)
Among Muslim youth in the disenfranchised banlieues (suburbs), the unemployment rate can reach up to 40 percent, giving way to civil disobedience, drug trafficking and the rise of an enclave mentality nurtured by salafism — a fundamentalist view of Islam. Salafism considers other Muslims as apostates and non-Muslims as infidels and, while usually a nonviolent philosophy, it is the doctrinal root of jihadism, which has taken a terrible toll in France. There has been a total of 240 terrorismrelated deaths in France since the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in January 2015, including the Bataclan music hall massacre in November 2015 and the strike on the Nice seafront during Bastille Day celebrations last year.
Jihadists, who have also targeted Belgium, Germany, the UK, Denmark and
Sweden in recent months, have fueled their provocative attacks with a sole obsession: to engineer civil strife in Europe, dubbed the “soft underbelly of the West,” so as to one day establish the caliphate in the Old Continent. This is seen as a stepping stone towards their final conquest of America and the whole planet.
Their wish is that European societies will retaliate against Muslims in general, whether it be through Muslim-bashing, attacks on mosques, a massive vote for extreme-right parties such as the National Front in France, or the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deustchland) or Geert Wilders anti-Koran party in the Netherlands, etc.
They want European societies to lose all hope for the integration of Muslims on the basis of shared values. Then, jihadists think, European Muslims will rally under the banner of jihad and ISIS, whom they will see as their sole champion against so-called “Islamophobia.”
ISIS followers in France perceived their country’s presidential election as a golden opportunity to accelerate their plan: The more attacks by terrorist jihadists, the more votes for the extreme right. And, for more than a year, pundits by and large had foreseen that Le Pen would lead the first round of the two-round presidential election, as a result.
However, due to fresh military pressure on the so-called ISIS Caliphate territory, from bombings and drones to the closing of the Turkish-Caliphate border, terror coordinators in Mosul and Raqqa have had to save themselves before they could activate networks in France. The French intelligence community finally managed to break the codes of a number of encrypted messaging services used by ISIS. This led to scores of preventive arrests that foiled all attacks but one — the stabbing death of a policeman in the Champs-Élysées three days before the first political primary last month. This lone incident came too late for their plot to work.
The extreme-right did not benefit from the expected ballot boost that had been prophesied by some, as Macron became the front-runner and is now expected to trounce Le Pen, who came second. But beyond the security issues that now plague France, the candidate who wins this Sunday must tackle education and economic reform in depth.
France must erase the social malaise that provided such a fertile breeding ground for the fracture that tears it apart — from the children of the immigrants to the white working-class — pitting the haves against the have-nots.