The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Tensions over race, religion in France’s presidential race
PARIS — 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, farright 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.
For some experts and antiracist 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.