Unleashing of hatred, Islamophobia, and racism. The barriers are being shattered. The patiently erected walls against hatred are collapsing while barbed wire and walls are being erected at our borders.
Those who want to bring back morality to school no longer know where good and evil reside. Those who talk about living together hunt down the enemy within and point to the scapegoat. From waves of terror to waves of resentment, France is fuming with rage.
Media overdose surrounding a Zemmour with his grand national Maurrassian narrative, reactionary identity obsession of a Finkielkraut, return to the right of blood and cult of authority of a Ciotti, third world war and fifth column of an Estrosi, national preference suddenly becoming politically correct when it’s about preferring a French homeless person to a foreign refugee, assumed religious preference when it’s about preferring a Christian refugee to a Muslim refugee, crude racism of a Nadine Morano almost making Nicolas Sarkozy pass for a “republican”… The French public debate is saturated with xenophobia. Let there be no mistake, Nadine Morano is just a symptom. But of what deeper ailment is she then the manifestation?
For many years, the media have been talking about the “missteps” of such and such a personality. We were told about the “proximity” between the right and the far right, then “porosity” and “collusion”. Finally, it was about an “extreme right” close to the far right. The National Front, by denouncing the UMPS, while thus rejecting traditional parties alike, was above all trying to hide its new twinship with the UMP. The French right, on its part, had to self-proclaim itself republican to try to reassure itself about its own political identity. Because by attempting to seduce the National Front electorate, it had to speak the language and adopt the reflexes of the far right. To appear as the last bulwark against the FN, it simply made a takeover bid on the ideological corpus of the National Front.
In reality, since the declaration of the “unapologetic” right and the adoption of the “Buisson line”, Nicolas Sarkozy not only shattered the taboos of the French right, but initiated its inexorable shift towards the far right. And it is the entire political spectrum that finds itself modified. It is also the credibility of public discourse in its entirety that is affected, as the gap is vast between the words used, those of the Republic and its values, and the content of often anti-republican speeches.
A large part of the so-called republican right is so unapologetic that it does nothing other than promote, with impunity, the far-right theses it once fought against. Apologetic, this new French right wallows in the stigmatization of what it calls “welfare dependency”, sometimes validating the direct link between immigration and unemployment, sometimes supporting the “Manif pour tous”, sometimes sinking into ultra-security discourse and often infringing basic rules of secularism.
The quest for national identity, the constant claim of Europe’s Christian roots, and then the allegiance to a supposed Judeo-Christian civilization founded a new identity-based confessional populism. The latest example being, by only agreeing to welcome the Eastern Christians and casting suspicion of terrorism on any person of Muslim faith, some “republican” mayors have recently publicly displayed their Islamophobia.
What shocked in Nadine Morano’s latest outburst, more than the rejection of others in hackneyed, outdated terms, and the return to racial terminology, is the rejection of others itself. But the xenophobic identity retreat movement is identical.
Faced with this surge of hatred, faced with this ideological shift, what to do?
First of all, it is necessary to stop presenting the far right in the French political spectrum as solely embodied by the National Front. It is in reality diffuse and its theses are supported far beyond.
It is up to the voters to demand from genuinely republican parties that they make all the necessary clarity in their speeches and actions. And that they not invest in or even exclude candidates, elected officials, and representatives promoting extreme right ideas. Sanctioning Nadine Morano who declared that France is a country of the white race is the least of it. But by whom will she be sanctioned? Who runs the party she belongs to? Oh yes, the one who declared that the African man has not yet entered History… And who publicly supports her? Oh yes, the deputy mayor of Nice, the one who affirmed that an ID card is not enough to make a Frenchman… And the members of this party do not protest? Do they ask for more? And the centrists campaign together with them? And everyone finds this normal?
And what reactions on the left, once the sweet time of indignation has passed? Who will lead the assault against this new identity populism? The head of government? The same one who declared that Roma only have the vocation to return to Romania? The one who passed a libellous law on intelligence, taking advantage of the opportunity of a real terrorist threat to instrumentalize the legitimate fear it raises as a political weapon?
It is up to the members of the Socialist Party to demand from their party and the government composed of its members not to enshrine a harmful security drift at their turn and at their level. It is up to them not to let the governing left adopt the language and solutions of the liberal right, now occupying the space left vacant by this traditional right migrating towards the extreme right. It is also up to opponents of the European Union’s austerity policy not to accept, under the guise of a union of sovereigntists, rapprochements and unnatural alliances with the extreme right.
Where are the humanist consciences to reject the arguments of those who advocate sorting human beings according to their faith? Where are the left-wing intellectuals in the face of the over-mediatized profusion of decline visions? And above all, where is the “left-wing people”? It seems divided, dislocated, lost between, for some, unconditional support for the party of renouncement, for others, belonging to different far-left or ecological parties that retain an ideological coherence but unfortunately cannot embody an alternative at the polls, and for an ever-increasing number, a new, claimed abstentionism, made of disappointment, rejection of political practices, and visceral refusal to endorse the indefensible policy of a government and a majority yet emerging from their ranks.
The reality is that there will be no grand evening. The reality is that it is vain and childish to wait for the providential man just as it is vain and futile to wait for a French Podemos or Syriza to emerge ex nihilo. It is up to us, it is up to each of us to contribute our part, our stone to the edifice, to not let things happen and, beyond simple reaction, to lay the foundations for a refoundation.
We must simultaneously wage the cultural battle to raise the flag of humanism lying on the ground, redefine and reaffirm our values, and, with our own means, each according to what they can contribute, give meaning to citizen engagement.
by David Nakache
