Choosing a fate.
There is one thing every French citizen agrees upon: the second and final round of the presidential election will have far-reaching consequences. It will not just decide between two candidates, or two parties, or even two political or economic philosophies. Rather, it will settle the fate of France as a nation.
For clarification, examine the 18th district in northern Paris. It voted heavily for the left in the first round on April 22, and is poised to do the same in the second round. François Hollande, the socialist candidate, garnered 43% of the vote there, much more than the 28% he received nationally. Far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon received 15% there but only 11% nationally. The other left candidates received a combined 7% both there and nationally. All in all, the left won a staggering 65% of the vote in the 18th, about 20 points higher than the national returns.
Incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy took only 19% of the vote in the 18th; nationally he took 27%. Far-right contender Marine Le Pen won only 6.5% there, a huge difference from her 18% nationally. Centrist François Bayrou received 7.7% locally and 9% nationally. With the addition of 2% won by conservative dissenter Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, the combined strength of the local right and center amounted to no more than 35%, compared to the national take of 55%.
A completely different picture emerged in the neighboring northwestern 17th district of Paris.
There, Sarkozy was the undisputed frontrunner, with 44% of the vote. While Hollande lagged with 26%, Bayrou finished slightly better than he did nationally, with over 10%. Mélenchon stayed near 7%; Le Pen fell to 6%. The far left took 3%.
The right and the center took 60% of the vote in the 17th, while the left did not even reach 40%.
Politically speaking, why are these neighboring districts worlds apart? The 17th is a bit richer as a whole, a bit more bourgeois than the 18th, but there are both affluent and working class areas in both districts. The actual differences are ethnic and cultural.
The 18th is essentially a “neo-French” stronghold: a place where most inhabitants are immigrants (or children of immigrants) from non-European countries and where Islam is the dominant religion. Admittedly, two major tourist spots with a distinct French flavor — Old Montmartre, the Disneyland-style artists’ village near Sacré-Cœur Basilica atop Montmartre Hill; and Pigalle, nowadays merely a sex shop row — are to be found here. But they are just enclaves in an otherwise increasingly alien environment.
To understand what the 18th district really is, one must examine everyday life. For instance, note the street prayers that Muslim Arabs and sub-Saharan Muslims have been routinely organizing on Fridays. Though an illegal practice — it blocks cars and even pedestrian traffic for hours — the socialist mayor of Paris and the police have had no option (so say they) other than tacitly tolerating it.
On the contrary, the 17th remains staunchly French in outlook. Its inhabitants, whatever their race, ethnicity, or religion, prefer France to be Western, Judeo-Christian, and democratic. They do not want it to become a post-Western, “globalized” nation. (Or, to use a formerly rude and now politically correct French expression: “Une société métissée” – a mongrel society).
Quite remarkably, the 17th district today hosts — along with more districts and communes in western Greater Paris — the largest French Jewish community. Many of the local Jews are Sephardic immigrants (rather, refugees) from Arab countries who upon coming to France lived in the same areas as Muslim immigrants from North Africa or sub-Saharan Africa. They were forced over the years to migrate to areas where they could expect to be both physically and emotionally safer.
What is true of Paris is equally true of the rest of France, except that in many places the National Front gets a much larger share of the conservative vote. Anywhere the left is winning, the neo-French factor makes the difference. Anywhere the right is ahead, opposition to métissage and Islamization is the key mobilizing argument. The political class, right or left, does not like to mention it too loudly. Even Marine Le Pen sees to it not to dwell only on “national identity” matters, but rather to also run as a champion of the poor and the outcasts.
Still, this is the real issue. A Hollande victory on Sunday will resonate as a great leap forward for the neo-French and as the beginning of the end for traditional France. A Sarkozy victory will mean that the case is deferred for at least another five years.
Just how many do the neo-French number? Under French law which bars global and interlinked statistics to race, religion, or ethnic origin, it is very difficult to compute reliable figures. An additional difficulty stems from the special character of the French polity, which consists of France proper (European France including Corsica) and distant overseas territories from the French West Indies to French Polynesia. Technically, overseas-born citizens or their children cannot be referred to as immigrants, though most of them are cultural aliens in many ways and tend to behave much as foreign immigrants when they settle in metropolitan France.
A further difficulty: there are marked differences among immigrants, between Europeans and non-Europeans on one hand, and even among non-Europeans on the other hand. Some of them came to France to be French, some to turn France into their own thing.
We may rely on some figures. According to Eurostat (the statistical office of the European Union), metropolitan France was in 2011 the most immigration-oriented of all EU countries: 26.6% of its inhabitants were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. A similar figure is provided by Insee, the French National Institute of Statistics: they found that 23.9% of all babies born in metropolitan France in 2010 had at least one parent born outside of Europe, including the overseas French territories. Roughly speaking, this amounts to one quarter of the 63 million population, or about 15 million people.
Some 40% of the global immigrant community must be subtracted from these figures: the European, East Asian, or Latin American immigrants, as well as the Christian or Jewish refugees from the Middle East or North Africa, see themselves as French rather than as neo-French. On the other hand, the five million French citizens from overseas territories tend to identify with the neo-French and the post-Western project (overseas France voted overwhelmingly for Hollande on April 22). Which brings us back to 15 million.
By and large, this is a rapidly growing community. Its birthrate is much higher than the average French birthrate, and further immigration is constantly reinforcing it. Legal immigration only amounted to 180,000 individuals in 2011, which means that almost two million new citizens, most of them neo-French, might have aggregated to the French population as a whole by 2010. Illegal immigration is said to be as important, which would lead to a net immigration surplus of four million people, most of them neo-French. All in all, half the population of France writ large — the younger half — can be forecast to be neo-French at some point between 2020 and 2030.
While not all neo-French are Muslim (the French polity’s Muslim population amounts to less than 10 million people, and some French Muslims are in fact quite secular), militant Islam — endowed as it is with a purpose, a will to power, networks, foreign money, and leverage — is clearly the driving force behind the neo-French project. But what makes Islam irresistible is a tactical alliance with the left. In France, like everywhere, the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy has eroded the left’s largest voting blocks: the working class and the civil service. Immigrants and the so-called minorities are however providing an alternative and potentially more important constituency. Philosophers like Toni Negri, Michael Hardt, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek, as well as“anti-globalist“ pamphleteers like Stéphane Hessel (a guru of the Occupy movement), have revamped the old Marxist topoi in order to make the switch palatable. The proletariat is known nowadays as the “Multitude,” and the West as the “Empire.” Jews, once the chosen people of the revolution, have been recast as Zionists, the spearhead of counter-revolution.
The killings in southern France a few weeks ago were a moment of truth in this respect. As one will remember, a neo-French jihadist of Algerian origin named Mohamed Merah murdered in cold blood three non-Caucasian soldiers (whom he saw as traitors) and then four Jews: a teacher and three children of 7, 5, and 4. For about 36 hours, there was some reason to believe that the killer was in fact a far-right extremist, similar to the Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik. The left parties and various Muslim groups started organizing mass rallies against racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia throughout France. When the killer’s identity was finally established, and when it appeared that the French Muslim community nurtured ambivalent feelings, if not sympathy, towards him, the whole idea was dropped. Some democratically minded Muslims, led by Hassen Chalghoumi, the mufti of Drancy in northern Paris, set up an anti-racist and anti-terrorist demonstration on April 29, the French national Shoah memorial day. They attracted less than one hundred followers.
In between the two presidential rounds, Nicolas Sarkozy constantly mentioned France’s national identity as one of his priorities. France, he said in Toulouse on April 29, “was twenty centuries old. … It was the combined produce of Christianity, the Enlightenment, the Revolution, and the anti-Nazi resistance. … It was the land of Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Joan of Arc. … It was keeping the memory of the Shoah and of the thousands of North African Muslims who had fought in its armies during WW2.”
Clearly, he was wooing both Marine Le Pen’s and François Bayrou’s supporters, the key voters in the second round. But his words rang true.
Hollande has also undertaken winning at least some of Le Pen’s votes. During his debate with Sarkozy Wednesday evening, he repeatedly said that he would be as tough as anybody on immigration matters, and would uphold a strict separation between state and religion. He even said that his most controversial and most pro-immigration proposal — granting electoral franchise to legal foreign residents in local ballots — was not to be taken seriously, since it implied a complex and unlikely constitutional revision in the first place.
But such cynical short-term tactics cannot change that the long-term future of the left lies with the neo-French only.
Michel Gurfinkiel is the founder and president of the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute in Paris.