French Muslims brace for Le Pen presidency

LE BOURGET, France — “Inshallah, it won’t be Marine Le Pen,” said Nassim with an anxious smile. “But if it is, we’ll have to accept our fate.”

Handing out fliers at last weekend’s Annual Meeting of French Muslims just north of Paris, the baby-faced 25-year-old said he’d happily vote for any other candidate to keep Le Pen from becoming France’s first far-right president. Even if it meant abandoning his left-wing convictions.

Nassim’s dilemma reflects the difficult position many French Muslim voters find themselves in — traditionally loyal to the political left, partly for its track record of championing social equality, this year’s campaign has offered up no viable candidate from the mainstream left. This means France’s Muslim population has had to wade through the campaign promises of a jumble of loose-cannon candidates in an increasingly polarized debate in which they have become prime targets themselves. And in which one candidate in particular has raised alarm at what she says is the encroaching influence of radical Islam in France.

“If Marine Le Pen arrives in power, this dream of ours — our common ambition to live alongside each other — will be finished,” says Nassim, a student at a top Paris business school who preferred to go by his first name.

Some 50,000 visitors flock to the Paris suburb of Le Bourget every year for Europe’s biggest Muslim gathering, an event somewhere between a religious convention and a giant exercise in Islamic retail therapy. In between lectures on spiritual and political issues, visitors throng hundreds of stalls to snap up headscarves and dresses, sticky halal sweets, books, soap and perfume.

This year, in the wake of a presidential campaign during which the role of Islam and perceived threats to French identity have played an outsized role, convention-goers were noticeably apprehensive about the vote on Sunday, when the country goes to the polls in the first round of the most nail-biting election in decades.

Muslims overwhelmingly backed Socialist François Hollande at the last election in 2012; nearly 90 percent chose him over the right-wing incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy.

Amar Lasfar, head of the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF), which has organized the fair for the past 34 years, implored the assembled crowd on Saturday to “go and vote.” It would be up to them to “protect France from the threat of the far right,” he said.

On the eve of the gathering in Le Bourget, Le Pen had released a video calling on the interior ministry to shut down the event. She has repeatedly urged the government to ban the UOIF over alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and complained that it has invited what she calls “hardcore hate preachers” to address its annual fair in previous years.

Lasfar accused the National Front leader of “pouring oil on the fire” and defended his organization’s respectability as France’s biggest Muslim federation. The UOIF was officially rebranded as “Muslims of France” at this year’s gathering, in a move to smooth its image in wider French society. Like other presidential candidates, Le Pen snubbed an invitation to attend the fair.

Marine Le Pen has repeatedly urged the government to ban the Union of French Islamic Organizations over alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood | Loic Venance/AFP via Getty Images

The National Front leader would hardly have picked up many votes anyway. Muslims overwhelmingly backed Socialist François Hollande at the last election in 2012; nearly 90 percent chose him over the right-wing incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, according to a post-vote study by pollster IFOP.

France heavily restricts the collection of ethnic and religious data, and no published surveys have tracked how the Muslim community — at an estimated 5 million strong, one of the largest in Europe — is likely to vote this Sunday and in the decisive run-off on May 7.

Antoine Jardin, a sociologist at the National Scientific Research Center and Sciences Po university who has researched the voting habits of Muslims in working-class suburbs, stressed there was no such thing as “the Muslim vote.” The community is as diverse as any other, he said, and in any case, data is sketchy.

Macron accused Le Pen during a presidential debate of treating “more than 4 million French women and men” like “enemies of the Republic.”

But he acknowledged that France’s Muslims have traditionally leaned left, in part because of leftist parties’ role in pushing for decolonization and fighting against racism. The fact that many Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians arrived as industrial workers in the post-war boom years also meant their children were raised in a staunchly left-wing environment.

Those mingling around the stands in Le Bourget hailed almost exclusively from the left, but it was difficult to find anyone putting their faith in Hollande’s anointed Socialist successor, Benoît Hamon. Like left-wingers across the country, many saw little point in backing a candidate languishing at 8 percent in the polls.

Instead, the name on French Muslims’ lips this past weekend was that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left firebrand who has seen a surge of support in recent weeks and now has a genuine shot at reaching the second round of voting. Polls place him nationally at 20 percent, just a couple of points behind front-runners Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron, and neck-and-neck with embattled conservative François Fillon.

Mélenchon, Muslim defender?

“His ideas are definitely eye-catching, especially for people from our community,” said an animated young woman who gave her name only as Sarah. Immaculately made-up under a black hijab, she was in Le Bourget to promote a new guide to the best halal restaurants in the Paris area.

Sarah, still undecided, said she was considering casting her vote for Mélenchon, who has proposed huge public spending increases, a 100 percent tax on earnings over €360,000, and a renegotiation of all European Union treaties.

“In some places, people feel like he’s standing up for us,” she said.

Mélenchon’s far-left party has won around a fifth of Muslim votes since 2002, according to the IFOP study, which noted this was partly attributable to “his very clear opposition to the [National Front] and his recognition of the benefits that Arab-Muslim immigration has brought to France.”

Among the many people perusing the bright clothing racks in Le Bourget, most said they were preoccupied with the same issues as other French voters: how to kick-start the country’s torpid economy, how to secure the best education for their children. Some expressed the same criticisms of the EU and globalization more commonly associated with Le Pen supporters.

Yet the context of this election — after two years in which more than 230 people have been killed in successive jihadist attacks on French soil — escaped no one. The backlash has handed Le Pen huge gains as her party capitalized on people’s fear for their security and contributed to an increasingly polarized debate over what it means to be French.

In the wake of the November 2015 Paris attacks, Hollande’s controversial proposals to strip dual nationality terror convicts of their French nationality — ultimately dropped — galled many Muslims who felt the measure exclusively targeted immigrants and their descendants.

And then there was last summer’s furious debate over the “burkini,” when several mayors in the south of France moved to ban the full-body Islamic swimsuit from their beaches. Le Pen backed their right to do so, calling the swimwear an affront to French secular values. Both she and Fillon have expressed support for a national ban on the garment.

A French woman named Dalila wears a burkini, as she sunbathes, on the beach at Carras in Nice | Christophe Magnenet/AFP via Getty Images

For Sarah, it was an upsetting episode. She feels Le Pen and Fillon have “made a business” out of attacking Muslims.

“I wear a headscarf. It doesn’t bother me if I go to the beach and there’s a woman topless there,” she said. “We’re in France. I grew up here. My father, who wasn’t born in France, always raised me to be tolerant.”

‘Multicultural drift’

Burkinis — now allowed back on all beaches after the courts intervened — were on sale at this weekend’s fair, a visible reminder of unresolved tensions. As were panel discussions on deradicalization; on life in the depressed, immigrant-heavy suburbs that have produced many young jihadists; on whether a French version of Islam is truly possible. One phrase came up time and time again in conversation: vivre-ensemble, or the ability to live together.

“The vast majority of French Muslims live their faith in a way that is absolutely peaceful in its respect for republican values,” Le Pen said earlier this month. But she has accused Fillon of letting ultra-conservative Muslims shut themselves off from the rest of society while he was prime minister from 2007 to 2012, and warns that Macron, too, would “accelerate the multicultural drift” with his relaxed attitude to community relations.

Fillon, a devout Catholic, has also threatened to get tough with the UOIF but rejects a ban on the veil in universities. Macron, meanwhile, accused Le Pen during a presidential debate of treating “more than 4 million French women and men” like “enemies of the Republic.”

Most Muslims shopping in Le Bourget could imagine nothing worse than watching Le Pen move in to the Elysée Palace.

Laoufel Gasmi, the deputy mayor of the Strasbourg suburb Illkirch-Graffenstaden who was in Le Bourget to promote his Muslim NGO, called Le Pen’s rhetoric “corrosive” and designed to exacerbate rifts in society.

“Sometimes for politicians the old adage ‘divide and conquer’ makes sense,” he said.

Most Muslims shopping in Le Bourget could imagine nothing worse than watching Le Pen move into the Elysée Palace. Yet some said they were willing to consider her proposals, not least when it comes to shaking up France’s relations with Europe.

Shaïma Seghiri, a 19-year-old wearing a bright yellow headscarf over a leather jacket, said she found common ground with Le Pen in her doubts over the EU. She’s backing fringe anti-EU candidate François Asselineau.

“For me, quitting the euro is a good idea — that would kickstart the economy,” the psychology student said.

Still, she and her friends are worried about what kind of future Muslims would face under a Le Pen presidency.

“It’s a shame,” chipped in Nour, a 19-year-old trainee nurse. “Because her policies, they aren’t bad.”

Claire Sergent is a freelance journalist working for Europe 1 and other media in France, previously based at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London. Katy Lee is a journalist with Agence France-Presse in Paris, formerly reporting from London and Hong Kong.