FROM MUSLIMS VOTING TO THE MUSLIM VOTE
We have seen that the suddenness, intensity, spatial dispersion, and temporal extent of the riots in autumn 2005 marked a turning point. At the same time, no party or organization succeeded in transforming the anger of the young people who took part in the confrontations with the police into a common cause or a concrete demand. The riots gave way to a silence that could be interpreted in many ways, and politicians tried to benefit from this silence by producing an intelligible interpretation of it.
More than twenty years after the March of the Beurs in 1983, the festering problem of the banlieues led to an unprecedented political crisis. Although the riots shocked French society into questioning itself, France failed to learn from them and to orient its politics accordingly. The left, which was then focused on the Socialist Party congress held in the Loire region of northern France from November 18 to November 20, 2005, right after the riots, gave the situation in the banlieues only minimal attention. Those attending the congress were preoccupied with the party primaries and with strategic positioning in the run-up to the 2007 presidential election. François Hollande, the compromise candidate, was re-elected party leader purely on the basis of internal party politics.
By contrast, the right was marked by the latent confrontation between Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy. Faced with the riots, it was unable to respond with a single voice. That did not prevent the latter from taking full advantage of the hard-nosed approach that he would make the springboard for his election as president of the Republic in 2007.
During the preceding years, the marginalized neighborhoods of the large French cities all underwent profound political changes. No matter how surprising they may seem, the events of 2005 were certainly not a bolt from the blue. Over time, the old alliances between migrants from countries that had been French colonies and organizations in the world of labor eroded—slowly but deeply. The ability of the labor unions and the Communist Party to subordinate differences in origin and religion to a feeling of class solidarity declined as the Communist Party adopted, under the impact of its electoral competition with the Socialist Party, a more nationalistic pose.
In the eastern Parisian banlieue Clichy-sous-Bois, the Communist mayor André Deschamps, denounced by his party for having made racist remarks during an electoral campaign, moved toward the National Front. (As early as 1983 in another former Communist bastion in Paris’s eastern banlieues, Montfermeil, the far-rightist Pierre Bernard took advantage of the weak Socialist Party presence to put down political roots.) The descendants of migrants, who were excluded from stable employment and employees’ collectives but who continued to adhere to the old logic of fraternity, no longer had the resources and connections to formulate and put forward common political demands. Moreover, the development of xenophobic discourses, marked by the electoral breakthrough of the National Front in 1984, shattered the solidarities that had emerged from the world of unionized workers, thus accelerating the ethnicization of the social fabric.
The topic of immigration, which had until then played a minor role in political debate, became a bone of contention. The failure of the left to grasp the pressing problem of the banlieues before the riots of 2005—the “rendez-vous manqué” (missed opportunity), as sociologist Olivier Masclet described it—became evident in the rioters’ lack of leftist sloganeering. Powered by a shared indignation at the death of two adolescents hiding from police in a power station and the explosion of a tear gas grenade on the threshold of a mosque in Clichy-sous-Bois, the protesting public showed little awareness of any of the prior, deeper causes of the riots.
A community organization in Clichy, the Association collectif liberté égalité fraternité ensemble unis (ACLEFEU1), was formed to provide a political response to the “social revolts” of autumn 2005. The group’s very name was part of its attempt to draw attention away from the violent nature of the riots and toward the economic causes and the conditions of everyday life that led to them. In the immediate wake of the disturbances, group leaders maintained a presence every evening in the neighborhoods in hopes of maintaining a relative calm while at the same time negotiating with public authorities new measures to help these marginalized areas.
The list of grievances2 compiled by ACLEFEU during a tour through France’s “sensitive” housing projects and written up just after the riots concludes with the following words:
This collection of testimonies reveals an accumulation of instances of neglect. Nonetheless, those with grievances [les “doléants”] still want to believe in the Republic and its values. The French support one another and want to participate “together and united” in a positive transformation of society.
ACLEFEU sought to reinforce a feeling of belonging-as-citizens by leading the rioters to abandon demonstrations of strength in favor of becoming politically engaged as a pressure group using the model of American “community organizing.” The cahiers text goes on to emphasize the organization’s objective of converting violent protest into political mobilization and, ultimately, voting. The appeal then addresses the political class:
[French citizens] now intend to use their right to vote, to examine how your programs address their expectations, and to assess the effectiveness of your action. Determined to become actors in this change, they expect that you will take the necessary actions to improve their everyday lives, that you will listen to them, that you will involve them.
For ACLEFEU, the low level of voter turnout and the rise of social tensions were the consequence of the lack of interest and effectiveness on the part of politicians incapable of responding to the demands of residents of the banlieues. The association’s activists themselves could not fall back on the support of a social consensus in France as a whole. Their demands, associated with a left-wing tradition long established in the marginalized neighborhoods of large cities, were now out of step with the attitudes of the majority of the population. The violence and destruction of property that took place during the riots alienated the country from the young people of the banlieues, preventing the growth of shared solidarity and sapping any political will to take action to help them.
The “toleration index,” published each year by the National Commission on Human Rights to measure the extent of the French public’s attitudes toward minority groups, fell abruptly in 2005 under the combined impact of the fear of the “Polish plumber”—cheap labor coming from new Eastern European EU member states threatening French jobs—and the crisis in the banlieues. At the same time, the riots marked the return of state activism in urban areas through an ambitious “Program of Urban Redevelopment” (PRU), which continued the plan adopted two years earlier under the auspices of the charismatic Minister for Urban Affairs Jean-Louis Borloo. Immediately afterward, the Agence nationale pour la rénovation urbaine (ANRU, or National Agency for Urban Renewal) was established, with the mission of demolishing more than two hundred thousand housing units and constructing the same number of new units, as well as remodeling an equivalent additional number. These political measures were limited to improving the conditions of housing and the organization of local life. They did not include provisions for expanding urban transportation or for improving access to employment.
Numerous elected officials applauded the PRU, which was accompanied by a temporary increase in economic activity and which provided new resources for the municipalities concerned. Others condemned the lack of democracy in the planning and implementation of this program.
Although the mechanisms for consulting the affected residents put in place and widely promoted by state officials could have served as a complement to political participation, they could not make up for the lack of political representation. In short, even before the world economic crisis of 2008, public policies deployed in the French banlieues neglected the economic issues that caused marginalization and that reinforced social and ethnoracial segregation. The measures put in place in urban areas proved insufficient and could not prevent an increase in unemployment and economic insecurity. Moreover, the demands for political participation were given little attention, thus undermining the legitimacy of urban activists and reformers.
In this context, the process launched by ACLEFEU, later complemented by other (sometimes rival) associations such as Au-delà des mots (ADM, or Beyond Words) and Mouvement de l’immigration et des banlieues (MIB, or Movement of Immigrants and Banlieues), adopted the twofold objective of channeling violent protest toward institutional participation and opening up political avenues for young people from immigrant families. These demands for equality were situated in the tradition of French immigrant movements and revolutionary history through the references to the aforementioned cahiers de doléance. (These grievances, submitted to the National Assembly at the end of a march on November 25, 2006, one year after the riots, assembled more than twenty thousand contributions from a hundred cities.)
At that time, the national mood was still shaped by the events of the 2002 French presidential elections four years earlier. These elections were marked by the elimination of former Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin in the first-round voting, while the second round featured a contest between right-wing incumbent president Jacques Chirac and the far-right Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. The 2002 campaign had focused on the lack of security in the impoverished banlieues, and the community organizations working in these areas, including ACLEFEU, were led by people attempting to lead the participants in the riots away from violence and into a new form of partnership with the left.
These attempts failed—at least in part. Voter registration of banlieue residents increased, but the incentives offered as a way of turning the protests expressed during the riots into a political force failed to yield a workable and effective electoral option. Neither was public policy changed. In light of these failures, the politics of compromise that was being sold to the young people in the projects came with a significant social and symbolic cost. Disappointed, they turned away from the compromise inherent in electoral politics and took a different path—that of confrontation without a clear political agenda. Later on, this focus on confrontation was to be co-opted and instrumentalized by certain groups, first and foremost Islamist movements, whose discourse already advocated a break with French society. Thus did the processes of religious radicalization in the decade between 2005 and 2015 take root on ground made fertile by the failure of the efforts at political reform.
In the wake of the riots, an ideological change took place within the electoral base of the right wing in the National Assembly. Nicolas Sarkozy, who was then minister of the interior, opted for a divisive strategy after having tried to make an alliance with Muslim organizations such as the Union des organisations islamiques de France (UOIF), which had a conservative agenda on issues concerning morals and ethics. He had attended the UOIF congress with some fanfare in April 2003, but during the 2005 riots, the organization failed to exercise the social control it claimed to have over the residents of the projects. The UOIF’s demonstrated ineffectiveness would pave the way for a new generation of Islamist leaders with a far more radical social agenda.
At the same time, public opinion was clearly becoming more hostile to immigration. Polls in late 2006 showed that almost 45 percent of the French blamed the riots on the failures of the young rioters’ parents, and 25 percent blamed immigration in general. This provided the minister of the interior, eying the upcoming presidential election in 2007, with the incentive to pivot toward an unparalleled tough political message. This step of Sarkozy’s put distance between him and the legacy of outgoing president Jacques Chirac. In Sarkozy’s eyes, Chirac had become too soft from June 1997 onward due to his “cohabitation” with Lionel Jospin’s government after the latter’s Socialist Party won the parliamentary elections and remained in power for a five-year tenure until May 2002, when Chirac was re-elected president after an electoral battle with Jean-Marie le Pen.
By contrast, Ségolène Royal, the new Socialist candidate for president chosen to face Sarkozy in 2007, opted to develop ties with the banlieues. On February 27, 2007, and with great fanfare, she made a public appearance in Clichy-sous-Bois to sign ACLEFEU’s manifesto. Adopting an opposing stance to her competitor, she stated: “The disenfranchised neighborhoods are not a problem, they are part of the solution to France’s problems.” The mobilizing effect was to prove real in the banlieues, but it was not enough to change the outcome of the election on the national level. Her position also served to alienate Royal from that part of the left’s middle-class base that was attracted to the law-and-order discourse of the right in response to the riots. Sarkozy’s victory in 2007 owed a great deal to the consolidation of a wide-ranging socially conservative electorate from the center-left to the extreme right.
On the left, five years after the trauma of Lionel Jospin’s elimination from the contest for the presidency after the first round of voting in April 2002, Ségolène Royal became the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate by winning the party’s internal primary against the wishes of the party’s top officials. Throughout her campaign, she chose to oppose Sarkozy at every turn so as to minimize dissent in Socialist ranks, and she used strong leftist language to that end. While on the campaign trail, for example, she went to the island of Martinique in the French Caribbean in January 2007 and met Aimé Césaire, the famed poet of negritude and a former Member of the National Assembly who had long fought for the recognition of slavery as a crime against humanity. During this public meeting, Royal criticized a law passed by the right-wing French Parliament in February 2005 that introduced into school curricula a statement about “the positive role of the French presence abroad, notably in North Africa.” According to Royal, “[t]his revisionist interpretation of history is unacceptable. Colonialism is a system of domination, spoliation, and humiliation.” Césaire gave her his support. She then promoted the notion of a “racially mixed France” (France métissée), a slogan that elicited a chauvinist reaction and ultimately favored her right-wing opponent. Moreover, the universalist conception of humanity that she repeatedly evoked sidestepped the contentious issue of the relation between Islam and secularism, a notoriously difficult issue for the French left and about which the left’s different traditions have yet to come to a consensus.
In the wake of the riots of autumn 2005, France’s very self-image was destabilized. Sarkozy was able to take advantage of this crisis by positioning himself as a stabilizing force on the right. He succeeded both in siphoning votes from Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front and in undercutting the left. The ebbing of the far right plunged the National Front into political and financial difficulties from which it would emerge only after several years of disorganization and ideological retooling that included Marine Le Pen’s ascendancy to the party leadership.
Serge Laroze, a National Front politician who in 2012 would become a party candidate in the legislative elections of that year in a district near Toulouse in southwest France, recalls this difficult patch for the far right in an interview with the authors:
In 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy siphoned off the National Front’s votes, taking over our themes, and to some extent our solutions. But he didn’t go that far: he created a sort of “soft” version of the National Front. Many Front supporters said to themselves: “He’s like Jean-Marie Le Pen, but more credible!” We lost a lot of votes, and we found ourselves in financial difficulty: our subsidy collapsed, and wherever we didn’t reach 5 percent of the popular vote,3 we had to pay back the campaign costs.
In the banlieues, 2006 and 2007 were marked by a significant rise in registered voters—from 637,000 to 708,000 in the northeastern Parisian département of Seine-Saint-Denis, an increase of 11 percent. This surge was twice the national average, which was estimated at 6 percent. In some communes with large disenfranchised neighborhoods, it was even greater: 29 percent in Clichy-sous-Bois, representing 1,500 additional voters; more than 14 percent in the north-central division of La Courneuve; more than 12 percent in Vaulx-en-Velin, a large outlying district of Lyon; and 11.5 percent in Argenteuil in northwestern Paris.
These local dynamics did not concern all the areas where riots occurred in 2005. But the increase in these areas was greater than in the rest of the country, with spikes in the especially sensitive zones that had been a locus of confrontation with Sarkozy a few months before the riots. As minister of the interior, Sarkozy visited the Quatre-vingt treize city of La Courneuve in June 2005 shortly after a child, Sid-Ahmed Hammache, had been shot dead by a stray bullet during a conflict between two rival gangs. In front of the television cameras, Sarkozy made his difference with Jacques Chirac clear: “Starting tomorrow, we’re going to clean out this place with a Kärcher.4 We’ll bring in the necessary personnel and stay as long as it takes, but it will be cleaned up.” Such parlance made a stir even with some of his colleagues in Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin’s government.
On October 26, 2005, Sarkozy visited police headquarters in Argenteuil, in Val-d’Oise. His motorcade was booed by a large group of young people. Sarkozy addressed residents observing the situation from their balconies: “Have you had enough of this? Have you had enough of this bunch of riffraff? Well, we’re going to get rid of them for you.” Thus did Sarkozy use the fresh collective memory of the riots to reinforce an existing polarization rather than producing a new one. Such gestures succeeded in tilting the French right-wing vote away from Chirac and Villepin’s moderation and toward a tougher stance on security matters linked to banlieues’ unrest.
Among the inhabitants of the marginalized neighborhoods, people from immigrant families were overrepresented among the new voters of 2007, and they voted mainly for the left. Thus Nicolas Sarkozy’s victory and the right’s tougher language coincided with the entry into politics of these second-generation immigrants who had been marked by the riots. The electoral triumph of their nemesis, Sarkozy, despite their unprecedented level of political mobilization left a bitter taste in the mouths of these new voters and had long-lasting effects.
Henceforth the “postcolonial” immigrant vote would play a significant role in French electoral politics. Second-generation immigrants have registered to vote in increasing numbers since 2007. Because of their French nationality, they enjoy voting rights that their foreign-born elders do not share.5 And as a consequence of the spread of mixed marriages, other forms of naturalization, and changes in the structure of immigrant families, it has become exceedingly difficult to speak of a clear-cut divide between scions of immigrants and the “majority” population. Social mixture has become a fact of French life that is not readily acknowledged in popular depictions of French society. Many French citizens have at least one person in their family of postcolonial immigration origin. Data provided by the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE, or National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies) in 2008 show that the French population included 3.2 million immigrants from Africa and Asia as well as 1.4 million of their direct descendants. France has entered what populations studies scholar François Héran has called Le Temps des immigrés—“The Time of Immigrants.”6
Theoretically, the increasing proportion of second-generation immigrants in the population should translate into greater political power for this community. However, their political clout remains undersized relative to their increasing demographic weight. Banlieue youths did not begin registering to vote in significant numbers until 2006—even though voter registration had been made easier under the Jospin Socialist government in 1997. Moreover, their increased but uneven political mobilization was counterbalanced by an increase in the right-wing vote made possible by the aftershocks of the 2005 riots and the incendiary, polarizing language of candidate Sarkozy.
By the time of the 2012 presidential election, the political conditions were quite different. The young people from the banlieues who hadn’t bothered to vote the first time Nicolas Sarkozy ran for office regretted their inaction and were eager to see him defeated in 2012. Their views were shaped not only by the situation in France but also by international events—particularly the turmoil in the Middle East. The war in Iraq, like the conflict between Israel and Palestine, served to mobilize them and reinforced their mistrust of Sarkozy. This is one reason why the 2012 Socialist Party presidential candidate François Hollande succeeded where Ségolène Royal had failed five years earlier.
ECONOMIC CRASH AND IDENTITARIAN REACTIONS
In its intensity, the economic crash that exploded during the summer of 2008 echoed the Great Depression of 1929. The resulting loss of jobs hit the banlieues hard as unemployment increased rapidly and enormously. People holding informal jobs, whether temporary or “under the table,” were hard hit by the general deterioration of economic activity. Between 2008 and 2012, unemployment rates for men rose by 49 percent and those for women by 55 percent. The gaps between “sensitive urban zones” and the rest of society grew larger.
This crisis also damaged the quality of the positions held by people whose financial situation and social status had up to that point been relatively stable. Young college graduates found it harder to secure an internship or find a first job, and in most cases, new hires were offered limited-term contracts, thus decreasing job security. These cumulative effects spread in already segregated areas where lack of public transportation made the difficulty of finding work insurmountable.
In addition to these structural developments, the growing scarcity of jobs intensified discrimination in employment and housing. The manufacturing sector, which is essential to the general economic activity of sensitive industrial zones, was seriously impaired. The planned closure of the Peugeot-Citroën car factory in the northeastern Paris district of Aulnay-sous-Bois threatened almost a hundred thousand people in Seine-Saint-Denis, which has a million and a half residents.
With the economic crisis of 2008, questions of unemployment and social security became of great concern, particularly among second- generation immigrants because of their vulnerable position in the labor market. This was how Farouk Khanfar put it one year after he ran as an independent candidate in the 2012 legislative elections in the Lille banlieues of northern France:
It’s the politicians who are creating the crisis! And then they talk about unemployment, about reducing family allowances, taxing them, reducing unemployment benefits.… That amounts to taking food out of people’s mouths! They say: “It’s your fault, you don’t want to work!” But in reality, there isn’t any work!
Starting in the autumn of 2008, France was shaken by a process of political polarization based on heightened opposition and conflict. This process mostly went unnoticed, because it was not channeled by social movements or other institutions. Even before the global financial crash of September 2008, however, Sarkozy gave people a language with which to express their anger when he placed the subject of French identity on the national agenda.
Sarkozy’s presidential term was characterized by a paradox: the economic question, although it obsessed everyone in the wake of the 2008 crash, was rapidly relegated to the background. Instead, a set of disparate issues relating to identity and involving immigration, French history, secularism, and Islam was substituted for it, while the problem of social and economic discrimination was not directly addressed.
In the absence of a clear strategy for responding to the economic crisis, the quest for an essence of French national identity reopened wounds caused by the crisis in the banlieues. It became the crucible for a confrontation between “us” and “them” and legitimized the propagation of particularist identities.
Criticized for having played the identity card, Nicolas Sarkozy defended himself by quoting Claude Lévi-Strauss: “Identity is not a pathology.” During a November 2009 speech in La Chapelle-en-Vercors, a site associated in the collective memory with the French resistance against the Nazis, the president observed that
we may be living through one of those times when landmarks fade away, when identity becomes unclear, when we begin to feel that something that is essential for us to live is being lost. […] I want to say this because I think it so: by trying to do away with nations out of fear of nationalism we have revived identitarian tensions. It is in the crisis of national identity that a narrow nationalism is reborn, replacing love of country with hatred of others.
In this period, the decline of the National Front seemed irremediable, and no pundit foresaw that in the forthcoming years, the extreme right would be reborn as a dominant political force. Sarkozy, convinced he had dealt a lethal blow to the National Front in 2007 when he siphoned away so much of its constituency, gave himself license to play the identity card for all it was worth—hence, in his 2009 Vercors speech,7 his decision to place the Republic in the long tradition of the French monarchs:
Let us examine how the Republic realized the old Capetian dream of a France one and indivisible, as a state that did away with feudalism. The kings dreamed, the Republic realized. […] Over the centuries, France has never ceased to mix, to interbreed—I’m not afraid to use that expression—and, through this mixture, through this interbreeding, through this assimilation, to transform and enrich itself.
Answering Ségolène Royal and the left more generally, which vaunted the benefits of social and racial mixing (métissage) while disparaging assimilation (associating it with restrictive standardization and oppression), Sarkozy attempted a synthesis, praising both. The rest of the speech seemed to prefigure the 2010 law forbidding the wearing of any veil that covers the face in the public sphere: “France is a country where there is no place for the burqa, where there is no place for the enslavement of women, on any pretext, under any condition or in any circumstance.” He concluded by contrasting “those who know France’s national identity” with those who do not: “Some do not want to engage in this debate because they are afraid of it. If they are afraid of the French national identity, that is because they do not know it. That is an additional reason for opening a debate that will basically teach them what the French national identity is.”
This question thenceforth became a major subject in quarrels among media personalities, politicians, and public intellectuals. A few days after this speech, riots broke out in Marseille (a city with a large population of Algerian descent) after a qualifying soccer match for the World Cup between Algeria and Egypt. Maurad Goual, who stood as an independent right-wing candidate from Marseille in a later round of parliamentary elections, testifies to these events:
It’s true that every match played against teams from Algeria, Morocco, or Tunisia leads to havoc in Marseille. But that was a scandal, it was shameful!
On January 16, 2010, Jean-Claude Gaudin, the mayor of Marseille—and a member of Sarkozy’s right-wing party8—declared during a meeting organized by the Minister for Immigration, Integration, and National Identity, Éric Besson, that
we’re glad that Muslims are happy about the match, except that afterward, when fifteen to twenty thousand of them surged down La Canebière [the main avenue in Marseille], there was only the Algerian flag, not the French flag. That does not please us.
These remarks triggered a national controversy and led to a schism between second-generation immigrants and Sarkozy’s right-wing party.
Meanwhile, a parliamentary commission on the aforementioned proposed legislation restricting the public wearing of veils that cover the face (targeting the niqab as well as the burqa)9 submitted its report in early January 2010. The proposed law was based on an older initiative of the Communist Member of Parliament André Gérin, the president since June 23, 2009, of an investigative committee on the public wearing of veils that obscure the face. The 2010 parliamentary commission’s report, recommending a ban on the niqab and the burqa in public spaces, was submitted to Minister of Justice Michèle Alliot-Marie and became law on September 14, 2010. The majority of the legislators in both the National Assembly and the Senate voted in favor of the law, although most legislators representing the parties of the left abstained.
The National Front managed an unforeseen return to the center of the political stage in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election when it reaped the benefits of the identitarian fire imprudently lit by Sarkozy. Although its new leader, Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the party’s founder, subtly muted the party’s older racially based nationalist rhetoric on immigration, she ensured that Islam and Muslims would become one of her party’s targets. Her strategy was to beat Sarkozy on his own ground and win back the voters lost in the 2007 contest.
Serge Laroze, the National Front politician of Haute-Garonne we already mentioned, illustrated this rhetorical change:
There are twenty million [sic] people of Muslim immigrant extraction […]. I’m not talking about politics, but about arithmetic! […] France has always been a country of immigrants, that’s clear.
But he added:
The problem with Islam is that it isn’t just a religion, but a civil code, a political constitution, a moral law. […] It’s not up to us to adapt to Islam, we have our laws, our Constitution, our temperament, our way of eating and slaughtering animals, etc. We’re not going to eat halal meat, we’re not going to prepare special meals, establish special hours in swimming pools.
He concluded by evoking the prospect of a confrontation:
I think the major problem of France and Europe, and here I’m sure I’m not wrong, is the collision course with Islam.
Stéphane Ravier, a National Front candidate in Marseille’s northern neighborhoods and, since 2014, mayor of that city’s thirteenth and fourteenth arrondissements, developed the same theme using a culinary analogy:
The problem is diversity. By being diverse, a large part of the population no longer knows who it really is: “Am I French? Am I Algerian? Am I Moroccan? Am I secular? Am I a Muslim, since I live in a country that is traditionally Catholic?” All this mixing produces something indigestible. We’re trying to combine couscous with sauerkraut and daube à la provençale. It’s inedible.
Behind the rejection of cultural mixing, symbolized by an inedible dish, he is at pains to praise each gastronomic tradition separately:
If you take each of the dishes, they’re all excellent! I love couscous, on the condition that it’s made like couscous. The mixture of kinds is a collective suicide. And that’s what we’re preparing for ourselves.
This argument makes it possible to reject Muslims not as such but rather as a group that French society cannot assimilate (“digest”) and whose own essence must be preserved. The principle of purity no longer follows the path of race but that of culture.
The National Front’s turn toward culture was also adopted by other elements of the French far right. In late December 2010, the Riposte laïque movement, led by former Trotskyite and Union activist Pierre Cassen, joined forces with the Bloc identitaire and other like-minded European groups of the far right to conduct what they called an Assises de l’islamisation (Symposium on Islamization).
The new anti-Islam discourse denies that it is racist. Anti-Semitism, which played a pivotal role in the history of the traditional far right for decades, has been set aside and replaced by denunciations of the “Islamic threat.” The battle against the “Islamization of France” had already begun in 2002 with the program of National Front dissident Bruno Mégret’s Mouvement National Républicain (MNR—National Republican Movement). Marine Le Pen and her team reformulated the concept and combined it with a selective understanding of French secularism (la laïcité) to justify the rejection of Islam and to denounce the ritual practices of many Muslims.
During this phase of her rise to national prominence, Marine Le Pen took issue with the fast-food chain Quick, which had opened exclusively halal restaurants in certain banlieues. According to her, the government had the right to intervene because it was one of the chain’s investors via the state-run Caisse des dépôts et consignations:10
It is the state that is breaking with the principle of secularism (laïcité) and is imposing not multiculturalism but “monoculturalism,” since in this case what is offered is not multiple but single. It will be halal and nothing else. This is a genuine scandal that breaks with one of the values of our French Republic, which is laïcité. […] I’m sorry, but if I have to be the last hold-out, the last person who refuses to allow the law of the market to take precedence over our traditions, our ways of life, and our values, well then, I’ll be that person.
In early summer 2010, riots broke out in the Villeneuve housing project neighborhood in Grenoble following the death of a hold-up man of Algerian origin who had been shot dead by the police. On July 17 and 18 of that year, the confrontations turned into a riot in which firearms were used, something that had been extremely rare in the riots of 2005. After these events, Nicolas Sarkozy gave what came to be known as “the Grenoble speech,” in which he laid out a new doctrine:
What has happened isn’t a social problem, it’s a problem of criminals, it’s values that are disappearing […]. We must have the right to strip French nationality from any person of foreign origin who has voluntarily endangered the life of a police officer, a gendarme, or any other person who holds a public office. French nationality is something you earn, you have to show that you’re worthy of it. When you shoot at an officer assigned to maintain order, you’re no longer worthy of being French. I also believe that a juvenile delinquent should no longer be able to obtain French nationality automatically as soon as he reaches the age of majority.
The events in Grenoble in 2010 marked an intensification of the violence in a context of increased social tension. The National Front’s return to center stage put strong pressure on the executive branch, and Marine Le Pen’s party used the Grenoble riots to portray the office of the president as weak. Le Pen bolstered her public image and name recognition by ramping up her attack on Islam. In a speech in Lyon in December 2010, she drew a parallel between the Muslim presence in France and the Nazi occupation. According to her, the public prayer performed every Friday in the street on the rue Myrha in the traditionally Algerian neighborhood of Barbès in Paris was a form of occupation:
Now, there are ten or fifteen places where, in a regular way, a certain number of people are coming to seize territory. It’s an occupation of bits of territory, of neighborhoods in which religious law is applied: it’s an occupation. It’s true that there are no tanks, no soldiers, but it’s an occupation all the same.
The sheikh of the mosque on the rue Myrha, in reply, pointed out that the neighborhood had a shortage of mosques: “We were running out of space. We’re using the street, we’re not occupying it.”
SORAL AND ISLAM AGAINST “AMERICAN-ZIONISM”
It was in this context that far-right journalist, essayist, and activist Alain Soral spoke out on behalf of his movement Égalité et réconciliation (Equality and Reconciliation). The trajectory of this complex and controversial public figure has been erratic and unpredictable. Although he presents himself as a former Communist activist, the French Communist Party denies any connection with him. Nonetheless, he worked for a while for the periodical L’Idiot international, founded by writer and activist Jean-Edern Hallier, in which capacity he met Jean-Paul Cruze, the author of a pamphlet entitled “Vers un Front National” (“Toward a National Front”) that made the case for an alliance between Communists and the far right. Soral joined the National Front after the 2005 riots and worked on Jean-Marie Le Pen’s final campaign for the presidency in 2007.
At the same time, Soral created Égalité et réconciliation, which was simultaneously an Internet forum and a network that organized meetings in Paris and in the provinces. It has enjoyed great success by encouraging the sort of inflammatory “antisystem” rhetoric that the Web facilitates, adopting the same formulas that have proven successful for the latest generation of jihadists. Égalité et réconciliation claims to represent both the “labor left” and the values of the right, echoing an old National Front slogan: “Socially left-wing, economically right-wing, nationally French.” Soral, the driving force behind this group, has a greater affinity for the older National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen than for the newer version led by Le Pen’s daughter. Thus the rhetoric of his own group reconnects with the racist, anti-Semitic French nationalism of a previous generation. In fact Égalité et réconciliation produces little if any online material hostile to Islam and to Muslims, emphasizing instead the far right’s traditional Judeophobia.
Égalité et réconciliation seeks to reconcile young Muslims and the far right through the propagation of a worldview they call Kontre- Kulture (Counter-Culture). Endeavoring to establish his organization in the banlieues, Soral gives speeches in poor neighborhoods with titles like “La France, l’islam et les banlieues face à l’empire mondialiste” (“France, Islam, and the Banlieues against the Globalist Empire”) that position Muslims as a key resource for French nationalists’ battle against “Zionists.” Soral also seeks to build a bridge between the traditional European far right and residents of the banlieues by challenging the French position on the conflict between Israel and Palestine, deemed too close to “Zionism.”
Alain Soral has collaborated closely with the popular and controversial comedian and activist Dieudonné M’bala M’bala. His relationship with the French-Cameroonian comedian began when they both publicly supported the “anti-Zionist” slate for the European Parliament elections of 2009, which ultimately received more than forty thousand votes. This movement was a continuation of the EuroPalestine collective, which had presented a list of candidates in the 2004 European elections. The famous Charlie Hebdo cartoonist known as Siné was a member of this collective’s support committee, as was the Olympic judo champion Djamel Bouras. Alain Soral, who was also a member of the collective, met Jean-Marie Le Pen shortly afterward, and the two men quickly became very close. Thus the former claimed he had partly written the speech that Jean-Marie Le Pen gave in Valmy (a town symbolic of the victory of French revolutionary armies in September 1792 against the invading Prussian army) to launch his presidential campaign in 2007, in which he reminded those in attendance that
Sarkozy is my exact opposite: the champion of a “yes” vote approving the Euro-Globalist constitution, whereas I was the champion of the national and republican “no”;11 he is communalist-oriented and clientelist, willing to divide in order to rule, going so far as to help the most extreme Islam take root on our terrain the better to stigmatize French North Africans, whereas I am a stubborn and assimilationist patriot.… In short, Sarkozy is a servant of Atlanticism and Empire, whereas I am the defender of small, sovereign, unaligned nations.
In 2007, Jean-Marie Le Pen was the guest of honor at Égalité et Réconciliation’s first “Summer University.”
Over the years, Alain Soral gradually adopted the slogans and arguments of influential old-guard, anti-immigrant, anti-Zionist populists of the far right such as François Duprat or Jean-Gilles Malliarakis, both founding members and former leaders of the National Front. This older far-right discourse, not well known to other political groups, produced a shock wave by its reintroduction in a very different Zeitgeist. Alain Soral declared that he had never had a problem with Islam or with Muslims and that he was mostly concerned with waging a battle against “Americano-Zionists.” This position led him to strengthen his ties with activists coming out of the antiracist movement, who had more of a leftist background.
During this period, far-right populists in Soral’s mold tried, with limited success, to put pressure on new National Front party leader Marine Le Pen. At the same time, Égalité et réconciliation mobilized to defend Ba’athist parties, such as Syria’s Assad regime, because Arab nationalism had long been seen by the right-wing populists as an opponent of Communism and Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Here, international politics resonated with certain expectations of voters in the French banlieues, according to whom the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has wrongly been excluded from French political debate.
This domestic political dynamic was soon influenced by events elsewhere. On July 22, 2011, the Norwegian Anders Breivik carried out a series of attacks in Oslo and on the island of Utøya against young social-democrats. The toll of 77 dead and 151 wounded traumatized a society that saw itself as open and consensual, that had until then imagined that it would be spared the social violence and radicalization that were afflicting other European countries.
Following in the conspiracy theory tradition, Alain Soral made a video in which he denounced Anders Breivik as a Freemason, claiming that the attacks were merely a plot that sought to cast opprobrium on the European far right. A contrario, Jean-Marie Le Pen indulgently suggested that the real culprit was a feckless government that allowed too many immigrants into Norway. On his blog, which was at that time hosted on the National Front website, Le Pen declared:
The situation seems to me serious, not because of this incident involving an individual who, in the grip of a fit of insanity, even if it was temporary, started massacring his fellow citizens. […]. What seems to me more serious, and what this case shows, is the naïveté and inaction of the Norwegian government.
The Breivik case was emblematic insofar as it justified violence by the white nationalist far right while at the same time fulfilling one of the wishes of jihadist Abu Musab al-Suri, who called for the rise of “indigenous” (de souche) violence in Europe that would spur a new generation of armed jihadists to retaliate on European soil in a manner reminiscent of the violent breakdown taking place in the Middle East with the post–Arab Spring upheavals. The hostility to the left, immigrants, and Muslims that animated Breivik, and the location of his attacks in a European country devoid of a colonial past where confrontations among ethnic and religious communities were rare, constituted a major shift in contemporary European history—a shift that also started in France on the occasion of the cantonal elections of 2011.
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MUSLIM VOTE
The cantonal elections12 of 2011 look in retrospect like a rehearsal for the 2012 presidential election. The comeback of the National Front, spurred by its new president, Marine Le Pen, provoked a change in political orientation at the head of Sarkozy’s right-wing party, the Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP). To cope with the competition from a far right that presented itself as the protector of laïcité against the “Islamization of France,” the UMP, for the first time in its history, decided not to issue voting instructions to its electorate in the event that the second round pitted a left-wing candidate against a National Front opponent. This decision, which was debated at length within the party, became a leitmotif in the following years.
The UMP positioned itself at equal distances from both of its main adversaries, adopting a populist strategy known as the “Buisson line”—named after Sarkozy’s advisor Patrick Buisson, whose personal résumé included editing the far-right weekly Minute. The strategy, piloted by UMP militant and former head of the National Front’s youth wing Guillaume Peltier, targeted the right-leaning lower middle class.
For its part, the left also hoped to use these cantonal elections as a tryout for the 2012 presidential election. To that end, it conducted experiments that involved mobilizing support in banlieues inspired by American-style door-to-door campaigning, hoping to find more stable support in strata of society that had become wary of its progressive social agenda.
But it was the strategy adopted by the National Front in these cantonal elections that sent a shock wave throughout the entire field of French politics. From the outset, the Rassemblement Bleu Marine (literally, in a play on Marine Le Pen’s first name, the Navy Blue Union) was intended to attract voters who did not identify with the old far right of her father, Jean-Marie. Co-directed by Marine Le Pen herself and prominent lawyer and media personality Gilbert Collard, the campaign was aimed at “de-demonizing” the party in the eyes of the voters. Making a serious bid for power required the party to work on its image and distance itself from the most repulsive episodes in its history, which were punctuated by the outrageous statements and legal battles of its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. In its founding charter, the organization claimed that it was capable of uniting “patriots on both the left and the right.” Its discourse was strictly “republican,” and while it accorded a special status to Christianity, it said nothing about other religions or spiritual trends:
The Republic is secular and accepts no religion or state ideology in the public sphere. […] It recognizes the role of Christianity in general and of Catholicism in particular in the history of France and in its contribution to French civilization.
Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement Bleu Marine took up some of the National Front’s central themes, such as its rejection of the legitimacy of the international organizations to which nations transferred their sovereignty—for example, the European Union. Her campaign also embraced another key tenet that had been at the heart of the National Front’s discourse for more than thirty years:
The long-term viability of our national solidarity requires that we give preference to French nationals and restrict foreigners’ access to certain benefits and jobs.
In these elections, the National Front’s message was honed and recalibrated in accord with Marine Le Pen’s view that “being French is an honor that is either inherited or merited.”
TOWARD AN ISLAMIC ELECTORAL LOBBY
During this period, new political entrepreneurs in the banlieues, sensing voters’ deep distrust of elected officials on the national level and of the leaders of the established political parties, saw an opening and began setting up new political lobby groups based on ethnic or religious affiliations. Paramount among these was UAM 93, the Union of Muslim Associations of the Seine-Saint-Denis département to the northeast of Paris,13 the first ever lobby group in France based on Islam. The influence of UAM 93 in the French Muslim population was initially quite limited, but it eventually became a significant political player.
Ahmed Khelifi was a candidate in the parliamentary elections held in June 2012 in Seine-Saint-Denis. During the campaign, UAM 93 published a video interview with him in which he explained why he was running for office:
I stood for election on behalf of a new party called “Nouvelle Union Française” [New French Union], whose ambition is to federate all the segments of the population that are not represented in the major parties, that is, the disabled, the elderly, students, the unemployed, blacks, Arabs, Muslims, and non-Muslims.
UAM 93 and other lobby groups were inclined to support candidates from all kinds of political backgrounds, the only criterion being the candidate’s promises and the advantages they hoped to receive in return for helping these candidates win public office. Freeing themselves from older working-class loyalty to the parties of the left, the heads of these lobby groups instructed their militants at the grassroots to give great weight to questions concerning racism, discrimination, immigration, and the status of Islam both in France and around the globe. Compared to this broad concern about representation (how Islam or immigrants are perceived, etc.), less attention was accorded to public policy.
Maurad Goual, a candidate for parliament in 2012, makes clear how difficult it is for young people in the housing projects on the outskirts of Marseille to sort out a political identity:
Today, a boy from the northern neighborhoods, whether his name is Mohamed, Mamadou, or Ismaël, knows only one thing for sure about his identity: it’s religious. He knows he’s a Muslim, that’s not negotiable. Beyond that, he doesn’t know what he is.
At the same time, acute forms of segregation and marginalization were being felt—and resented—by residents in neighborhoods such as those in the western Parisian département of Hauts-de-Seine. Mohamed Bentebra, a candidate in the 2012 legislative elections in that district, here describes the stigma of life in “les cités” (“the projects”):
What makes me laugh is that in the projects, everyone wants to leave. What people who live in the projects have in common is neither their origin nor their religion, but the fact that they all want to leave. Today, whether your name is Laurent or Mamadou, if you live in Sevran or Clichy-sous-Bois [impoverished banlieues in the département of Seine-Saint-Denis], you’re dead!
Whereas voting in “the projects” prior to 2011 was primarily reactive and defensive—as when immigrant voters cast their presidential vote in 2007 for the socialist candidate Ségolène Royal in order to oppose their nemesis, Nicolas Sarkozy—in the cantonal elections of 2011, young voters from these same areas were more inclined to support local candidates who understood residents’ difficulties and who expressed sympathy for their religious practices. The mainstream parties seemed less than interested in—and at times positively hostile toward—such concerns. This perception was conveyed by Hamid Boujnane, a candidate based in Lille in the 2012 legislative elections:
[The mainstream parties] don’t want new people to come in [into politics]. I can tell you that when you’re new and you’re not blond with blue eyes, it’s even more difficult.
Candidates from established parties who were unresponsive to demands increased people’s impatience.
Prior to 2011, UAM 93’s political activity had been relatively small-scale. On February 26, 2009, it published a joint statement with the French Communist Party of Seine-Saint-Denis demanding the cessation of bombing when the Israeli army was conducting its Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. A few days before voter registration was closed on December 18, 2009, it exhorted people to register, stressing the importance of the 2010 regional elections. But only during the 2011 cantonal elections did it begin to intervene forcefully on the public stage. In March of that year, it released a public appeal from the Collective of Muslims of Montreuil, a banlieue east of Paris in the département of Seine-Saint-Denis that had been a longtime stronghold of the Communist Party and that was now home to the largest concentration of Malians outside of Mali.
This appeal began with a get-out-and-vote message addressed to Muslim voters, whose minimal political influence it deplored:
In a city like Montreuil, where the Muslim population is considerable, it is regrettable that Muslims do not make their voices heard in the various elections […]. This cannot go on. If the right wing insults us, that is because we don’t vote. If the left wing ignores us, that is also because we don’t vote. Let’s stop punishing ourselves. Our voices have to be heard! Political leaders have to know that we matter.
It is significant that the UAM 93 strongly opposed the right wing but also rejected the left. It sought to distance itself first and foremost from all elected officials, whom it accused of being deaf to the demands made by the association and by Muslims in general. It also seemed uninterested in matters of public policy or in ideological combat. UAM 93, for example, never mentioned the National Front, whose influence had been declining in the banlieues since 2002. Its grassroots efforts were focused on mobilizing voters solely on a religious basis:
Muslims have to vote en masse and in an organized manner in order to obtain commitments from the candidates, so that freedom of religion and its practice are properly respected. […] We think that Belaïde Bedreddine [a Communist member of the Montreuil municipal council] must be elected, we have to vote for him in order to punish Ms. Voynet [a former Green party cabinet minister in Lionel Jospin’s socialist government, who was then mayor of Montreuil].
This is a classic call to a target community to cast a protest vote.
In emphasizing the importance of mobilizing Muslim votes, UAM 93 was inclined to persuade local officials that a coherent Muslim voting bloc in fact existed and that they were the ones to mobilize it rapidly. Later analysis of the data revealed that this was not the case at that time, but local candidates found the argument convincing.
On March 25, 2011, the branch of UAM in Aubervilliers, a poor city north of Paris, published a statement repeating the same argument point by point:
It is regrettable that Muslims do not make their voices heard in the various elections. There is nothing surprising about the fact that politicians do not take into account the legitimate demands of Muslim citizens. […] Muslims have to vote en masse and in an organized manner in order to obtain commitments from the candidates, so that freedom of religion and religious practice are properly respected.
The text explains UAM 93’s strategy, making the connection between the legitimacy of Muslim bloc voting and the critical share of Muslim voters in its constituency. The appeal to religious feeling justifies the demands relating to its expression (such as the need for more Muslim places of worship) but does not encourage voters to think of any other spheres of social life, such as education or transportation, as a potential voting issue.
The cantonal elections of March 20 and 27, 2011, provided the UAM with an opportunity to prove itself as an effective political advocacy and lobby group. In a communiqué published the week before the first round of cantonal voting, the association proposed to handle voting by proxy and to help voters who had trouble getting to the polls. These practices, rarely adopted by religious organizations, are common among political parties trying to mobilize their base. Presented as nonpartisan services, they were connected with positions taken by the association regarding the candidates to be supported or defeated.
Community initiatives such as those of the UAM have a real impact but do not decide the outcome of elections on their own. Despite the appeals to eligible voters in the impoverished banlieues issued by UAM and other religious organizations, voter turnout was low both in the cantonal elections of 2011 and in the regional elections of the previous year. Social problems and the very young age of many of the would-be voters in the banlieues kept more than a few away from the polls. The appeals to identity politics could not counteract the politically demobilizing effects of an economic crisis that had hit this cohort harder than any other social group.
Analysis of the 2011 election results reveals that there was no monolithic, homogeneous Muslim vote based on a surge of religious and communal feeling. There were, however, forces that pushed this constituency in that direction. The rise of the far right and polarizing rhetoric about national identity provoked frustration and even anger among residents of these neighborhoods. They felt targeted and denigrated, and all the more so after having manifested their willingness to participate in the country’s political life. The will to make themselves heard and to count produced a new surge in 2012 that made a significant contribution to François Hollande’s victory.
FRANÇOIS HOLLANDE’S DECEPTIVE VICTORY
The presidential election of 2012 ended a parenthesis in French politics that had been opened by the 2005 riots. As already noted, Nicolas Sarkozy had revamped the parliamentary right wing with a hardline discourse on security and immigration. In the 2007 presidential elections, it siphoned many votes from the National Front and reduced its influence. It took over a space that allowed it to triumph over a left wing weakened by the calamitous memory of April 21, 2002, when Lionel Jospin had been eliminated in the first round of presidential voting, leaving Jean-Marie Le Pen to oppose Jacques Chirac. But once in power, Nicolas Sarkozy had succeeded in countering neither the effects of the economic crisis nor the rise of violence, as had been shown by the riots in Grenoble. On the contrary, the ideological schism over national identity orchestrated by the president’s office had backfired.
Marine Le Pen’s takeover of the National Front was a shot in the arm for the far right. The slogan she chose for her inaugural campaign as party head—“Rassemblement Bleu Marine”—put voters on a first-name basis with its new leader. The cantonal elections of 2011 illustrated this renewed competition and foreshadowed the rise of the National Front, which went on to earn more than 17 percent of the vote in the presidential election of 2012. A decade after Jospin’s elimination, the National Front recovered its ability to exercise influence, positioning itself as an alternative solution to the failures of Nicolas Sarkozy. However, the leftist force that Le Pen’s party faced in 2012 was no longer the demoralized Socialist Party of 2002.
François Hollande’s victory on May 6, 2012, signaled a profound change in French society. For the first time since 1988, a left-wing candidate had won the presidential race. The mayorships of the main cities, the majority of the départements, and most of the regions also fell into the hands of the Socialist Party and its allies. These results were the consequence of three distinct trends. First, widespread hostility to Sarkozy stemming from the time of the 2005 riots lasted throughout his term of office, particularly among Muslim voters. These banlieue voters felt singled out by Sarkozy during his time as minister of the interior and then as president.
Second, the comeback of the far right fragmented the electorate that had given Nicolas Sarkozy his 2007 victory and subtracted a key voting bloc that his UMP party needed for victory in 2012. Marine Le Pen exploited the return of urban riots and the exacerbation of tensions caused by the increased visibility of Islam in French society to recover the National Front’s traditional voters and to attract others disappointed by Sarkozyism.
Some commentators after the 2012 election expressed the view that Sarkozy lost because he positioned himself too far to the right, thus alienating centrist voters to the benefit of Hollande, particularly on social questions such as same-sex marriage and immigration. However, it seems more likely that his chosen strategy allowed him to limit his electoral decline relative to the far right. Attacked on his left and right flanks, he was the target of a political crossfire that led to defeat. Still, the results were close: Hollande won the race with 51.6 percent of the vote, only slightly more than a million votes ahead of his adversary.
Third and finally, the lingering aftereffects of the 2008 economic crisis provoked a strong rejection of the man who was perceived as the “president of the rich”—notably, but not exclusively, in the most disadvantaged milieus. This change took place among lower-middle-class voters on the right who had not seen their living conditions improve despite Sarkozy’s promise that they could “work more to earn more.” The crisis hit the country’s industrial base particularly hard, and affected workers punished the sitting president at the polls.
François Hollande had been nominated as the Socialist Party’s candidate after a bizarre primary marked by the disqualification of his rival Dominique Strauss-Kahn in May 2011, he having been arrested in New York on charges of sexually assaulting a hotel maid. In this tumultuous context, Hollande, who had served as first secretary of the Socialist Party for more than ten years, emerged as a figure without rough edges or any disqualifying negative characteristics.
Campaigning to be a “normal president,” the candidate promised to end the polarization that had been associated with the Sarkozy era. In his inaugural speech in Le Bourget, in the heart of Seine-Saint-Denis, Hollande pledged to go after the “world of finance,” thereby avoiding the fraught issue of the banlieues. Essentially, he coasted to power by letting hostility to Sarkozy play its mobilizing role.
The left’s victory in 2012 was an amplification and an extension of Ségolène Royal’s electoral gains in 2007. The personal relationship between Royal and Hollande, a former couple with four children, boosted the fame of a candidate who was little known in banlieues. And whereas part of the left and of the Socialist Party had expressed a certain distrust of Royal because of her heterodox deviations from standard leftist ideology, Hollande avoided obvious faux pas and managed to balance expectations that were sometimes contradictory.
From 2007 to 2012, a million and a half new voters were registered. The two elections brought out approximately the same number of individuals—slightly less than thirty-seven million voters for each of the first rounds. Sarkozy had got almost 11.5 million votes in the first round of voting in 2007, but five years later, his first-round total was only 9.7 million. Hollande modestly improved the Socialists’ first round score, from 9.5 million to 10.2 million votes. The balance of power seemed to be shifting in favor of the left. But the most important surge in the first round of presidential voting was that of Marine Le Pen’s revitalized National Front, which received 2.6 million more first-round votes than it had under her father in 2007.
Thus the left’s advance was accompanied by a strong surge of the National Front, which attracted mainly right-wing voters who were disappointed by the previous five years and who demanded a more radical identity-based politics that Marine Le Pen ably provided.
The largely immigrant banlieue of Seine-Saint-Denis presented a very different face, in opposition to national trends. There Hollande got more than 38 percent of the votes in the first round, while Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen were limited to 19.5 percent and 13.5 percent, respectively. The vote in banlieues favored the left even more in 2012 than it had in 2007. The economic crisis, the debate on national identity, and the polarization regarding Islam led to an unprecedented mobilization of Muslims and of second-generation immigrants to the benefit of the Socialists.
Indeed, studies have emphasized that the vast majority of self-identified Muslims casting ballots in 2012 voted for Hollande. Polls conducted by the OpinionWay Institute revealed that 93 percent of them chose the Socialist candidate. The French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP) came up with a similarly elevated figure—86 percent. An inquiry conducted by the Institut Montaigne in April 2012 revealed that 60 percent of young Muslims in banlieues intended to vote for Hollande compared to only 28 percent for Sarkozy. These estimates were, however, flawed because of the poor quality of the sampling of religious voters.
Because French law forbids census takers to ask questions about religious affiliation, there is a lack of hard data on the social profile of these groups. The standard tools used by pollsters to correct for bias are incapable of sorting out the statements made by religious groups. However, most expert commentators are agreed that Muslims disproportionately voted for the parties of the left. But it would be hasty to conclude that this was a “Muslim vote” motivated by religious demands and identity politics.
Immigrants, no matter their religion, have long been situated farther to the left on the political spectrum than the rest of the population. The vote of a large part of the Muslim electorate in 2012 was in line with this tendency. However, their voting behavior in this election can be seen as essentially defensive, in opposition to the re-election of Sarkozy—who was seen as a threat—rather than as a positive endorsement of the Socialist candidate’s platform. In this particular election, the party that benefited most from “communalist” identity politics was the National Front; Muslim voters did not coalesce into a monolithic “Muslim vote” based on a specifically religious group feeling.
The vote for President Hollande fostered for a time the illusion of a collective unity. But behind this temporary political realignment, which was attainable because of the rejection of the outgoing Sarkozy presidency, it is possible to discern fault lines that would steadily expand in subsequent years. From the riots of 2005 onward, the marginalized banlieues in particular experienced an erosion—initially almost imperceptible but real even so—of the social and political bond with the rest of the country. This breakdown was accompanied by an increase in the role played by religion in defining identities and in framing political demands, coupled with the rise of a certain moral conservatism that was sometimes tinged with radicalism. This overall movement went essentially unnoticed, because it did not follow the predictable trend of national politics.
Support for the left, which played a very important role in defeating Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round of the presidential election, soon disintegrated—and the disintegration was rapid. The Socialist and Communist parties, traditionally well established in the banlieues, were challenged by a myriad of independent nonpartisan candidates. There again the vote for Hollande masked the reality of local conflicts and the divisions within an electorate that lost its unity as soon as Sarkozy had been eliminated.
The new fault lines became clear in a series of legislative elections held after the 2012 presidential race. In a June 2012 legislative election in Beziers, a poor city in the southwest of France, the right-wing UMP candidate, Élie Aboud, was defeated by the Socialist Dolorès Roque by a dozen votes in a tight three-way race that included a National Front candidate who won almost 20 percent of the vote. This election was annulled by the Constitutional Court and took place again in December of that year. In the second election, Aboud won by a landslide, garnering more than 61 percent of the vote. Between the June and December votes, many imams in the district had expressed their outrage at the “homosexual marriage” law project advocated by the Socialist government, and a number of Muslim voters immediately manifested their discomfort with gay marriage at the ballot box.
The National Front’s electoral surge in 2011 and 2012 proved to be sustainable, because it reflected a deep social and ideological trend. Although the left had benefited from a conjunctural victory, the economic and moral disappointments that led to Sarkozy’s defeat continued to undermine French society. Whereas the right’s victory in 2007 had produced the illusion that the National Front had entered a permanent decline, the left’s victory in 2012 gave the false impression that a resolution of the country’s structural problems was possible.
In the following months, eleven more June elections that had been annulled by the Constitutional Court took place anew. All were won by right-wing candidates. The paradoxical situation of 2012 already contained within it the ingredients for the rise of radicalism and violence that was manifested in the crimes Mohamed Merah committed on March 15 and 19, 2012. Coming at the beginning of a hard-fought electoral campaign, these actions were dramatically continued in the course of Hollande’s term as president.
1 Association and Collective for Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, Together United. When spoken, the group’s acronym evokes a call to nonviolence, sounding like the French phrase “Assez le feu!” (“Enough fire!”).
2 “List of grievances,” an expression borrowed from the period of the French Revolution.
3 Campaign costs are reimbursed only to candidates of slates that received at least 5 percent of the votes.
4 A Kärcher is a German-made high-pressure washer widely known in France.
5 Foreign-born legal residents in France are not allowed to vote in local elections in France—unless they are citizens of an EU member state.
6 Le temps des Immigrés: Essai sur le destin de la population française (The Time of Immigrants: An Essay on the Fate of the French Population), Editions du Seuil, Paris, 2007.
7 It was written by his advisor Henri Guaino, who also wrote the speech Sarkozy gave in Dakar addressing the youth of Africa on July 26, 2007.
8 The Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP). Created in 2002, this party changed its name to Les Républicains in 2015.
9 The niqab is a garment that covers a woman’s upper body and face, except for her eyes, whereas the burqa covers the entire body, including the face, and features a piece of netting that obscures the eyes but allows the wearer to see out.
10 “Deposits and Consignments Fund,” a public investment arm of the French state.
11 Jean-Marie Le Pen alludes to the referendum on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, which pitted “Europhiles” and “sovereignists” against each other, crossing party lines within both the right and the left.
12 A French canton is an administrative subdivision akin to a township that groups together even smaller subdivisions known as “communes” and that provides the communes with police and other municipal services. It is a significant echelon between local and national politics; accordingly, cantonal elections are considered by pollsters as an important indicator of national political trends.
13 The administrative and electoral district (département) of Seine-Saint-Denis, which as we saw is assigned the postal code 93, has a population of approximately 1.5 million and is the most culturally and demographically diverse of all French départements. Recent census data suggest that almost a third of the district is foreign-born—generally of North African origin. UAM 93 leaders claim that it is the first French département with a majority Muslim population.