Marine
Le Pen targets Muslim voters
The
National Front party is looking for support in the Paris banlieues.
By NICHOLAS VINOCUR
10/12/15
PARIS — Marine Le
Pen’s National Front party wants to conquer a new and unlikely
voting bloc: Muslims, whose praying in streets she once compared to
the occupation of France by Nazis during World War II.
Next month the
anti-immigration FN party will appeal for the first time to French
Muslims in the greater Paris region with a direct mailing campaign
that aims to drum up support ahead of regional elections in December,
officials said.
That’s a strategic
shift, if not a total about-face, for a party whose representatives
frequently talk about Islam as a threat to France’s Christian
identity. Le Pen herself is due to face trial this month on hate
speech charges for the Nazi-Muslim comparison she made on TV in 2010,
and many French Muslims still see the party as fundamentally
anti-Islam.
Yet the Front is
betting it can gloss over the apparent contradiction by professing to
embrace moderate Muslims and condemn fundamentalists.
‘No contradiction’
The prize, it seems,
is too rich to ignore: significant numbers of Muslim voters who
massively backed President François Hollande in the run-up to the
2012 elections, but have been disappointed by his legalization of gay
marriage and other socially liberal policies, with many losing
interest in politics.
Given France’s ban
on ethnic statistics, polling does not cover Muslims specifically. So
the Front bases its diagnosis on claims by Muslim politicians such as
Socialist senator Bariza Khiari, who warned that her party last year
that it was losing support in her community. She pointed to worrying
electoral trends, noting the Socialists’ loss of several
immigrant-heavy towns near Paris during municipal elections last
year.
“I see no
contradiction in our approach,” said Wallerand de Saint Just, who
is running for a council seat in the greater Paris region and heading
up the Front’s banlieue appeal in areas including the
Seine-Saint-Denis district. “We are appealing to French citizens of
Muslim faith, not the fundamentalists, and we’re telling them that
we see them first and foremost as French citizens.”
Saint Just, who is
also the Front’s treasurer, declined to show POLITICO the leaflets,
which will be mailed out to inhabitants of the 157 so-called
“Sensitive Urban Zones,” or ZUS in the French acronym, in the
greater Paris region. The ZUS designation, which was officially
phased out in January, refers to areas that suffer from high
unemployment and poor housing. It often overlaps with areas that have
high immigrant and Muslim populations.
He said they would
contain a message explicitly addressed to “French citizens of
Muslim faith,” as well as campaign proposals on security, urban
planning and improved access to public services.
It’s a costly
initiative that will be paid for by Saint Just’s €1 million
campaign budget (he said he borrowed the money from Jean-Marie Le
Pen’s Cotelec finance firm), underscoring how much the Front is
staking on the banlieues as opposed to the wealthy center of Paris.
Socialist soft spot
In 2015 local
elections, the National Front won a third of votes in the canton of
Tremblay-en-France, losing to a left-wing coalition by 32.6 percent
to 67.4 percent of votes in the second part of a two-round election.
It gathered nearly 20 percent of votes in several other nearby towns
of the Seine-Saint-Denis department, which has the highest proportion
of foreign-born residents of any area in France.
This time it vows to
do even better.
“Wherever people
are suffering, that’s where we go, and people are suffering in the
banlieues, not in the 9th arrondissement of Paris,” Saint Just
said, referring to a trendy Right Bank neighborhood. “The Socialist
party and [Nicolas Sarkozy’s] Les Républicains are largely
responsible for having sabotaged life in these neighborhoods and
people there don’t want to see them in power anymore.”
One of the places
where the FN aims to gain ground is in Clichy-sous-Bois, a notorious
banlieue town east of Paris known as the starting point for urban
riots that erupted in 2005.
The town’s
Socialist mayor, Olivier Klein, said Muslims in the city suffered
from being associated with Muslim extremists, especially after the
Charlie Hebdo terror attacks that killed 17 people earlier this year.
He dismissed the National Front as a potential political force in his
town, where a majority of the inhabitants are of immigrant origin and
abstention rates are exceptionally high.
“I understand what
they are up to — trying to capture the vote” of people who don’t
usually vote, he said. “But I don’t think they’ll find much
traction. People here know that [National Front politicians] spend
most of their time stigmatizing immigrants, saying they are
responsible for crime.”
“It’s
going to be a boomerang effect. The Muslims who voted for Hollande
are going turn against him massively.”
Some specialists
disagree, arguing that the Socialist party has done too little to
cultivate its Muslim backers. The only question is whether those left
out will continue to abstain, or rally to a competing force like the
National Front.
“For Muslims, the
disappointment with the Socialist party is huge,” said Marwan
Muhammad, an author, Islam specialist and former head of an
Islamophobia hotline. “The party has not only failed to help
Muslims improve their situation socially, it has used them as a
disposable electorate, only worth paying attention to before a big
vote.”
Marine’s banlieue
troops
Despite having grown
up in a suburb, albeit a wealthy one, Marine Le Pen herself is
unlikely to go glad-handing in a town like Clichy-sous-Bois.
When she was running
for president in 2012, Le Pen boasted on TV that unlike her rivals,
she never went to the banlieues because the country’s real problems
were concentrated elsewhere, notably in rural areas neglected by
other candidates.
A brush with actual
inhabitants of the banlieues last year might have reinforced her
instinct to stay away. Her car was pelted with stones by three youths
in track suits who had recognized her while she was shopping at a
pharmacy south of Paris.
That’s why the
National Front is leaving the at times tricky business of canvassing
in the banlieues areas to locals like Jordan Bardella, a 20-year-old
National Front official who grew up in the town of Drancy.
Bardella, whose
mother voted for Marine Le Pen in 2012, said he and a team of
canvassers covered at least one banlieue town per weekend and, aside
from the odd insult, rarely ran into any trouble with locals.
However, they tended to stick to busy marketplaces and steer clear of
housing projects, where he said access was controlled strictly by
drug-traffickers’ lookouts.
“It’s not that
we are staying away from the projects; it’s that they are
effectively closed off to anyone from the outside whether it’s
police, firemen, journalists or political canvassers,” he said.
“Nobody is going in there, and that’s exactly the problem we’re
denouncing with the locals.”
‘Multiethnic,
unicultural’
The leaflets and
canvassing drive are part of an overarching strategy, developed by
National Front Vice President Florian Philippot, to widen the party’s
appeal and attract new voters in the run-up to presidential elections
in 2017.
In order to fuel the
initiative, the party has launched a number of “collectives,” or
internal think tanks focused on coming up with campaign proposals.
One of them, focused on the banlieues, draws upon the work of
historians, sociologists and geographers to craft its message.
FN officials said
two intellectuals were particularly influential: Gilles Kepel, a
political scientist and Islam specialist who argues that the
inhabitants of the banlieues are turning away from mainstream French
life and finding refuge in Islam; and Christophe Guilluy, a
geographer whose book “La France péripherique” (“The
Peripheral France”) describes a country split between globalized,
ultra-connected urban centers and a hinterland of towns and villages
growing ever more isolated and resentful of cosmopolitan values.
“For us the
intellectual debate has been over for a while: France is a
multiethnic, unicultural country,” said Sébastien Chenu, an aide
to Le Pen.
Chenu said the party
already had a strong base of support among some immigrant
populations, notably the Portuguese. But Muslims, 86 percent of whom
voted for Hollande in 2012, according to an IFOP study, were next.
“It’s going to
be a boomerang effect,” he said. “The Muslims who voted for
Hollande are going turn against him massively.”
Authors:
Nicholas Vinocur
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