 |
Merkel
facing 1 million refugees in 2015
In
November, 206,101 people requested asylum, exceeding all previous
months this year.
By CYNTHIA KROET
12/8/15, 9:37 AM CET Updated 12/8/15, 11:47 PM CET
Germany has
registered 964,574 new asylum-seekers this year, according to
interior ministry figures. If this trend continues the country will
reach one million refugee arrivals by the end of 2015.
In November, 206,101
people requested asylum, exceeding all previous months in 2015.
On Monday Germany’s
interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, said that arrivals are
slowing down, possibly linked to bad weather conditions and actions
taken by Turkey to limit the refugee influx.
“We are not at a
tipping point yet, but it’s a good development,” said de
Maizière. He added that more measures will be taken to speed up the
processing time for applications.
Chancellor Angela
Merkel said earlier this year that a total of 800,000 asylum-seekers
were expected over the course of 2015, the majority fleeing war in
Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Newspaper Bild
reported that the government has adjusted this figure to 1.5 million.
The 2015 estimation
is four times more than the figure from 2014, when 238,676 migrants
arrived in Germany.
Though Germany has
registered the highest number of asylum-seekers compared to any other
EU country, Sweden has the most applications per capita.
Merkel’s open-door
refugee policy has sparked a debate within her conservative Christian
Democratic Union party, with ministers and top party figures
questioning her approach.
Authors:
Cynthia Kroet
|
The
Right Stuff: Marine Le Pen and the Growing Influence of Front
National
Marine
Le Pen has managed to pull the Front National from the extremist
fringe into the political center. The right-wing populists could even
emerge as France's strongest party in upcoming regional elections.
But the real prize is in 2017.
By Julia Amalia
Heyer
December 04, 2015
Five days after
Black Friday in Paris, Marine Le Pen is walking through a convention
center in the northern part of the city. It's a sunny day, but the
air is stuffy inside the building, where Le Pen is dressed in black
from head to toe, including her pointed ankle boots, and is carrying
a red shoulder bag. It's her first public appearance since the Paris
attacks and her choice of events is symbolic. The convention is
focused on domestic security, with all manner of law enforcement
tools laid out amid the bright red carpeting. Le Pen looks worn out.
Her exhaustion is evident even under her characteristically thick
layer of makeup.
She stares straight
ahead as she walks past rapid-fire weapons and bullet-proof vests in
khaki and camouflage, before stopping at a booth operated by the
customs authority to look at a model coast guard ship in a glass case
-- a better choice of backdrop than the "new generation assault
weapon" on display at the booth opposite.
"Customs
inspections are extremely important," says Le Pen, posing for a
photo in front of the glass case. If she had her way, the French
customs agency would reintroduce border controls at crossings with
Germany, Italy and Spain.
It's the Wednesday
after the fateful Friday in Paris -- 13/11, as people are now calling
it -- and Le Pen is back in campaign mode. Despite the imposition of
emergency laws, regional elections are still set to be held in France
next week, and they are widely seen as an indicator for the 2017
presidential election. Le Pen is in the limelight even more than
usual, now that her party, the far-right Front National, stands a
good chance of securing the largest number of votes nationwide.
Forty-seven-year-old
Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen, known as Marine, moves from the ship
model to look at a model truck. There, a customs official explains
how trucks are screened for smuggled goods. As she runs a
gray-painted fingernail along the contours of the truck, she inveighs
against former President Nicolas Sarkozy, saying that he is "no
longer trustworthy." A horrible person, she says, her deep, raw
voice sounding dismissive. While incessantly sounding off about
domestic security, he was constantly reducing funding for the
military and the police, she says. Unbelievable, she exclaims,
shaking her head.
'A Reprehensible
Question'
"Madame, isn't
it bizarre to be campaigning in the current situation, with the
entire country in shock?"
Her gaze is
penetrating. And it's not friendly.
"Mademoiselle,"
she hisses. "This is not a campaign appearance."
"Will you
benefit from the attacks?"
"That's a
reprehensible question." She turns away.
France is divided
into 13 regions. Marine Le Pen herself is running in the north, her
deputy Florian Philippot in the east and her niece, Marion
Maréchal-Le Pen, in the south. Polls indicate that all three have
realistic chances of winning their regions, which would mark the
first time ever that the Front National took over the helm of a
region in France. More than that, Le Pen, Philippot and Maréchal are
key figures in the success of the Front National -- and in the search
for answers to the question of how and why it has managed to
establish itself, once and for all, as a major political force,
disrupting the two-party system that had dominated the Fifth Republic
for decades.
President François
Hollande, a Socialist, reacted to the attacks of Nov. 13 by
announcing draconian measures. He said that he would tighten the
French criminal code and reintroduce border controls. He promised to
upgrade the military and hire more police officers. Illegal
immigrants and extremists are to be deported more quickly from now
on, and convicted Islamists will be deprived of their French
citizenship.
His announcements
corresponded almost exactly with the demands Le Pen and her party
have been making for years.
Marine Le Pen, the
youngest daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, deserves the credit for
transforming the Front National into a major party. She de-demonized
it, as she describes it, and made it accessible to different groups
of voters. Indeed, now that academics, business leaders and elite
students have begun to support the Front National, many Frenchmen
view it as just another party and it has never had as many members as
it does today, roughly 80,000. It also has more influence than ever
before and controls 11 town halls in cities throughout the country.
It holds 1,546 seats on local councils and about 200 seats in the
governments of France's regions and départements. The Front holds
twice as many seats in European Parliament as the country's ruling
Socialist Party. David Rachline, France's youngest senator, and
Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the youngest member of the National
Assembly, both represent the Front National.
Even Greater Heights
SPIEGEL accompanied
Marine Le Pen for several months, discussing the restructuring of the
Front, its ideology and its goals with her, her advisers and her
supporters. The attacks of Nov. 13, however, raise the question of
how much French society will change as a result. It is still unclear
whether France's growing dismay over the attacks will be offset by an
equally strong will to remain an open society, or whether terrorism
will propel movements like the Front to even greater heights.
Marine Le Pen has
held back, at least until now, leaving it up to the president and his
prime minister to talk about war and about the possibility of further
attacks, possibly with chemical weapons. And it was Sarkozy, not Le
Pen, who was the first to criticize the government. She quieted down
just as her rivals became more vocal. She has no need to gloat or
explain herself. She has become a brand that everyone knows, and
everyone knows what it stands for.
In the European
Parliament in Strasbourg this week, she stood up from seat number 217
and demanded: "We want French borders again. We have no
confidence in European borders. We want to be the ones to decide what
is good for us." She spoke as though she were fully aware that
the stars are currently aligned in her favor. Her momentum is
reflected in the latest polls, which show that, in the wake of the
Nov. 13 attacks, even more Frenchmen are opposed to accepting
refugees than before. Furthermore, a large majority of the
population, 84 percent, favors stricter security measures, including
border controls.
When Le Pen is asked
what her first official act as French president would be, she
responds quickly and without hesitation. She looks you in the eye as
she speaks. "I will turn to European channels to demand the
return of France's sovereignty," she says. "I want to
regain control over our currency and our borders."
It is late October,
and she is sitting behind her desk in her narrow office at the
European Parliament in Strasbourg. Her e-cigarette is in its charging
device, the walls are bare and the only item on the bookshelf is an
illustrated book about cats. Le Pen loves cats and has four red
Bengals. One of them has just had kittens, and she shows off photos
on her iPhone. She is wearing a light-colored jacket with fur
appliqués, her face framed by a carefully coiffed bob.
More Prominent and
More Influential
The room seems
ridiculously small for someone like Le Pen, a tall, broad-shouldered
woman who has acquired a larger-than-life stature in recent years --
among both Front National supporters and its detractors.
As they either warn
against her or threaten to vote for her, Le Pen is becoming more
prominent and more influential. Polls show that one in three French
citizens could now imagine voting for her. For her supporters, she is
a savior, and they are depending on her to return the country to its
old, long-faded greatness. But for her rivals Le Pen is a nemesis, a
vengeful deity who thrives on, and derives strength from, their
failings.
Unlike her father,
Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen has actually succeeded. She is now
part of the political elite, on a level with François Hollande and
his presidential predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy. The question is now
whether she is next in line. Forecasts for 2017 envision her in the
second-round run-off election with Hollande, a virtually unimaginable
success for a party that a large share of Frenchmen despised until a
few years ago. Indeed, the Front National is still described in
French as being "right-wing extremist."
Initially, she he
had not intended to run for office in her district,
Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie. But then her ambition to win an election
on the strength of votes from the public at large, rather than from
her own party, prevailed. The former coal-mining region is largely
flat and nondescript. Le Pen has set up her logistical center in the
town of Hénin-Beaumont, where her party colleague Steeve Briois was
elected mayor in last year's municipal elections. Briois is a key
element in her strategy to establish a presence at the local level.
Narrow streets lined
by low houses lead to the center of the town, where Briois has placed
plastic orchids in the windows of his office. He looks a little like
a younger Bruce Willis, minus the perfect teeth. When asked to
describe the most salient feature of his city of 26,000 people, he
mentions its 20% unemployment rate. The few shops are closed for
lunch and the streets are relatively empty; the handful of people
outside are wearing sweatpants.
'France of the
Forgotten'
Hénin-Beaumont is
part of what geographer Christophe Guilluy calls "la France
périphérique," or peripheral France. The region is
disconnected from the more thriving parts of the country and it's a
place where blue-collar workers, small farmers and low-level
employees lead relatively meager lives, lives that attract little
interest in Paris. Guilluy's theory is that those who live away from
major cities feel like losers of globalization and its crises and
that they are exacting their revenge by voting for Front National.
While it is true
that Front National doesn't stand a chance in the Paris metropolitan
area, its prospects are much better here in the north. Le Pen calls
the region the "France of the forgotten."
Briois is from a
nearby town and has been a member of the Front for 27 years. Speaking
in a soft voice, he says that he wanted to "fight against the
system" from an early age and was impressed when he saw
Jean-Marie Le Pen in a television appearance. His devotion to Front
National ultimately made him a party vice president and member of
European Parliament, but his true calling was to become mayor of
Hénin-Beaumont, where residents appreciate him. He organized a
Christmas market that people were still raving about in August, and
they also liked Hénin-Plage, a small, artificial beach created
during his administration.
When Briois was
chosen as France's best mayor earlier in the year, the president of
the National Assembly, who was supposed to present the award,
boycotted the event. Nevertheless, Briois is proud of the award, just
as he is proud of the work of his party leader. Like all of her
supporters, he simply calls her Marine.
"She has
changed everything. Her concept is completely different from her
father's," says Briois. She is truly determined to be in power,
he explains. It used to be, he says, that when he and his fellow
party members handed out flyers in the market square, they were often
berated and sometimes even attacked. But that no longer happens
today.
"Ah Marine,
bienvenue," people call out to her. "Is it really you,
Marine?" They ask her to autograph their campaign brochures,
give her complements and want to pose for photos with her. A few
months ago, a journalist at a major French newspaper wrote that
Marine Le Pen was being "welcomed like a pop star." When
the article was printed, the publisher threatened to fire the
journalist for biased reporting. But he was only reporting the truth.
Le Pen is indeed treated like a star in some areas.
On a Friday evening
in November, she is standing on the black-and-white tile floor of an
old concert hall in Wattrelos on the Belgian border. She is wearing a
white blouse and a blue blazer. Steeve Briois is sitting in the front
row, holding her red bag. As she presents her program to a packed
audience, assistants hand out flyers printed with a light blue heart
and the words "Marine, vite" (Quick, Marine). She says that
she will foster the trade professions and small businesses in the
region, and that she will bring in more doctors to treat the elderly
and the sick.
A Declaration of War
"They're
pulling out all the stops for the migrants, the illegals, but who is
looking after our retirees?"
"Only
foreigners are being supported here."
"The government
is stealing from the French and giving their money to foreigners."
France already
appears to have internalized her rhetoric. About two-thirds of
Frenchmen believe that politicians are doing more for immigrants than
for them, the so-called Français de souche, or French stock. She
ends her speech with a declaration of war: "Yesterday it was the
cities, today it's the regions and tomorrow it will be the entire
country!" Everyone stands up as Le Pen starts to sing the French
national anthem, the Marseillaise. Like her father, Le Pen sings
loudly and clearly.
Before Marine Le
Pen, the Front was more of a protest movement than a party, a
movement whose potential depended on how Jean-Marie Le Pen made his
points and delivered his provocative statements. He remained an
attention-grabbing contrarian to the very end -- until last summer,
when his daughter ejected him from the party he had founded. Her
father had become a threat to her own success. Jean-Marie Le Pen was
uninterested in grassroots political work or local politics, and he
ran the party from his villa in the western part of Paris. His
daughter is wired differently.
In the autobiography
she wrote at 36, she describes her vision of the Front National of
the future as a political force that plays a role throughout France.
It was just before her first divorce and she had three small children
to care for. Her path to the top of the party was not easy, and it
was not a position she inherited from her father. But she did inherit
her love of politics from him along with the willingness to sacrifice
everything for it, including her private life and her children.
She was elected as
the party's leader in 2011 and today, five years later, she is
practically untouchable. She prefers to make decisions in one-on-one
conversations and her leadership style is described as brusque, but
even that description sounds admiring. "In Marine's kitchen,"
is the reply one often gets to the question as to where the center of
power in the party lies.
Politics has a grip
on the family, almost like a kind of Stockholm syndrome. How else to
explain why Marine Le Pen, whose childhood was marred by the fact
that her father was only interested in his work, is emulating him
today?
Cleansing the Party
Her children are now
teenagers, but does she feel any pangs of conscience? Of course, she
says from behind her desk in the small office in Strasbourg. Her
problem, she says, is the one all working mothers face: not having
enough time. There is a moment, she explains, when you have to make a
decision. "And I chose France." The statement is as clear
as it is cold.
"Look, things
aren't nearly as bad as they used to be for me," she says,
trying to soften her tone. Her children are not named Le Pen but
instead have her ex-husband's last name. Furthermore, she adds: "I'm
perceived much differently than my father was."
She was eight years
old when a would-be assassin tried to kill her father with a bomb he
had deposited in a stairwell. The device, which contained 20
kilograms (44 lbs.) of explosives, ripped an enormous hole into the
apartment building where they lived, but no one expressed any
sympathy. For Marine Le Pen, it was the initiation rite into the Le
Pen family's virtual fortress. There is a French proverb: The heart
either breaks or it hardens. Hers hardened, says Le Pen.
Insults don't bother
her anymore? "My ability to feel indignant is completely
intact," she counters. She hates being called a racist. But can
she understand why people call her that? "Certainly not,"
she replies.
As soon as she
became president of the party, she tried to obliterate her father's
stamp on the Front National. Her views differ from his on issues such
as abortion, homosexuality and extramarital relationships -- and she
hasn't married her life partner, Louis Aliot, one the five vice
presidents of the party. She says that she stands by the values of
the French Republic, including secularity. But in her case,
secularity does not appear to be a universal principle, but instead
is directed primarily against Muslims. For Le Pen, unacceptable
religious symbols are headscarves, mosques and pork-free menus in
school cafeterias. Her speeches have become more strident since she
banned her father from the party. She describes immigrants as
"clandestins," or illegals. She avoids the word "refugee,"
probably because it seems to denote people in need of protection.
Le Pen has hired a
group of advisers, young men in well-tailored suits, to restructure
the Front. Most of them had nothing to do with the party in the past
and were either affiliated with the center-right or far left portion
of the political spectrum.
Florian Philippot,
34, is a case in point. Le Pen's boyish-faced chief strategist and
the party's second-in-command, Philippot embodies everything she
despises, at least in her rhetoric. And he says so himself: "I
am a product of the French elite." He was a senior official in
the Interior Ministry before becoming a politician, and he is a
graduate of two of France's Grandes Écoles, HEC and Ena.
The Conformist Elite
In early November,
Philippot was to be found in the spacious apartment of his mentor,
Bertrand Dutheil de la Rochère, an affable older man wearing a wool
sweater over his shirt. The flat in the fashionable 7th
Arrondissement is exquisitely furnished, including Louis Quatorze
armchairs. Dutheil once worked as a senior executive with the
government-owned electric utility EDF and is part of an aristocratic
family whose family tree extends back to the 15th century.
He also served as
chief of staff for former Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement,
a staunch leftist, for whom Philippot put up campaign posters in his
early 20s. When Marine Le Pen became president of the Front National,
the two men became members. A portrait of Le Pen hangs next to one of
Chevènement in Dutheil's office, with "Oui, la France"
printed on it. Dutheil says that earlier, he could never have
imagined becoming a member of Front National.
Philippot initially
kept his party involvement a secret. "I didn't want to talk
about it," he says. People think in consistently conformist
terms in Elitist French institutions, he says. Everyone in those
circles believes that the European Union is great, immigration is a
good thing, borders are fundamentally objectionable and national
sovereignty is categorically outdated. Philippot held different views
and still holds them today. He doesn't like Europe. In fact, some of
his former fellow students say that he hates it. Years after the
introduction of the euro, Philippot still showed a preference for
restaurants that also displayed their prices in French francs. He
likes to compare the EU to stars in the universe: We still see their
light, but they have actually long since ceased to exist.
For Philippot, the
European Union is exclusively to blame for France's problems,
including excessive debt levels, unemployment and the faltering
economy. He believes that globalization signifies decline, and that
the only way to fight it is with borders and national sovereignty.
The problem with the
Front's anti-euro strategy is that it is reaching its limits. It
makes little sense for many higher earners, who know that it isn't
possible to simply turn back the clock on Europe. This explains why
Le Pen, in recent months, has quietly tried to de-emphasize calls for
France to leave the euro. She is also seeking to appeal to the middle
class now and wants to shed the Front National's image as the party
of the disadvantaged. Like British Prime Minister David Cameron, if
she is elected president in 2017 she plans to hold a referendum on EU
membership.
She has stopped
promising retirement at 60 and an unconditional basic income for all
French citizens. Even the 35-hour workweek no longer seems off limits
for Le Pen. She is modifying her economic program to conform to
reality.
Conquering New
Territory
Philippot's
BlackBerry vibrates. "Marine," he says into the phone. They
speak by phone up to 15 times a day. Philippot is campaigning in
eastern France, along the border with Germany. His region is called
Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine and has a population of seven
million. But Philippot comes across as someone who would rather
debate with cabinet ministers on television than listen to people
complain about advancing deindustrialization on a market square in
some small Alsatian town. His focus is on strategy, and on literally
conquering new territory in these elections. Philippot has pushed
professionalization of the party more than any other Front National
politician. He has created so-called collectives, groups with
appealing names, each of which is intended to address a specific
issues like culture, the environment, youth and education. One such
group, "Racine," which addresses educational issues,
includes more than 800 teachers and school principals. About half of
them are politically independent. The Front is slowly reaching those
it was unable to reach in the past.
There is even a
group in Saint-Denis, the northern Paris suburb where the mastermind
of the Paris attacks went into hiding. The main focus of group,
called "Banlieues Patriotes," is to recruit Muslim voters
-- the very people who Le Pen and her supporters are so quick to
label as the roots of all evil during her public appearances.
"Our goal is 51
percent in the spring of 2017," says Philippot. "We are
approaching everyone."
The Front remains
particularly strong among blue-collar workers and the unemployed. But
it is also gaining popularity among young people, and its youth
organization, the FNJ, reportedly has 25,000 members. More and more
of them are people under 30 with university degrees.
A few weeks ago,
Front National established its own "Association" at the
Institut d'études politiques, known as Sciences Po, a few weeks ago.
The institute is a training ground for the bourgeoisie, and almost
all presidents of the Fifth Republic attended Sciences Po, which is
adjacent to the apartment of Dutheil de la Rochère. Even Philippot,
who formed an advance guard of sorts, would never have believed that
this would happen so quickly, that the dams would break so quickly
and Front National would inundate the establishment. When the
association introduced itself on a September evening in a small
lecture hall, an image of Le Pen cuddling with her cats was projected
onto the wall.
We're not that evil,
said Thomas Laval, a former fan of Nicolas Sarkozy, at the event. The
40 students attending the event laughed at his ice-breaking quip.
Antoine Chudzik, 23, was standing next to Laval and said that he had
voted for Hollande in 2012, but added that he could hardly believe
how misguided he was at the time. He joined the Front a few weeks
ago, he said, because "Marine Le Pen is the only one defending
the Republic today."
The third region
where Front National has good chances of victory is the
Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, where Marion Maréchal-Le Pen is
campaigning. The daughter of Marine's older sister Yann is 25 and has
carved out a stellar career in a very short amount of time. The
latest polls predict a narrow victory for the youngest member of the
National Assembly.
Real Political
Talent
Her success is based
neither exclusively on her attractiveness nor her last name. Both
characteristics have certainly done her no harm, but her aunt is not
the only one who believes Maréchal-Le Pen has political talent. The
region where she is running has a population of five million and
stretches from the French-Italian border to Marseille, traversing the
foothills of the Alps. Her campaign poster depicts a smiling, lightly
tanned Maréchal-Le Pen against a background of lavender fields, and
it isn't difficult to imagine her dressed in an evening gown,
attending a reception in Cannes.
The Front has long
been a powerful force in the rural, Catholic and conservative south,
an area with higher unemployment than elsewhere in the country. After
the end of the colonial era, hundreds of thousands of North African
immigrants settled in the region's picturesque small cities. Most
Frenchmen who live there feel that there are too many immigrants.
Perhaps this is why
Maréchal is more conservative even than her aunt. In fact, she is
seen as the direct successor to her grandfather, Jean-Marie Le Pen,
who had originally intended to run for office in the region. On the
Friday evening exactly one week after the Paris attacks, she is
standing in a multipurpose hall on the outskirts of Avignon and
begins her presentation with a moment of silence. She is wearing
jeans and a blouse, and she has the same penchant for pointed ankle
boots as her aunt. The spotlights illuminating the candidate are in
the colors of the French Tricolore. It isn't easy to find the right
words at this moment, she says. But in addition to grief, she adds,
she also feels overcome by a "cold rage." She is quoting
Marine Le Pen.
Hardly three minutes
have passed before she begins berating the government, including
Prime Minister Manuel Valls and President Hollande, "who are now
using our rhetoric." It took 130 deaths, she says, for them to
realize that mass immigration poses a threat to the country. Unlike
her aunt, she does not speak without notes. She quotes Victor Hugo
and Charles Péguy. Her speeches are like elaborate exposés, in
which France, especially the south, forms the cradle of a higher
civilization, one that is threatened by primitive foreign powers.
'Defend Our
Identity'
Maréchal has the
ability to say vicious things with a piercing voice, and yet come
across as a sophisticated young woman. It's an ability even her
grandfather admires. Marion has developed into a fascinating
politician, the old man said admiringly in the spring. She describes
herself as a devout Catholic and, unlike Marine Le Pen, has
demonstrated against gay marriage. Her campaign team includes
candidates who were once rejected by the Front for being too
extremist. One of them is Philippe Vardon, a member of the right-wing
extremist "Bloc identitaire," which opposed what it called
the "Islamicization of the South" with outright xenophobic
campaigns.
On this Friday
evening, she tells her audience: "Here in our party, no one
walks around in a headscarf, burka or jelaba. People here wear what
Frenchmen wear."
"We must defend
our identity, our chateaux and our cathedrals. Racine and Molière."
"Islam
continues to advance, constantly expanding, and all we do is
retreat."
She is greeted with
loud applause from her standing-room-only audience. Marion,
Présidente, they shout. We will do everything differently, she
promises. "We have a big project."
And then she
practically sings her aunt's mantra: "Yesterday it was the
cities, today it's the regions and tomorrow it will be the entire
country!"
Translated from the
German by Christopher Sultan
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