French Right-Wing Candidate Alain Juppé Warns of Rising Anti-Muslim Hysteria
Juppé said to Le Monde newspaper that major candidates were inciting so much ethnic hatred that France risked sliding into civil war.
"We must absolutely calm down the climate that exists in France today. Simply saying the word ‘Muslim’ leads to a hysteria that is totally disproportionate.” He added, "We must calm down the situation. If we continue the way we are going now, we are heading towards civil war. But I want civil peace.”
This extraordinary remark comes after deep attacks on Muslims in France in the last two years. Thousands of Muslim homes have been raided under the state of emergency.
President François Hollande of the Socialist Party (PS), which imposed the state of emergency, has repeatedly invited Marine Le Pen, the leader of the neo-fascist National Front (FN), to the Elysée presidential palace. The FN is expected to easily qualify for the presidential run-off in May.
Since the Charlie Hebdo attacks of January last year, the French people have been subjected to relentless propaganda, including from Juppé’s own LR party, denouncing Muslims. Thus, in one column after the Hebdo attacks, Nouvel Obs commentator Jean Daniel wrote that, "Yes, we are at war, and what’s more it is a war of religion.”
Nearly two years later, a former prime minister of France is admitting that the state of emergency has cultivated a hysterical atmosphere that brought ethnic and religious tensions to a fever pitch.
The immediate target of Juppé’s remarks was the provocative comments of his main rival for the LR nomination, former President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is building his campaign around appeals to neo-fascistic sentiment and the worship of French ethnic identity.
Last Monday, Sarkozy said: "If one wants to become French, one lives as a Frenchman. We will no longer tolerate an integration that doesn’t work, we will demand assimilation.” In a reactionary and bizarre reference to ancient Gaul, the region of Europe encompassing most of present-day France that was first inhabited by Celtic peoples, Sarkozy declared, "Once you are French, your ancestors are the Gauls.”
This statement violates fundamental juridical principles that French citizenship is a legal and not an ethnic or blood relationship, and flies in the face of France’s large ethnic Arabic, African, Italian, and Portuguese populations.
Juppé’s remarks reflect growing concern in sections of the ruling elite that, amid the deepest crisis of European and world capitalism since the 1930s, their longstanding promotion of anti-Muslim and law-and-order prejudices has taken on entirely new dimensions.
Since 2003, French bourgeois politicians of all stripes have backed bans on the veil in the public schools, or on the burqa. Such anti-Muslim campaigns were promoted not only by right-wing forces, but also by the PS and its pseudo-left allies like the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA), Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle, LO), and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Left Front.
Today, after nearly a decade of intense economic crisis, however, and mounting anti-Muslim sentiment after the Paris terror attacks and under the state of emergency, the level of tensions is far higher. Calls for banning the burkini or dismantling refugee camps in Calais reflect the growing emergence of politicized anti-Muslim nationalism as a key force in French bourgeois politics.
Source: WSWS
