Can a breakthrough with France’s Muslims put Macron back on a winning path?
Finally, after eleven months of Covid-related chaos and confusion preceded by two years of violent street protests against his stalled programme of economic reforms, President Emmanuel Macron of France has won a major political victory.
By a majority of 131, the National Assembly voted yesterday to pass the first reading of a Bill that seeks to bind French Muslims to the Republic’s governing principle of laïcité, or secularism, drawing a clear line between politics and religion.
Macron has always insisted that Islam itself is not his target. He has no problem with religious observance. It is Islamism – the heresy that places adherence to an extreme form of belief above all other considerations, including the rule of law – that he intends should be extirpated from French society. The measure now goes to the Senate, which has the power to introduce amendments, but is expected to pass into law within a matter of weeks.
More than five years have gone by since a wave of deadly Islamist attacks began in France, throwing the country into a protracted period of fear and uncertainty, laced with anger. In January 2015, terrorists invaded the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which the previous week had published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. Twelve people were killed and another eleven wounded. But much worse was to come. That November, no fewer than 137 people died in a series of coordinated gun and bomb attacks on six different Paris locations. More than 400 people were wounded, many of them grievously.
In the summer of 2016, an extremist drove a heavy truck into crowds thronging the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, killing 87 and wounding hundreds more. Days later, an elderly priest, Father Jacques Hamel, was murdered in the Normandy village of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray by a Muslim extremist who slit his throat. In a particularly brazen attack in 2019, four people were stabbed to death by a radicalised Muslim of Sudanese origin in the central police headquarters in Paris.
More recently, a high-school teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded for daring to show cartoons of the Prophet during a class discussion on free speech, while in the southeastern town of Romans-sur-Isère, a church warden was stabbed to death and a woman worshipper all-but beheaded outside a Catholic Church in which the priest was preparing to celebrate mass.
Under the Bill’s proposals, which have been condemned by political and religious leaders in various corners of the Muslim world, mosques and Muslim associations must endorse Republican values and the state will be empowered to shut down those that are deemed to promote violence or hatred towards non-believers. Moderate Muslims threatened by extremists are to be given state protection, while mosques and religious associations will be required to account for donations in excess of €10,000. Regulations on home-schooling will be toughened so that education, not religion, becomes the focus. Virginity tests on girls will be banned.
A majority of the French, it is safe to say, give various degrees of support to the proposed new law. Political parties, however, this being France, have tied themselves in knots as they considered every philosophical, as well as practical, implication of what was on offer.
The hard-left France Insoumise, led by the Moroccan-born, cardigan-wearing teacher Jean-Luc Mélenchon was stubbornly opposed, while a scattering of Socialists, Communists and other ideological remnants preferred to abstain. Only eleven dissidents from the shaky En Marche majority withheld their support in the end, and of those all but one sat on their hands rather than voting against. For her part, Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Rassemblement National found herself impaled on the horns of a dilemma: damned if she voted for it, damned if she didn’t. What she wanted was a draconian response, preferably involving a cavalry charge. What she got, she said, was administrative reform. Her problem was that with only eight deputies to call on, her rejection of the Bill hardly mattered. It was left to the centre-right Républicains, having failed to push through a slew of much harsher measures, to make up the bulk of the No vote.
Macron, for once, looked to have done his homework. Even moderate Imams came onboard, reckoning that the President’s package was probably as good as it gets. Just this week, the French Council of the Muslim Faith issued a “charter of principles” directed at ending sectarianism and radicalised teaching. Under the terms of the charter, Imams intending to work in France will be vetted to ensure that they respect the state and do not inculcate radical Islam.
The council’s initiative was hailed by Macron as “a truly foundational text for relations between the State and Islam in France”.
Interior minister Gérald Darmanin, who is of part-Algerian ancestry and helped pay his way through university as a busker on the Paris Metro, said over the weekend that the Bill “provides concrete responses to the development of radical Islam, an ideology hostile to the principles on which the Republic is founded.”
As he waited for the votes to be counted, Macron found himself unavoidably preoccupied with another element of his anti-terrorist strategy, the defeat of Islamist insurgents in the Sahel region of Africa. His words in this context might have been better chosen. He was determined, he told journalists after a Sahel virtual summit, to “decapitate” those forces in the region bent on overthrowing democracy and replacing it with hardline Islamist theocracy.
The cost of French intervention in Africa is running into billions of euros. More than 5,000 troops are tied up in what looks to be a forlorn struggle, 55 of whom have died since 2012, 29 this year alone. France has sought help from its EU neighbours, but very little has so far been forthcoming. Germany this week turned down a request for an increase in the handful of specialists it has contributed.
Still, you can’t win them all. Macron will no doubt be holding his breath as he waits for the reaction to the parliamentary vote of Muslim readers around the world, among them Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who last year said that France under his leadership was worse than Germany in the run-up to World War II. Yet the President would not be human if he was not tempted to open a bottle of vintage champagne in the Élysée last night. Opportunities for celebration these days are few and far between. If he could just get Covid-19 on the run, a whole new narrative could open up before him. But that, as US Vice President Kamala Harris might have pointed out when she called on Sunday with the news that France’s role in the world had not been forgotten, is a whole nuther story.