2022 Elysee Elections – All Roads Lead to the Persecution of the Muslims of France

With the start of the first round of the French presidential election on April 10, 2022, French Muslims no longer find themselves confused by the choice of the 12 candidates, because "the result is the same" if any candidate wins, because "most of them are hostile to them."

As usual, these elections were supposed to carry great importance for Muslims, hoping it would gift them a different candidate who would soften hate and Islamophobia campaigns, but they were frustrated that most of them had the same hostility towards Muslims, which made them think about boycotting or migrating.

Muslims fear that far-right people, such as political journalist Eric Zemmour, or the National Rally former President Marine Le Pen, will win, but others believe that the victory of incumbent President Emmanuel Macron for a new five-year term "may be a cause for concern."

 

Decisive Voices

The French website Orient 21 monitored Muslim fears of Macron's victory, talking about "a windy wind blowing over the Muslims of France" and even becoming second-class citizens.

"This high winds on rights and freedoms in France have brought the Muslims of this country into this oppressive storm by dissolving their associations and enacting laws that will transform them into second-class citizens," the website said in a report published March 31, 2022.

Many Muslims elected Macron in 2017, on the promise of a liberal society open to multiculturalism, in exchange for bigotry from rivals such as Le Pen, but those promises evaporated, and France became more extreme and hostile to them under his reign.

But a large proportion of them decided to boycott the vote, and as Macron's electoral base was shaken, a question about his fate was asked if the Muslims of France did not vote for him this time.

"Macron needs the votes of young Muslims to be re-elected to the presidency, and he knows it," the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz reported on March 31, 2022, referring to former President Nicolas Sarkozy's punishment for dropping him in the 2012 elections.

Macron's quest to "appease" Muslim voters to vote for him again was monitored by conferences in cities with a majority of young Muslims, such as Marseille, and told them again: "I want to be president of all the people of France."

In the 2017 election that brought Macron to the Elysee, many Arabs and Muslims gave him their votes because he said, "I want to be president of all the people of France, and for all the people who deal with the threat of nationalism."

In the 2012 presidential election, 86 percent of Muslim voters voted in the second round for socialist candidate François Hollande, who was elected with 51.56 percent of the vote.

Without the great support of French Muslims, his right-wing opponent, Nicolas Sarkozy, would have been re-elected.

In 2017, there was a high turnout of 62 percent of French Muslim voters, more than 90 percent (2.1 million voters) voted for Macron, while 200,000 voted for Le Pen, according to the Harris Polling Institute.

If any of the 12 candidates in the presidential race (8 men and 4 women) win 50 percent of the vote, he becomes president of France directly, and if no one achieves this percentage, the top two candidates will climb to the final second round on April 24, 2022.

 

Boycott or Risk

According to official statistics, the Muslim population in France is 10 percent, with an estimated 5.7 million French Muslims (out of a total of 67 million), the largest number of Muslims in Western Europe.

Minority votes (11.8 million people, who make up 19 percent of the population), including Muslims, are an important factor in the French elections.

However, many of them are reluctant to vote in any election, because they feel "marginalized" by the French state.

Because of the unusual hostility and the transformation of the programs of the majority of candidates into plans to fight, suppress and blockade فhe Muslims of France, many of them are considering boycotting the elections, and have two options either to boycott or risk returning to vote for the left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the LFI party, according to the British website Middle East Eye on April 8, 2022.

Nearly 80 percent of Muslims have voted for left-wing parties in previous elections, but over the past decade their position has changed for political, social and economic reasons, and they have moved away from the left.

Some confirmed to the British website that they were considering boycotting the elections, and others talked about immigration from France as a whole after it became particularly hostile to the freedom of faith of Muslims.

They described themselves in these elections as "orphans of the political system" in the face of racist candidates, and after Macron betrayed the Muslims who elected him in 2017

They believe that none of the current presidential candidates has a program whereby Muslim votes are worthy, and they all have the same anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim agenda.

Islamic thinker Tarek Ramadan told Turkey's Anatolia news agency on March 21, 2022, that the solution was to "effectively abstain" from participating in the elections.

The boycotters' point of view is that "it is the real solution for Muslims to create a change or political commitment to them, and messages to candidates, before they think about migrating from France."

The same view is supported by the imam of a French mosque who remained anonymous, because of the "separatism law" that prevents imams from making political remarks inside mosques.

"It is time for us to stop being content with the girls and demand a project that suits us as Muslims," the imam said.

On April 2, 2022, Reuters quoted analysts who expected many French to abstain, a record number of voters would boycott and come as a surprise.

"Macron's main challenge remains his potential lack of voter mobilization against Le Pen in the second round, the Political Risk Group (an international public relations and consulting firm) said in a briefing note published by Reuters.

"French election participation rates have been on a downward trend since the 1980s, according to interior ministry data, and only one fifth of French voters participated in 2017 in at least one round," it said, according to Reuters.

Ipsos, a public opinion firm, predicted that one-third of voters would boycott the election, a record number for a presidential vote in France.

An Ipsos poll published by Le Monde on April 6, 2022, showed Macron's voting share could be 26.5 percent, compared with 21.5 percent for Le Pen in the first round of the April 10, 2022, ballot, and 51 percent for Macron in the second round, compared to only 48 percent for Le Pen.

Le Pen outperformed more in the latest AFP polls on April 7, 2022, and Macron appeared to be slightly ahead by 54 percent compared to Le Pen's 46 percent in the second round expected to arrive together.

The poll published by Le Monde showed that the radical left-wing candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the LFI party, was rising strongly before the vote and spoke of his chances of making a surprise.

It said he had 16 percent of the public support, raising his chances of booking a second-round seat, forcing the French left to rally around his campaign to prevent a re-fall into the trap of choosing between Macron and Le Pen.

 

Reasons for Boycott

The reasons why French Muslims are thinking about boycotting the election were summed up by Virginia Wesleyan University professor Of French Studies, Alain Gabon, in five reasons for an article published by Middle East Eye on March 29, 2022.

Gabon said that French Muslims fear another five years of hostility under Macron's second term, so they do not see him as the best, because France has become more Islamophobic under his reign, than it was before his election.

Macron's policies have made the majority of French see Islam as an existential threat to their "civilization," "traditions" and "values," Gabon said.

The Macron era saw the rise of the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory to the forefront of public debate, leading Muslims to flee France in greater numbers and large brains to flee Gabon.

The idea of the theory of "great replacement" is that foreign peoples (e.g., Muslims) will replace the French people, which is why they fear and are anti-Muslim.

A third reason for Muslims to worry about voting for Macron is the repressive authoritarian administration of Muslims and their religion, restricting their religious freedoms, and treating them with a hostile eradication approach.

Under his rule, they were forced by the Charter of Secular Republican Values and the Council of Imams, supervised by the Interior Ministry, to recruit imams from Muslim countries and to impose anti-"Islamic separatism" legislation that closed mosques and associations.

The fourth reason is the "criminalization of dissent" under Macron, as the imposition of legislation such as the "Islamic Separatism" bill gives power a whole new legal toolkit to be used to monitor, ban and close anything they choose to classify as "extremist."

A fifth reason Muslims fear Macron's victory is the penetration of censorship and repression, which affects the future of Muslims after hatred has long been extended to private life.

The Interior Ministry is attacking publishing houses and Islamic schools and preventing the formation of a Muslim civil society critical of the government, which has entrenched "new French Islamophobia," created "Islamic" and managed it in a neo-colonial style, Gabon said.

 

Real Threat

In exchange for calls for a boycott, the imam of the Paris Mosque, Shamseddine Hafez, said in an article published in Le Monde on February 15, 2022, that "the solution is participation," stressing that "only the ballot paper can stop the cycle of hatred against Muslims."

"Our children will rebuke us for our selfishness if we continue to ignore all the disturbing indicators that come to us from the political scene, and they will ask us for clarifications about our negativity and their judgment on us will be harsh, they will say that we let that happen," Hafez said.

"Silence (boycott) is a form of collusion," Hafez said.

The dean of the Paris Mosque warned that the rise of anti-Islamic rhetoric in the French elections threatened to create a "spiral of hatred" and make Muslims "scapegoated in a manner similar to anti-Jewish rhetoric in the 1930s.

"I am very concerned, because they (the candidates) are looking for scapegoats like in 1930," Hafez told The Guardian on March 27, 2022.

"Then Europeans said that Jews had become a problem of an entire society, and today they are replacing Jews with Muslims."

What bothered Muslims was that far-right candidate Le Pen stepped up her hostility to pledge to ban the hijab, impose a fine on Muslim women's wearing, and hold referendums to circumvent the constitution.

"Eighty-five percent of the people do not want the veil to spread in France," she claimed a day before the election.

If Macron loses, Le Pen, an anti-Islamic populist right-wing, will rise, and her victory would also be an existential crisis for the European Union because of its desire to distance it from American influence.

A poll conducted by the Harris Research Center in the early days of April 2022 showed that Macron's second-round victory against Le Pen would be a slim 51.5 percent to 48.5 percent.

This means that "Macron has become less popular, in a deep crisis, and may be hardly re-elected," The Independent reported on April 5, 2022.

Le Pen's shares have focused their recent campaigns on alleviating her party's traditional obsession with Muslim immigration in a successful attempt to soften its image, focusing on economic issues such as bread, high fuel and heating costs of interest to French families.

Although Le Pen's speeches focus on the economy, her National Rally party continues to demand an end to the benefits granted to foreigners, an end to the reunification of immigrant families and a ban on headscarves in public places.