French President Emmanuel Macron met with 220 elected mayors earlier this week. Some mayors, especially those on the right, felt that Paris had failed to quell the protests that erupted after the killing of Nahel, a 17-year-old Algerian teenager, by the police. According to the Interior Ministry, a total of 99 town halls were attacked during the demonstrations. David Lisnard, President of the Association of French Mayors (AMF), used the term ‘urban riot’ and said that this would happen again in the years to come, adding: “That requires immediate action to restore order, of course, and regal authority, which is what I’m telling you, and then, at the same time, a profound effort, totally different from what has been done for the last thirty years.”
It was also at this meeting that Macron floated the idea of restricting social media. “When things get out of hand, it may be necessary to regulate or cut off access [to social media],” the French president said. The Interior Ministry was forced to call the widespread rumors that France would cut the internet ‘fake news’, arguing that it was ‘illegal’ in France. But the genie was clearly out of the bottle. Starting his political career as a Trotskyist in the 1970s, then joined the Socialist Party for a while, and was eventually elected mayor of Béziers in 2014 with the support of the National Front, which was once led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, and supported Marine Le Pen in the 2022 presidential elections, Robert Ménard was publicizing Macron’s remarks at the meeting: The President had proposed cutting off access to social media platforms such as Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram.
Is the ‘escalating violence’ a new phenomenon?
The French state’s solution to the attacks on town halls and some mayors during the riots is to extend the shield of central government to local authorities. Dominique Faure, the minister responsible for local and regional government, announced that the government will allocate 5 million euros to better protect local elected officials, especially mayors. In an interview with Le Monde, Faure outlined his plan to support local elected officials, saying twelve measures would be taken, including funding for better physical and legal protections, as well as psychological support for mayors.
These measures include strengthening the relationship between local authorities and prosecutors, and increasing legal and financial protection for local authorities. A law will be presented to the French parliament in the fall that will create an ‘aggravated’ charge for those found guilty of harassing local elected officials and allow judges to give them harsher sentences, the minister added.
The home of Vincent Jeanbrun, mayor of the Paris suburb of L’Häy-les-Roses, was targeted during the demonstrations. This is one of the main justifications for increasing centralized control over local authorities. But the ‘increased violence’ predates the Nahel rebellion. The mayor of Saint-Brevin-les-Pins, Yannick Morez, ended his term early after his house was set on fire. Morez, who became the target of right-wing protests over a planned refugee center in his town, resigned on May 9. The reason for his resignation was the fire in front of his house by right-wing groups organizing a protest. In his resignation letter, Morez pointed out that he made this decision especially because of the burning of his house and the lack of state support.
Mainstreaming right, mainstream leaning to right
This is why the use of both justified and blind violence in the recent wave of riots led by young people of immigrant origin by the French right, particularly the National Rally, is far from being ‘sincere’. Violence in France did not start on June 28 and with migrants, and it will not be its only source in the future. For example, shortly before Nahel’s murder, on June 14, 19-year-old Guinean migrant Alhoussein Camara was shot dead in the chest by police officers in the southwestern French town of Angoulême on his way to work. Camara’s lawyers wonder why the outcry over Nahel has not been directed against the Guinean migrant. Why there was silence on the murder of this young warehouse worker does not matter now. What matters is that the treatment of African migrants has not changed much, despite the existence of examples of non-counter-violence.
However, in France and Europe in general, the mainstreaming of the ‘populist’ backlash against the austerity measures introduced in the wake of the Eurozone crisis has entered a new phase. The reverse is also true; in the last decade, the political spectrum known as the ‘center’ in Europe has been rapidly moving towards elements to its right. With the Macron administration being accused by Marine Le Pen and her party of ‘failing to prevent a handful of thugs’, and the parliamentary left, particularly the French Communist Party (PCF), ‘distancing itself from violence’ and at times even confronting it, the National Rally is increasingly coming to the fore as the representative of ‘law and order’.
The migrant issue is of course an important part of this picture, but only a part. Other elements of the picture include the fact that France, as an imperialist power in decline and unable to stop its decline, is unable to keep up with its economic rival Germany. French capital feels that it has become too inefficient in the face of its German ‘rival’; it still finds labor costs too high; its official weekly working hours are almost the lowest in the EU; it is struggling to find the skilled labor needed for its ‘technological breakthrough’ (it still hasn’t found it); and militant trade unionism of one dimension or another continues to plague it.
A report published in 2019 by the National Productivity Council summarizes the fascic circle in which the French system finds itself. It notes that there is a huge skills gap among school leavers, with high performers well above the European average, but low performers (overwhelmingly from less affluent families) performing significantly worse than the EU and OECD averages. Another striking data point is that labor productivity, which was actually neck and neck with Germany for a long time, started to fall in the 1990s. According to the report, “the skills of the French labor force are below the OECD average and show no sign of improving.”
Issues such as pension reform, the immigration problem and the rise of the right must be seen in the context of this ‘French decline’. While Germany picks and chooses ‘skilled migrant labor’, the French right-wing sees their country as ‘rubbish’. It is because of these needs that Le Pen’s party does not want to abolish immigration altogether, but to reduce its annual quota. This includes denying dual citizenship to those living in former French colonies. Labor migration from Africa to France is not feasible.
In this context, the National Rally’s demands to increase the budget of the Ministry of Justice, to build new prisons, to protect the ‘right of self-defense’ of the police, and to expand the powers of the police to wiretap and monitor internet communications point to a desire for a reorganization that is not limited to the immigration issue. The legal equivalent of this is likely to be ‘colonial law’ with the old-fashioned native-colonial distinction.
New mercantilism’s march to power
The main issue here is the international situation. In France, the chances are improving for the National Rally, which stands out as the greatest defender of ‘law and order’. This must be accompanied by a convincing economic program.
This program is rising in the United States under the name of ‘Bidenomics’. The re-industrialization of France, the increase in import tariffs to protect French producers, interest rate cuts for SMEs, and lower taxes, all of which are included in the National Rally’s program, indicate that the new mercantilist idea, which has increased its prestige, has matured enough to fall from the tree in France. Considering that more than 60 percent of the country’s trade comes from within the EU, a simple ‘autarkic’ approach will not work, and Le Pen has no such plan beyond ‘protectionism’. In this context, we should point out that Macron’s claim of ‘strategic autonomy of Europe’, which is questionable how much he has thought about it, clears the stones in front of the National Rally, which proposes a ‘European National Federation’.
Moreover, we should remind that the National Rally is not alone in this. Throughout the uprisings, officials of Les Républicains (LR), the party founded by Nicolas Sarkozy, pushed the ethno-nationalist throttle. For example, Bruno Retailleau, leader of LR’s Senate faction, told Franceinfo radio on July 5: “[The rioters] are French, of course, but they are French because of their identity. Unfortunately, in the second, third generation, there is a regression towards ethnicity,” Bruno Retailleau, leader of the Senate group, told Franceinfo radio on July 2. The ‘center’ right is allegedly doing this to avoid losing voters to Le Pen. But this is an overly simplistic conclusion. The right-wingization of the mainstream or the ‘center’ paves the way for the right.
Indeed, within days of describing the rebels as ‘barbarians’, LR President Eric Ciotti proposed security and anti-immigration measures. His catalog of measures bore a striking resemblance to Le Pen’s: Sharply increasing prison capacity, lowering the age of criminal responsibility to 16, abolishing benefits for the parents of criminals and stripping criminals with dual nationality of their French citizenship.
The ‘Melonization’ of Le Pen
What remains is the ‘Melonization’ of Le Pen. Clearly, this requires a Europe-wide fiction. The 2024 European Parliament elections are crucial in this regard. Whether the contacts between the Italian Meloni’s European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and Le Pen’s Identity and Democracy (ID) will result in an alliance will give an idea of the course of events. The consequences of the ‘center’ right European People’s Party (EPP) closing the door to ID, forced by the German Christian Democrats, will also become clear.
We have to recognize that the French revolt and its implications, especially for Germany, are critical for the future of the right in Europe. The economic politics of the US and the prospect of economic convergence between Democrats and Republicans will fuel the rise of the new mercantilist-protectionist right in Europe. The revolt of the plebs without a program could open the gates of hell.
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