A France without Islamic headscarves on its streets is one of the Rassemblement National’s promises to its ever-increasing electorate. But with polls indicating that its presidential candidate Marine Le Pen could well enter the Elysée Palace in May next year, the lady should perhaps be careful what she wishes for. Even her young running mate, Jordan Bardella, has warned her against maintaining a promise that, if fulfilled, risks inflaming the largely Islamized suburbs.
French media have reported on the alleged split with astonishment, as the Rassemblement National (RN), formerly known as the National Front, passes for an authoritarian party of the radical right where challenging the leader is frowned upon.
French law already prohibits Islamic headdresses in public schools and for civil servants at their places of work. But the RN wishes to get rid of them “in the public domain,” where until now only burkas are banned, as well as other Islamic garments totally covering a woman’s face.
To be sure, Mr. Bardella also is in favor of a much larger ban, according to the magazine L’Express, which broke the story of the alleged spat at the top of France’s largest party. But he prefers a softly-softly approach, removing the issue from its list of priorities. Ms. Le Pen, who made Bardella leader of the party in 2022, gave the idea short shrift, however, when he put it to her at a recent gathering of RN brass.
If recent polls are to be believed, 66 percent of the French are in favor of a cityscape free of the veil…
Scrapping her traditional promise would be “disastrous,” she is alleged to have told him and others brave enough to challenge the 59-year-old up for her fourth attempt at the Elysée. Her voters may have forgiven her for abandoning earlier promises meant to make her party electable, such as reintroducing the death penalty and the French franc, dropped when France introduced the euro in 1999. She no longer vows to take France out of the European Union, a promise considered a threat by elderly conservatives loath to see their country lose its leading role in the EU, and the generous subsidies that go with it. Ms. Le Pen’s initial enthusiasm for Brexit never caught on in her own country.
But scrapping the idea, in the short term, of French cities, towns and villages shorn of the headdresses, niqabs and hijabs viewed by many as symbols on France’s creeping Islamization would be considered one concession or treason, according to the left-leaning newspaper Le Monde, which dislikes her and gets ever more jittery at the thought of a “right-wing extremist” taking over from President Emmanuel Macron. (RELATED: Power, Islamism, and the Crisis of Western Rationality)
So Ms. Le Pen has stubbornly entered the election campaign with the promise that, in case of victory, she will not introduce a bill in Parliament, but instead put the proposed headscarf ban to the public in a referendum.
If recent polls are to be believed, 66 percent of the French are in favor of a cityscape free of the veil, feared and loathed in equal measure. Unsurprisingly, 94 percent of RN voters yearn for it. Add to that the whopping 34 percent of the electorate which intends to vote for her, with centre-right politician Edouard Philippe in second place with a paltry 19 percent, and the hard-right’s dream seems on the verge of coming true.
Well, not so fast. It is far from certain that France’s highest Court, the Cour Constitutionnelle, considers the ban, essentially a dress code for women of an ethnic and religious minority, worthy of being put to the nation. Le Monde gleefully predicts that there is little chance of the Court’s approval, which also goes for the far more important promise by Ms. Le Pen: changing the Constitution so that autochthonous French are automatically prioritized over aliens in matters like social housing, benefits, filling of vacancies for jobs, and other measures judged scandalous and racist by the left.
Jordan Bardella, too, thinks that in time the headscarf must disappear from places like Saint-Denis, the northern Paris suburb where he grew up. But, according to French media, he considers implementing the ban by force a recipe for disaster. Marine Le Pen, leader of her party’s caucus in Parliament, would immediately get embroiled in a struggle with France’s highest court. A ban could also be at odds with the concept of freedom of religion, enshrined in the Constitution, and provoke the ire of the Arab and Islamic world.
On the condition of anonymity, Mr. Bardella’s supporters at the top of the party also vent their fears that in many Islamized suburbs and neighborhoods a ban would be considered a stigmatization of Muslims at best, a declaration of war at worst.
The recently elected mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, the son of immigrants from Mali, has predicted an “uprising” in towns like his if Le Pen becomes president. Others have accused Mr. Bardella of wanting to “tear the headscarves” off women’s heads in his former home town, where he witnessed Islamization and drug-related criminality at his doorstep. Mr. Bagayoko, a Muslim, is a prominent member of the ultra-left wing party La France Insoumise (France Unbowed). Its presidential candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is the most popular politician in many places where veils dominate the cityscape. He is sure to call for “resistance” as police officers in, say, Saint-Denis, try to enforce the ban. And run a serious risk of being lynched. A “save the veil” campaign risks literally enflaming the whole country; what kind of an impression would that give the world of an officially secular France? (RELATED: France’s Mélenchon and the Politics of Replacement)
Has the matter indeed driven a wedge between Le Pen and 30-year-old Bardella apart? The other day, he looked uncharacteristically uncomfortable on a walkabout with her in a small town in the west of the country, where she smiled, chatted with admirers and posed for selfies; he remained aloof and seemed in a hurry to get it over with.
Not only French people on the right think the veil has no place in their country, at least not as massively as in places like Saint-Denis and parts of Marseille and other cities. But they deem the subject too hot to handle, fear being branded Islamophobic, or balk at the consequences of a ban well-nigh impossible to impose. So, as a somewhat cynical French saying goes: It is urgent to do nothing… Ms. Le Pen begs to differ. In her view, tolerance of a symbol of the subjugation of women and the growing influence of Islamists, who have done France so much harm, has gone too far. The buck stops with her; she has promised the French. (RELATED: Drug Gangs, Child Gunmen and Antisemitic Abuse — Welcome to Marseille)
Indeed, the creeping Islamization is ever more apparent in places like Saint-Denis, whose cathedral hosts the graves of French kings and that of the Frankish leader Charles Martel, venerated for beating back the invading Muslim armies at the battle of Poitiers in 732 A.D. In his book The Strange Death of Europe, British author Douglas Murray describes his visit to the town and its cathedral: “Today a visitor … may well wonder whether Martel did indeed succeed. To wander the district of Saint-Denis today is to see a district more resembling North Africa than France. The market square outside the basilica is a souk more than a market. Stalls sell different styles of hijabs and radical groups hand out literature against the state.”
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