The Victory of France’s Extreme Center

”Far Right” Is a Matter of Where You Stand

France’s New Popular Front at its inaugural coalition meeting. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Is the National Rally party anti-immigrant? The New York Times reports that “France’s far-right, anti-immigrant National Rally party, led by Marine Le Pen and her wildly popular protégé, Jordan Bardella, surged to first place in elections for the European Parliament on Sunday [June 9] with about 31.4 percent of the vote.” Yet in a more nuanced analysis, Times reporter Roger Cohen writes that “with his Italian background, Mr. Bardella has been able to argue that the issue is not immigration itself, but the refusal of many migrants to assimilate.” By calling his party “anti-immigrant” then—instead of, say, pro-assimilation—the Times is tacitly rejecting Bardella’s argument. Its framing of the National Rally party, while feigning objectivity, is de facto oppositional. It collapses the distinction that Bardella makes, thereby forestalling the question of whether French immigrants are, in fact, failing to assimilate. Instead of at least acknowledging that possibility, the “far-right, anti-immigrant” label serves to shut down discussion entirely.

The Times itself provides inadvertent evidence for Bardella’s failure-to-assimilate argument. An article about “mostly peaceful” French protests against “the far right” features an image of demonstrators mounting a defaced monument, wearing keffiyehs, and waving Palestinian flags. Even if we assume, very generously, that they are showing solidarity with Palestinian civilians, and not Hamas, the choice of a foreign flag over the French tricolor is telling. The demonstrators’ message is not that they are proud French citizens, in refutation of National Rally’s imputation to the contrary; it is that their first loyalty is to a foreign cause, for which France is a literal stepping stone. Also visible in the image is the red-and-black flag of Antifa. The red in the Antifa flag represents communism, while the black represents anarchism. Yet the article never describes the demonstrators as “far left”; only the right is deemed extreme.

Measured in terms of violence, the most extreme ideology in France today is not the native-born right or left: it is Islamism. A short list of notable French jihadist atrocities includes the 2021 beheading of a teacher by a Chechen refugee; the 2016 massacre of 86 attendees of a Bastille Day parade by a Tunisian; and, in 2015, the killing of 12 employees of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo by French-born Algerian brothers, the slaughter of 90 concertgoers at the Bataclan theatre by terrorists of primarily Moroccan and Algerian backgrounds, and the siege of a kosher supermarket and subsequent murder of four Jews by the son of Malian immigrants. It is worth noting the perpetrators’ targets, because they represent both Western values and sources of Islamist rage: humanistic education, loyalty to one’s country, the marketplace of ideas, art for art’s sake, and religious freedom. It is also worth noting the national origins of the assailants, because they have certainly been noted by the French people.

Antisemitic attacks by Muslim immigrants have led an increased number of French Jews to depart for Israel. In response, the supposedly anti-immigrant Marine Le Pen encouraged French Jews, many of whom have roots in North Africa, not to leave the country: “The Jews of France are Frenchmen, they're at home here, and they must stay here and not emigrate. The country is obligated to provide solutions against the development of radical Islam in problematic areas.” By contrast, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of France’s leading leftist party, France Unbowed, has called antisemitism in France “residual” and refused to label Hamas a terrorist group. National Rally, despite its own mixed history on the subject, recognizes that a country unable to protect its Jews is unable to protect any of its citizens; France Unbowed gaslights on the issue and panders to its anti-Israel base. No wonder famed French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, who once co-signed an open letter opposed to Le Pen, now says he would support her in a run-off with Mélenchon.

The majority of French Muslims condemn violence committed in the name of their religion. But it is not an overwhelming majority. A survey found that 72% of French Muslims strongly condemn the Charlie Hebdo attacks, with the remainder either not condemning them at all (18%) or condemning them but sharing some of the attackers’ motivations (10%). Muslims are approximately 10% of metropolitan France’s population, meaning 1.17 million of them view blasphemy as justification for mass murder, and another 649,000 are sympathetic to that argument. It can reasonably be extrapolated that these same Muslims do not espouse modern France’s founding principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, let alone its constitutionally enshrined secularism (laïcité). That may not be reason enough to halt all Muslim immigration to France, but it is reason to take the issue of integration seriously; especially since, according to a Pew “medium migration” projection, Muslims will be 17.4% of the French population by 2050.

France has historically been welcoming of immigrants. As historian David A. Bell notes, “Between the wars France was the leading country of immigration in the Western world, and by the Eighties fully a quarter of the French population could count at least one grandparent born elsewhere.” Although far from an unmitigated success story (especially given the anti-Jewish Vichy regime during World War II), these earlier immigrants were ultimately integrated into French society, so that “it is not unusual to find people with Italian, Polish, Jewish or Iberian surnames in the wealthiest and most visible strata of French society.” That National Rally, France’s leading “anti-immigrant” party, is itself led by a man with an Italian surname is a sign of integration’s success. Indeed, a more extreme French party opposed to mass migration, Reconquête, is led by the son of Arabic-speaking Jews from Algeria. A nativist could argue that immigrants are taking the jobs of French ultra-nationalists.

Viewed in historical context then, the issue inflaming France (literally, in the case of violent riots that saw thousands of cars lit on fire in 2005 and 2023) is not immigration as such, but the lack of integration of particular immigrants. As Bell notes, almost six million people, or around a tenth of France’s population, live in suburban housing projects “where people of North African and black African descent dominate, and where rates of unemployment, poverty and crime far exceed national averages.“ In the context of the 2005 riots, Christopher Caldwell pointedly asked, “Who were these rioters? Were they admirers of France’s majority culture, frustrated at not being able to join it on equal terms? Or did they simply aspire to burn to the ground a society they despised, whether for its exclusivity, its hypocrisy, or its weakness?” If France has been unable to integrate its most recent waves of immigrants, the logic of halting further waves seems obvious.

In the Times, Cohen writes that the European right overlooks “the benefits that immigrants can bring to societies with shrinking labor forces and tax bases.” These benefits should be part of any national conversation about immigration, but they should also trigger follow-up questions like: What is the appropriate balance between economic growth and social stability? What is the rate at which a society can absorb immigrants without being absorbed by them instead? Must an aging European population be supplanted by conservative Muslims from Algeria? On that last question, Japan’s aging society is aiming to recruit highly skilled tech workers from Southeast Asia and India. It is not opening its doors to the entire world, but is instead targeting specific countries and industries for workers. Presumably, Vietnamese software engineers are seen as more compatible with Japan’s cultural values and economic goals than Tunisian goat herders. Can’t Europeans base their immigration policies on similar calculations?

The accusation of “fascism” is often used to shut down such questions. But fascism, as an actual historical phenomenon, did not argue for the integration of minorities. Before World War II, German Jews were the most assimilated Jewish community in Europe, sometimes called "More German than the Germans.” Far from murdering German Gentiles in the name of their religion, German Jews sought to adapt Judaism to Protestant mores via the Reform movement and the appellation “Germans of Mosaic faith,” which de-emphasized the national dimension of Jewish identity. Walter Rathenau, the German Jew who served as foreign minister in 1922, went so far as to write, “My people are the Germans, no one else. For me, the Jews are a German tribe, like the Saxons, Bavarians, or Wends.” For his trouble, he was assassinated by German ultra-nationalists who thought he was an Elder of Zion. The Nazis forced Jews to wear yellow stars so they stood out from the non-Jewish population. National Rally wants to ban religious symbols from public spaces so minorities don’t stand out. One can certainly oppose such a ban on the grounds of religious freedom, but not on the grounds of it being in the spirit of Nazism.

David Frum writes that “If liberals insist that only fascists will enforce borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals refuse to do.” But his formulation does not give voters enough credit. National Rally, like Giorgia Meloni׳s Brothers of Italy party, had to moderate before it achieved political success. Marine Le Pen’s own father was expelled from her party (then called the National Front) for downplaying the Holocaust and speaking favorably of France’s collaborationist Vichy government. Even if National Rally’s makeover was motivated in part by concerns over electability, that speaks rather well of French democracy. Political parties are supposed to appeal to voters, and anachronistic fascist leanings clearly do not attract the French electorate. Notably, the more extreme Reconquête party performed poorly in the recent European parliamentary elections. As political scientist Olivier Roy observes: “Zemmour [leader of Reconquête] got only 5%. But the real extreme right is with Zemmour and has slowly left the Front National because they think that Marine Le Pen shifted too much towards the center.” Seen in the long view, then, National Rally’s success was not a victory for the far right, but for a radical new center.