IS PARIS BURNING? Could the Riots in France Lead to the Election of Conservative Marine Le Pen?
President Emmanuel Macron and his supposed “centrists” can scream “Nazi!” all they want about Le Pen and National Rally. That’s been their electoral strategy since Le Pen’s father was running for president in the 1970s. But the colossal failure of Macron’s left-wing policies and those who preceded him, along with the rise of populists in France, has created a genuine opening for the right that Le Pen will almost certainly exploit.
The fact that Jean-Luc Mélenchon is trying to start a revolution will make Le Pen’s job a lot easier.
Mélenchon has been, as ever, mercurial, playing both sides at once. He has called for a “march of peace” today, with students, teachers and parents, united in wearing white hats or caps, coming together to show their disgust with the government. At the same time, LFI rhetoric argues that in all its forms, from bad schooling to police brutality, “state violence is not legitimate”. The students have a right, says Mélenchon, even a duty, “to take revenge”. He has publicly denounced both Lecornu and Valérie Pécresse, the centrist President of the Île-de-France region who wanted to charge Bagayoko’s administration €100,000 for the damage caused, as “racist”, levelling the same charge at the news channel BFMTV, which has shown some of the most graphic images. The present democratic structure of France, says Mélenchon, is loaded with “white privilege” and part of “an already obsolete present”. He calls for a “citizen’s revolution”, driven by “the force of numbers”, and led by the new postcolonial generations to come. (France already has 7.6 million second-generation immigrants aged 30 or less.)
“Unsurprisingly, the student protests are now conflated with Gaza, Palestinian flags are everywhere, and there are calls for a ‘Sixth Republic’ — effectively rewriting the present constitution — and ‘a New France,'” writes UnHerd’s Andrew Hussey. “Mélenchon’s overall aim is a revolutionary one: to create a France for the 21st century, one that is constructed out of its new second and third generation of immigrants.”
This kind of overreach by Mélenchon is already leading to a significant backlash against the left.
“Mélenchon is smart, but he also underestimates the extent to which conservatism, in a political or simply a social sense, is still a force to be reckoned with in the ‘Old France’ — which still makes up the majority of French people,” Hussey continues. “With his strategy of organized disruption, Mélenchon is clearly playing once again into the hands of Le Pen, whose agenda is the opposite of Mélenchon’s.”
It’s not hard for “Old France” to decide which side they should be supporting.
And it’s not hard to notice, as John Daniel Davidson writes at the Federalist, that “The riots in France last week stand as a warning to the United States and all western countries: mass immigration will split your country in two, and the two sides will eventually go to war.”