Stopping Le Pen

There is a the less-famous version of the Chotiner interview — one in which the interviewee is an actual expert with a lot of interesting things to say. The latest is a really good conversation with Arthur Goldhammer:

You just brought up some leftist concerns about Macron, but it seems like the campaign was broadly dominated by right-wing themes. And not just that—people in Macron’s administration played into anxieties about Islam and French identity.

Well, Macron responded to growing French anxieties about terrorism, in particular, by authorizing the police to conduct searches under much less restrictive rules that had prevailed before. He proposed a crackdown on the teachings in Muslim religious schools and insisted on new rules to require imams dispensing religious education to be trained in France rather than in countries like Saudi Arabia or Algeria. And he was still vilified by many on the right who think that those measures did not go far enough toward a crackdown on the breeding grounds for Islamist terrorism.

I wrote an article in the Guardian about him in which I raised some concerns about the measures he had taken to restrict Islam, and there was pushback from the Élysée. Someone contacted the paper and said Macron attacked Islamists, not Islam, and you foolish Americans are not making the necessary distinction that Macron always makes in his speeches. But, even if he observes that distinction, some of his ministers did not. The Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin, for example, attacked the sale of halal foods in grocery stores, and the Minister of Education raised the issue of the pernicious influence, so-called, of American wokeism on the education being dispensed in French schools.

Le wokisme?

Yeah. Le wokisme is what they call it.

That’s great. So you paint this picture of Macron going further right than people like us might have hoped. And yet that seemed to be not quite far enough for the French electorate, and that’s what I’m just trying to understand.

I think you’re quite right. It doesn’t seem completely warranted. The rate of immigration, both legal and illegal, has been curtailed, in part by COVID. There’s no particular reason for anxiety. I think the beheading of Samuel Paty in broad daylight on a public street, by a Chechen refugee, was a major source of anxiety. There’s a trial going on right now of the surviving terrorist involved in the Bataclan attack in 2015. So that’s a reminder that terrorism is an omnipresent danger in France. But still it goes too far. Macron’s critics attack him for being anti-democratic in their view, but here he’s responding to a clear popular demand, where polls showed that seventy per cent of the French think he hasn’t gone far enough. So he’s caught between a rock and a hard place.

Definitely recommend the whole thing.