The Paris attacks could be a gift to the French far-right
—Christophe and Catherine did not know where their son was on the evening of 13 November until they got a call from his cousin to turn on the television. As it dawned on them that the rock concert he had told them he was going to was at the Bataclan, they tried phoning him and his girlfriend frantically, but could not get through.
‘Then he called us to tell us he was OK and wasn’t at the Bataclan,’ said Christophe. ‘But his cousin told us he was on television being evacuated with his girlfriend.’ Somehow their son had wanted to spare his parents the appalling trauma he had just gone through, though with both him and his girlfriend hurt, albeit with light gunshot wounds, the 24-year-old was not going to be able to keep it secret.
The attacks in Paris last month, both at the Bataclan and on the city’s streets, have traumatised the nation, especially coming 10 months after the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices. The socialist French president François Hollande quickly declared the country ‘at war’. Forty-eight hours after the shooting he launched airstrikes on Syria.
There is now a state of emergency in France. Television screens are filled with police raids as they search the homes of anyone they think has the tiniest link to terrorism or who might have provided them with weapons. There is no judicial oversight of these searches. Emergency legislation also gives police the right to impose curfews and house arrests.
There has been a ban on public demonstrations, which led to street battles with police trying to shut down climate change marchers who demonstrated ahead of the climate change conference at the end of November. Schools are in lockdown. There are thousands of soldiers patrolling the streets.
Most French people agree with the measures. Hollande’s personal poll ratings are up by 17 per cent, his highest since he was elected in 2012.
The large Muslim population who already feel they are treated as second-class citizens in France have had very little voice. And there has been hardly any outcry from the left about human rights, the persecution of the ethnic minority population, or freedom of speech.
Commentators in France put this down to the fact that the places the terrorists attacked were places were the young left gathered. It was not the rich on the Champs-Élysées who were mown down, it was those drinking and eating in one of the few multicultural areas still left in central Paris.
So what does this all mean for French politics? We will soon find out. There are regional elections in France between 6 and 13 December 2015. They are midterms, normally bad for the party in power. And in France these are particularly sensitive elections, because the Front National, led by Marine Le Pen, is a strong contender.
The attacks in Paris have been a gift to the far-right party. This is a country where people, even before the attacks, were worried about immigration and the decline of French life and culture. Hollande’s hardline response to terrorism has gained him personal popularity but it has only led to a marginal increase in support for the Socialist party.
In the old industrial Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region, unemployment runs at 12.5 per cent and Le Pen is the frontrunner. She believes that if she becomes leader of the region she has good chances of taking the French presidency in 2017.
The Front National is also likely to win in the south in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur where the lead candidate is Le Pen’s 26-year-old niece Marion Maréchal-Le Pen. Her most recent announcement was that she was going to stop publicly funding family planning clinics if she won.
Back at home with his son, Christophe is worried France is turning into a police state and that Hollande’s actions have justified the nationalistic ideology of the far right. And Catherine, a primary school teacher, is getting flowers, chocolates and little notes from the many Muslim mothers of the primary school children she teaches, expressing horror at what happened to her son and assuring her they want to live peacefully in France.
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Sally Gimson is a journalist and councillor in the London borough of Camden