Michel Gurfinkiel, Milstein Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum and the president of the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute, spoke to a July 29 Middle East Forum Podcast (video). The following is a summary of his comments:
“The October 7 tragedy has turned into a dividing line between two political concepts” and has become a “defining statement” about what is currently unfolding in the West. In France, the real problem centers on the impact of a “massive, non-European, and largely radical Islamic immigration to this country” affecting French ethnicity and “the very fabric of French society.”
The real problem centers on the impact of a “massive, non-European, and largely radical Islamic immigration to this country.”
In 1997, the impact of immigration was difficult to ascertain since it was unknown whether the Muslim population in France was 3 million or 6 million out of 60 million people. Under French law, “there were no ethnic nor religious statistics in my country.” Three decades later, in an overall population that has grown to 70 million people, “we are probably now above 10 million Muslims” in France. It is a figure that is close to a “1,000 percent” increase over the course of slightly more than a half century.
Over the past decade, yearly migration into France of legal and illegal migrants has numbered approximately 200,000 from each group. Of the almost half million migrants, a majority are from Islamic countries in North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Islamic Levant, as well as from Turkey and other Middle Eastern countries.
France is more liberal than most countries in Europe, and even more than some areas of the U.S., and “most immigrants from most countries, until recently, used to assimilate very handsomely in the French mainstream.” Many Muslims, on the other hand, are not only unwilling to assimilate, but aim to turn France into an Islamic country. While there is a courageous minority of Muslims in France, “including some religious Muslims,” who eschew radicalism, support French democracy, and support Israel’s right to self-defense post-October 7, most Muslims in France “put Islamic values above the values of the French Republic and of French civilization.” “Most of them say that when they vote in the French elections, they tend to vote according to what they perceive as the global interest of the Islamic community.” Thus, over 60 percent of them vote for anti-Israel, antisemitic, and anti-French political parties, with most supporting the Palestinian cause and Hamas’s October 7 attack.
Compounding this change is the emergence of “native French, non-Muslim, left-wing extremists” who are antisemitic and aligned with the Muslim radicals. Years ago, French political scientist Pascal Boniface commented on the merger of this voting bloc: “The interest of a political party now in France is to go with the Muslims because they are demographically the wave of the future.”
Demographically, “traditional European, Judeo-Christian, native French,” have a low birthrate and are in a “suicide mood,” with a “phenomenal decline in Christian, or more specifically Catholic religious practice in France.” One third of non-Muslim women of child-bearing age in France say they do not want to have children. In contrast, the birth rate in Muslim communities in France “is higher than in Muslim countries.” Many Muslims, along with radical Muslims, avail themselves of France’s extensive welfare state.
Compounding this change is the emergence of “native French, non-Muslim, left-wing extremists” who are antisemitic and aligned with the Muslim radicals.
Politically, the far-left party, La France Insoumise [Unbowed France], led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is an “extreme Leninist, Trotskyist party and, in effect, a fellow traveler of the Muslim radicals.” Countering it is the “hard right” party of the National Rally led by Jordan Bardella, which has turned into a “bona fide conservative and patriotic party.” Ironically, although the National Rally party’s roots are questionable, owing to its association with its founder, antisemitic Holocaust-denier Jean-Marie Le Pen, his daughter, Marine, a current member and past president of the party, claims to support Israel. The more conservative and right-wing French Jewish community may find that “the only place where now they feel at home is the new right.”
France’s recent general elections mark a turning point in the “tremendous transformation of French politics.” According to the popular vote, the National Rally party dominates, but the electoral law for the general election has turned the “popular majority into a relative minority in parliament.”
[In French elections, there are two rounds of voting. To win, a party must get an absolute majority in the first round. If no party wins over 50 percent in the first round of voting, a second round is held. In this round, coalitions may be formed by smaller parties, which may result in the party with the single largest number of votes not winning the seat – Ed.]
Between the two rounds, coalitions form. The Macronist center party “engaged into an unnatural alliance with the left and the far-left” in order to get seats in parliament, “the very people that I described as being extremist and … anti-Israel and antisemitic. Such maneuvering is “creating a situation where a large part of the French citizenry feels totally alienated.” The electoral law may be “unfair” in that it does not reflect the massive growth of the National Rally, which only had two representatives in the French National Assembly a decade ago, but currently has 170 elected representatives.
France may be approaching the “worst case scenario” that destroyed Lebanon as a country where “every community is at war with the other communities.” It remains to be seen if Macron or his party will realize what the next decade of French politics holds. “If nobody understands that a broad patriotic alliance is an absolute necessity for the survival of France as a democracy, as a nation, as a free country, we may [have to prepare] for the worst.”
