How Marine Le Pen is winning over the Muslim vote
‘Shock’ was the one-word headline on the front of Monday’s Le Figaro. France was bracing itself for a swing to the right in Sunday’s regional elections, but few imagined it would be quite as dramatic. Marine Le Pen’s Front National (FN) polled nearly 30 per cent of the vote in the first round of voting, ahead of Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right Les Républicains and the ruling Socialist Party, who trailed in third with 23 per cent. As it stands, the FN are on course to take control of six regions after Sunday’s second round, although the predictions are they will triumph in no more than three due to tactical voting.
Among those who voted for the FN are a small but increasing number of Muslims who see no conflict between their religion and the party’s fierce opposition to Islamism. Marine Le Pen – a far smarter operator than her anti-Semitic father, Jean-Marie, whom she had expelled from the FN earlier this year – has been courting the Muslim vote since she became party leader in January 2011. In her victory speech on Sunday night she called for the French people ‘of all origins’ to vote for the FN in the second round and ‘turn their back on the political class that deceives them’. The message that Marine Le Pen has sought to convey is that her party isn’t opposed to Muslims but to what she has described as the ‘progressive Islamisation of our country’. It’s a message that is winning her votes in the most unlikely of places.
In September Mohamed Boudia posted on social media a selfie of himself and Le Pen, an act for which he was threatened with death, and which served to reinforce his own belief that the Islamic extremists must be rooted out. While the majority of France’s estimated 4.5 million Muslims want to lead peaceful, integrated lives (only 2.1m are said to have declared their faith), there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of extremists.
Opposing them are Muslims like Boudia, some of whom have started a Facebook page called ‘We are Muslims and Proud to vote for Marine Le Pen‘. Another person is Karim Ouchikh, an administrator for Rassemblement bleu Marine, a political organisation affiliated to the FN. His parents were Berbers from northern Algeria who arrived in France in the early 1960s and abandoned their language and their customs to immerse themselves in the new culture. The problem now, he says, ‘is that since then a huge number of foreigners have arrived and formed enclaves’. In an interview with Le Point magazine in October, Ouchikh explained that he turned to the Front National because he was dismayed at the rising number of young Muslim men adopting the dress and beards of the ultra-conservative Salafists, people he describes as ‘provocateurs’.
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How Marine Le Pen is winning over the Muslim vote
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