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hen Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan asked Emmanuel Macron “Are you in a good mood?” during a casual conversation at the COP28 Climate Summit in Dubai, the French president replied, “I feel energetic.” He even ran to the podium as if to show how energetic he was. But everyone knows that Macron is not in a good mood.

While people of all religions and races from all over the world were demonstrating in the streets against Israel, the French president not only gave Tel Aviv his strong and unconditional support, but also came up with a brilliant solution that no one had thought of and proposed it during his visit to Israel: “The international coalition against Daesh can also fight against Hamas,” he proposed.

The French Foreign Ministry ignored the statement, a group of diplomats wrote a letter to the ministry marked confidential and reacted, the Élysée Palace issued a statement and tried to explain, but it was obvious that Macron thought of Daesh as soon as he saw the words Hamas, Jihad, and terrorism side by side!

The French president had thought that the whole world, including the Muslim countries, would side with Israel, which was committing massacres in Gaza, and fight as one against Hamas. Of course, this was beyond even Netanyahu’s imagination! In the post-truth era, the Israeli prime minister, who has been trying to manipulate the Western states that have been spreading “Islam equals terrorist” propaganda morning and night for decades, has been formulating “his war” with the same rhetoric since day one. But, as Netanyahu knows the world better than Macron, he stated, “This is Europe’s war. This is America’s war. If we don’t win now, you will be next.” And they came running—except for Spain.

Just a few months after his election in 2017, Macron was the first French president to declare that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism and described Netanyahu as a “friend.” Colonial France and colonial Israel once again appeared side by side in the same picture. Subsequently, since his first presidency, Macron has introduced the most Islamophobic legislation in Europe, leaving no breathing space for Muslims in a country occupied by cultural racist discourses.

After October 7, pro-Palestinian demonstrations, boycott campaigns against Israel, and anti-Israel protests were banned in Macron’s France, the country with the largest Muslim and Jewish populations in Europe. However, recruiting soldiers for Israel and raising money for the Israeli army in synagogues were not banned, and French-Israelis with dual passports who went to fight on the Israeli front were presented on television as “brave, courageous, and noble” people.

Macron has thus given Israel every opportunity to delegitimize its political enemies, directly or indirectly, to hide its occupation and massacres, and to present Israel to the French public as a “victim of radical Islamic fanaticism.” While members of the government and parliament engaged in all sorts of polemics with politicians from the radical left-wing La France Insoumise (LFI) party, which is the strongest opposition to Israel in the country, they did not react to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant’s description of Gazans as “human animals,” nor to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s religiously motivated horrific statement, which he made during a press conference on October 28, 2023. Netanyahu stated, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. I Samuel 15:3-4 ‘Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass’.”

On the French news channel LCI, David Pujadas’s comments in favor of the Israeli position that if Hamas is a terrorist organization, then all Gazans are terrorists, were not a problem. But when the Israeli army spokesman was interviewed on TV 5, the French state channel, after the spokesman’s statement that “Hamas kills civilians,” the journalist Mohamed Kaci said, “You also kill civilians. Then, are you acting like Hamas?” to which the army spokesman fiercely replied, “These words are an attack on the state of Israel.” The journalist thanked him, ending the broadcast. Then, all hell broke loose: First, the channel issued a written statement declaring that Kaci “did not act in accordance with the rules of journalism” and “the organization deeply regrets” it. A day later, Kaci was fired.

Being critical of Israel and expressing anger against Israel have become a marginal choice in France. Taking a stand against Israel and publicizing the tragedy in Gaza have been left to social media platforms and media websites that are against the dominance of the mainstream media.

Obviously, these policies and practices are not in favor or in the best interest of either French Muslims or French Jews living in France today. In fact, as early as 2020, Turkish President Erdoğan suggested that the French president might have lost his mind, saying, “What else can one call a head of state who does not recognize freedom of faith and freedom of belief and who treats millions of people of different faiths living in his own country in such a way?”

A month later, on November 10, 2023, Macron did a U-turn. In an interview with the BBC this time, he attacked Israel directly. “Baby-killer,” he called Israel, the country he had called on the world to fight for two weeks earlier. “Children, women, and the elderly are being bombed and killed. There is no explanation for this and it is unacceptable.” The same evening, he made another U-turn. He called Israeli President Herzog and said he “does not have the intention and will not accuse Israel of deliberately harming civilians in its operation against the Hamas terrorist organization.” He added, “I unconditionally support the state of Israel and your right to defend yourselves.”

In a statement, the Israeli presidency said that during this apparently long apology meeting, Herzog reminded Macron of the offer he made two weeks before to form a coalition against Hamas like the one against Daesh. All this is of little consequence, though. After all, the French president made this offer two weeks before, and a few hours later, in Ramallah, he had said that “the life of a Palestinian is worth the life of a Frenchman, who is worth the life of an Israeli”!

Macron then embarked on a new move ahead of COP28: he wanted to bring together the leaders of the countries in the region, from Egypt to Jordan to Qatar, and hold a roundtable. He, in fact, mobilized two of his ministers for this organization. However, the roundtable did not take place and not even a statement of unavailability was issued by any of the parties mentioned.

According to newspaper reports, Macron, who was due to visit Saudi Arabia after COP28, “canceled his visit at the last minute because he had planned to meet Mohammed bin Salman in Dubai anyway.” Le Monde reported, “Since the Crown Prince canceled his visit to Dubai at the last minute, he was not able to meet him either. This picture at COP28 gives an idea of how difficult it will be for France to engage in dialogue with Arab leaders in the post-October 7 climate.”

No wonder President Erdoğan, the only NATO leader to openly say that Israel is committing war crimes, asked Macron, “How are you feeling?” President Macron, though, wasn’t content with just saying “I’m in good spirits” in response; he added, “We can work together on humanitarian issues.” This brief conversation with Erdoğan that was the only message about Israel-Gaza in the tweets from COP28.

“For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” To make things worse, the storms that French President Emmanuel Macron will face are not of only one kind. Whatever had not happened before in the history of the Fifth Republic has taken place in the second round of the French presidential elections.

For the first time, a president could not win the absolute majority in the parliament just two months after being elected; for the first time, no political bloc could achieve the absolute majority in the parliament; and for the first time, a far-right political party became the main opposition party on its own with the highest number of deputies in its history. President Macron, who wanted a strong and clear support for his second five-year term, is now facing an outcome beyond even the worst scenarios.

Undoubtedly, Marine Le Pen was the elections’ most successful name. Le Pen, who could not get enough deputies in the past elections even to form a group in the parliament, increased her party’s number of deputies 11 times and won 89 seats. In the second round of elections, the ultra-leftist party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon was the rival of President Emmanuel Macron, who, for two consecutive elections, had run against the far-right party leader Le Pen for the Élysée Palace.

This led some commentators to argue that the far right was weakening, but it actually was not. Comments that the second-largest political power in the country had shifted from the far right to the far left within two months, and that the voters in France were acting on a very unpredictable ground were also not true.

In the second round of the 2017 presidential elections, Le Pen was behind Macron by 32 points. In the 2022 elections, again in the second round, the difference dropped to 17 points. The difference between Macron’s and Le Pen’s votes was only 4.69 percent in the first round of the 2022 election. However, the parties on the left united and formed a single bloc despite the rivalry among them, whereas far-right parties could not. If Marine Le Pen had been able to convince Eric Zemmour, who preferred to run independently, and bring him under her party’s umbrella, she could have found herself abreast with Ensemble (the bloc supporting Macron) and NUPES (the bloc supporting Mélenchon) in the first round.

Notorious for his hostility towards Muslims and immigrants and some anti-Semitic rhetoric, Jewish far-right Eric Zemmour was the most talked about name in the presidential elections. Zemmour received 4.25 percent of the votes in the first round and split Le Pen’s vote. No one could predict that Zemmour could get such a high score, while it was considered almost certain that Le Pen would increase the number of deputies of her party, which was founded 50 years ago by her father, with 18.66  percent of votes in the first round. In fact, Marine Le Pen would run in 208 of 577 constituencies, 88 more than the last election held five years ago.

The NUPES alliance, led by the former Marxist Mélenchon, won 131 seats, less than expected and did not please the left. Hopes were indeed higher for the NUPES alliance for the second round. The alliance’s score in the first round was celebrated in the left press with headlines such as “The Left Is Coming Back.” The right press saw headlines along the lines “Will Communism Come to the Country This Summer?” aiming to frighten undecided voters. However, Mélenchon’s party, Unsubmissive France, which one day was portrayed in the media as the dreadful shark in Spielberg’s 1975 movie Jaws, another day was a monster, and yet another a bogeyman, eventually won 72 seats—in 2017, it had only 17.

Eight months before the 2017 presidential elections, Macron had resigned from his position as minister of economy in the socialist government, and first won the presidential elections and then 308 seats in the second round of elections with his party, whose motto was “Neither right nor left, both right and left.” Five years later, his La République En Marche ! (Republic Forward), which changed its name to Renaissance, received only 170 seats in the election.

Macron could not reach the numbers of five years ago, even with the votes of a total of seven parties, large and small, united behind the bloc and entering the election together. The Ensemble, the alliance of political parties supporting Macron, won 245 seats and thus remained 44 seats short of an absolute majority.

Along with Macron’s unsatisfactory performance in the last five years, there were other reasons, of course, behind the election results such as the COVID19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the economic and social consequences of the war. However, the economic policies of President Macron and his government, which further widened the gap between the rich and those with a low income, and his Islamophobic rhetoric and legal regulations targeting Muslims that were actually unprecedented in Europe affected both election results.

Thus, while the far-right politics moved to a legitimate ground, Le Pen and the like, on the one hand, and those who took a hostile position against such policies, on the other, like the far-leftist Mélenchon, gained strength just for this reason by winning the votes of 70 percent of Muslims.

In the 2017 elections, the traditional right and left parties had weakened to a great extent against Macron’s brand-new party and were finally buried in the 2022 presidential elections. The socialist party, which had 30 seats in 2017, was able to get 26 seats, while the Republicans, which had 112 seats, could only get 61 deputies. The Union of Democrats and Independents (UDI), another right-wing party that entered the election with the Republicans, had 18 deputies last time, but could only get three this time. It deserves mentioning also that for the first time in its history, Paris will not have either a socialist or a republican deputy.

Another important result in the second round of elections was the indifference of the French people to the elections: a new record was set with 53.77 percent abstention and 7.67 percent protest votes. According to the detailed analyses of the election results by poll companies, although all parties were affected by this situation, the left was affected the most. It seems that indifference to the left bloc and sometimes the fact that there was no left bloc candidate in some electoral districts despite the risk of the far-right candidate being elected in the second round and no votes for the bloc supporting Macron all contributed to this new record.

Before his visit to Romania and Moldova, President Macron spoke recently in Orly and asked for an absolute majority in order not to add “French disorder to the world’s disorder.” There was no absolute majority in the elections, and even the Republicans, judging by the statements of their officials, do not want to cohabitate the same political space as Macron. As Élisabeth Borne, prime minister of France, said, the country is indeed in an “unprecedented state”!

In France, a founding member of the European Union, the far-right party has advanced to the threshold of the Élysée Palace, and its voice is now being heard not only at home, but around the world. Marine Le Pen has never been so close to winning the presidential election. What if she crosses the threshold?

Since the night of April 10, French politicians, academics, intellectuals, journalists, and especially President Emmanuel Macron, have been repeating both verbally and in writing: “This is a historical responsibility, it is time to unite against the extreme right!” In the Fifth Republic, when this call was first made 20 years ago, in 2002, Jean Marie Le Pen eliminated the socialist candidate Lionel Jospin, but President Jacques Chirac won the election with 82.21 percent in the second round.

In 2017, when Emmanuel Macron won 24.1 percent and Marine Le Pen 21.30 percent of the votes in the first round, the call was repeated: “This is a historical responsibility, unite your votes against the extreme right!” Although the difference was not as clear as last time, Macron came in at 66.10 percent and Marine Le Pen at 33.90 percent. Here it is, five years later, in the first round, Emmanuel Macron got 27.84 percent, Marine Le Pen got 23.15 percent, and the other two far-right candidates Eric Zemmour got 7.07 percent and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan 2.28 percent.

The far right thus received a total of 32.50 percent of the votes in the first round. This time, according to various polls that see Macron ahead, the gap between the two candidates is closing and is only between 2 and 7 points.

In the last elections, the country’s traditional left and right parties had weakened in favor of Macron’s “neither right nor left, both right and left” party; this time, they were buried. Anne Hidalgo, the candidate of the socialists and the mayor of Paris, received 1.75 percent of the votes. Valérie Pécresse, the candidate of the center-right party of the Gaullist tradition, Les Républicains, is crying foul because her 4.78 percent will not allow her to receive state aid, and has launched a campaign to cover election costs.

Parties that receive less than 5 percent of the votes in France are not eligible for state aid. While that is the scenery, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the ultra-leftist La France Insoumise party, who is a presidential candidate for the third time, scored unpredictably high, receiving 21.95 percent of the votes. In other words, he almost scored high enough to qualify to run against Macron for the second round, the difference with Le Pen being only 1.2 percent.

Why did the far right and the far left get stronger?

So, what happened to make the far right and far left so strong in France? Why is everyone, especially Macron, screaming that “Republican values” are under threat? Why are the leaders of the Rassemblement national (National Rally) party (Le Pen), the Reconquête (Reconquest) (Zemmour), and Debout la France (Dupont-Aignan) called far-right? Who are their enemies, what makes the far right a far right?

The economic measures of Macron’s rival, Marine Le Pen, are similar to those of the far-left and even centrist parties. She wanted to take France out of the military wing of NATO, but De Gaulle also did so in 1966. She does not say, “France should leave the European Union,” but she makes promises that will inevitably create a de facto departure from the EU. “I will recognize the supremacy of constitutional law over European law by holding a referendum,” she says.

While Macron said in his 70-minute speech on “Fighting Separatism” that “in some schools, some students want meals in the canteens based on their religious beliefs” (i.e., they do not eat pork), according to Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, this was communitarianism and unacceptable. In October 2019, Macron’s former interior minister, Christophe Castaner, described having a beard or celebrating Ramadan as “conspicuous” and a sign of radicalism. These and similar absurd statements were well received by France’s elite, whose apparently influential majority is extremely Islamophobic, and became the cover story of weekly magazines.

The Imam Charter, for example, a unique state-level text on anti-Muslim hostility, was the official declaration that Muslims were a separate and dangerous entity under the French Constitution and laws, even in their very existence. Judging by the ideas and actions that the imams, and thus Muslims, were supposed to commit to never think or act, they were a community prone to committing all kinds of evils, including “discrimination against the sick and disabled.”

Indeed, Macron’s government this year even shut down the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, one of the leading anti-discrimination organizations documenting hate crimes against Muslims. Between 2018 and 2022, France rummaged nearly 25,000 mosques, schools, associations, and workplaces, and shut down 718 bodies, including more than 20 mosques. The state demonizes Muslims with its Imam Charter, Anti-separatism Law, its so-called French Islam with its fabrications and rhetoric, and portrays Islam as a dangerous religion that needs mass surveillance and oppression. Muslim French are presented as an existential threat to France’s “civilization,” “tradition,” and “values.”

With a president and government that patented Islamophobia for themselves, naturally, Marine Le Pen had to go from door to door in the election campaign in order not to get euchred out of her voters. What’s more, Zemmour emerged as another candidate in the elections. “Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind,” say the Turks.

In his brief 10-minute speech after the election results were announced, Macron hastily began embracing Muslims. In his refutation, he said excitedly and surreptitiously, “I do not want a France that prevents Muslims or Jews from eating as their religion dictates. No, we will not.” For the first time, Macron mentioned Muslims and Jews in the same sentence, but because of the strict laws and sanctions against anti-Semitism, no one cares about the kosher of the Jews. He could not stop himself and went on to give a message to Muslims before the second round on April 24: “Madame Le Pen says she will ban the headscarf. Then, she will not be president of all French people.”

Before that, however, Macron had said, “The headscarf contradicts our country’s civilizational understanding of the relationship between men and women, and therefore makes us feel insecure.” Each of his ministers made numerous statements on the same subject. Marlène Schiappa, Minister Delegate in charge of Citizenship attached to the Ministry of Interior stated, “The headscarf is a political act,” and Minister of National Education Jean-Michel Blanquer said, “The headscarf is undesirable in our society.”

The Minister of the Interior Darmanin, who opposes Le Pen today, said, “In no democratic country in the world, is there a ban on religious symbols and signs in public spaces,” the women wearing headscarf were taken hostages in accordance with traditions that are not compatible with the Republic.

While hostility to Muslims brought votes from the far right, respect for Muslims also brought votes from the far left to Jean-Luc Mélenchon. French Muslims, who had to choose between deliberate abstention and voting, gave their votes to the far-left candidate Mélenchon by 70 percent, according to polls. Many French Muslims posted the following message verbatim on their social media platforms: “I never look at the world ideologically from the same angle, but Mélenchon does not discriminate, does not point fingers, does not label us and even condemns Islamophobia.”

The legitimization of Islamophobia, which resurged in France after the colonial period, especially since the 2000s, has played a very important role in the growth of the far right. Today, it is no longer just a threat to Muslims, but it indirectly threatens the rule of law, the European Union, and even the country’s strategic choices and alliances.

In the first round of France’s presidential election on April 10, incumbent Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen came out on top, securing their places in the second round of voting, which will be held on April 24.

Macron’s result was the best first-round performance for an incumbent president since 1988. He gained more votes than in the 2017 first round. There is no doubt that his warnings of the need to hold voters back from the far right and his role in the Ukraine-Russia war both played a big part in his success.

However, Le Pen also scored higher than in 2017, especially in the last few weeks of her campaign when, instead of putting Muslims on the agenda, she focused on the high costs of living and inflation, something that concerns most voters.

Now, with all the votes counted, Macron has over 27% and Le Pen has less than 23.1%. Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon came third, with close to 22% of the votes.

Although this year’s election did not exceed the 2002 record levels of abstentions, which stood at 28%, the percentage of voters who abstained this time remained high at 26% which corresponds to 12.8 million from around 49 million eligible voters. This time the abstention rate was higher than in the first round five years ago.

The abstention among the younger population was higher this year than in the previous elections. According to Ipsos-Sopra Steria estimates, the age group with most abstentions was voters between 25 and 34 (46%).

Yasser Louati, a French political analyst, believes that voters abstain from voting mainly because they don’t have faith in politicians.

“We have millions of people living under the poverty line, COVID19 killed more than 150,000 people. We have institutions that are being discredited, people don’t believe in institutions, politicians are not trusted, journalists are not trusted,” he told Politics Today.

“Instead of addressing these questions and how we can make our institutions more legitimate, how we can address poverty, we have debates over Muslims. Such as, do Muslims belong here? Are Muslims like us?” he noted.

Amal Benkerroum, a Muslim woman entrepreneur, who is thinking of leaving France, told us, “I don’t know if I will vote on Sunday. I don’t know who to vote for.” She added, “If Le Pen becomes the next president of France, I am going to leave France because that means the community that we are living in doesn’t want us and we are not welcome.”

With the second runoff only a week away, France is faced with two choices. However, most young people feel that neither Macron nor Le Pen can represent them. Four days after the first round, several hundred students took to the streets chanting “Neither Macron nor Le Pen!” Most of them voted for the hard-left leader Mélenchon, and they complain about not having a suitable candidate in the second round who represents them.

According to Ifop pollsters, Macron is expected to receive 51% of the votes and Le Pen 49% on April 24. However, abstentions may increase in the second round mostly due to the fact that the 2022 French election has been driven by fear rather than hope. Although Macron is calling on people to vote for him in order to block the far right, the gap is very narrow and it is the first time in French history that the far right is so close to winning.

Who would have thought that French President Emmanuel Macron and the Muslim minority living under pressure in France especially during his term, would breathe a sigh of relief at the same time, for the same reason, albeit for a temporary period! The war launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022, on the grounds of the “demilitarizing and de-Nazification of Ukraine,” turned the political climate in France upside down.

With the biggest conventional war that Europe has seen since World War II, Russians took the place of the Muslim minority in France, who were spoken of with hostility from morning to night and subjected to legal regulations one after another. Muslims, who were the target of far-right candidates in the first round of the presidential elections, could thus partially breathe because people are now more afraid of the Russians.

On the other hand, compared to the other candidates, President Macron, whose popularity had started decreasing as far back as directly after he was elected, turned into a dignified statesman who tried to manage the crisis in his capacity as the EU term president. Naturally, he was relieved.

After three years in which the most discriminatory laws of the Fifth Republic were enacted and anti-Islam and anti-Muslim hostility turned into a state policy, “immigrants, Islam, and Muslims” were at the forefront of the propaganda during the election campaigns.

The most media-savy and strongest candidates of the election campaign, hang on to 75-year-old former socialist militant Renaud Camus, who has turned into one of the most influential figures of the far right, and his conspiracy theory called “Le Grand Remplacement” (The Great Replacement) which claims that Arabs and Muslims will seize control of France.

This infamous theory had also influenced Brenton Tarrant, who attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, causing 51 deaths and 49 injuries. While the far-right Marine Le Pen has long expressed her admiration for Camus, Éric Zemmour, a far-right candidate who called for banning Arabic names, and giving employers the right not to employ Arabs/African,  has turned Camus’s theory into the central idea of ​​his media show and political propaganda.

Aside from the discussion of whether the left would be a remedy in the face of this storm, where the extreme right ideas sailed into the stern, Liberation Newspaper asks: where was the left? At the beginning of the election campaign, the newspaper asked, “Well, who will protect Muslims, women, Jews, officials, intellectuals, and other targets from this hate speech?” and argued that the left should come out with an inevitable historical mission.

However, there was no reply to this article. Could Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s coming third with 22% of the total votes be an answer? The left in France has not been able to straighten its back since the socialist François Hollande, who ruled the country between 2012 and 2017.

The Socialist Party candidate, 62-year-old Anne Hidalgo, who was elected mayor of Paris in 2014, could not exceed 2% at the polls. It is not new for the French left to lose some of the working class to the far right, and to leave others in despair and make them abstain from the elections. To some, this is a lost ideological war. In fact, no leader candidate from the left could emerge with a political agenda to meet this need at a time when social democracy is most needed because of the COVID19 crisis.

Nevertheless, not on the left but on the extreme left wing, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of La France insoumise (France Unbowed), was the surprise of the first round in his third run as a presidential candidate. With his promises to increase the minimum wage, to bring back a tax that was lifted for the rich, and to be positive towards the Muslim minority, he got 22% of the total votes.

Far-right ideas were seriously moving along, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine directly affected the dynamics in French politics. As Russia claimed that its purpose was to destroy the neo-Nazis in Ukraine, far-right and right-wing candidates in France that engage in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim propaganda were suddenly cornered. Le Pen, Zemmour, and even Mélenchon had to make people forget about their long-held admiration for Vladimir Putin and their various relations with him in person. Each tried to condemn Putin and Russia in their own way.

There was another important development revealed by the war: the immigrant was in disguise! He was no longer Arab and Muslim, but European. The commentator on the French television channel BFM put it thus, “They were not Syrians fleeing the bombings of the Syrian regime, but Europeans, with cars like ours, who simply set out to save their lives.” “Immigrants,” which was one of the most talked about topics for all candidates, including President Macron, in the election campaign, thus turned into a sensitive issue that have forced candidates to use a careful language.

Far-right candidate Zemmour said, “I would prefer the Ukrainians to be in Poland. Also, when the war is over, they can return home more easily: it is not good to destabilize France, which is drowning in immigration.” And after saying this he suddenly became “heartless”! His far-right rival Le Pen must have sensed the changing tide and and said that “Ukrainian acceptance is very natural.”

And President Macron, whose support went down right after he took his seat in the Elysée Palace, who had to struggle with the consequences of the Yellow Vest protests all over the country, who had to deal with the weaknesses in the health and industry sectors caused by the COVID19 pandemic, announced his candidacy for the elections on March 3, just five days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

His tactic was to watch the opposition candidates from the stage and turn the first round of elections into the opposition’s primary election. Although this situation was criticized as a “democratic deficit,” he was redressed as a candidate who sought a solution to the Ukraine crisis before the Russian invasion, who tried to persuade Putin, and gave the image that he strove for peace. Thus, he assumed the most reasonable role as both the French president and the president of the EU Council.

Macron broke away with his closest rival Le Pen, passed her by 4.7 points, and got 27.8% in the first round. Macron’s claim was to fill the seat of European leadership left vacant by Merkel and to foster France’s role in finding solutions to the problems of the European Union. Although this was opportunism and was criticized as such, until the war, the French elections were publicly discussed with headlines such as “Will Europe win the elections?” The Russia-Ukraine War changed the country’s priorities.

Macron’s famous opinion that “progress in the common defense capacity is of critical importance to ensure the sovereignty of the European Union,” which he frequently emphasized, now gained a special meaning during the war. Macron defines himself as “a defender of democracy against populism” and the only candidate who could find answers to questions such as: What red line will be drawn against the dictator who tries to seize European order? What weapons will be used to resist since there is no one ready to die for Ukraine in the European Union? What should be done for France to gain its sovereignty industrially, strategically, and militarily?

Political commentators in France put it all down to the lack of alternatives. Now the question is whether there can be a surprise in the second round.

France will choose its new president in April of this year. Current president Emmanuel Macron has not yet announced his candidacy, but he is expected to announce it officially soon. There are around 40 candidates who will run for the election.

The presidency is the strongest organ of the country’s two-headed executive branch. Thus, the French presidential election attracts a global interest as French presidents determine the country’s foreign policy and domestic politics.

While far-right politicians in France have been already mobilized, Macron, who was elected in 2017 with great expectations, wants to be re-elected. No prediction for a future election is easy, and neither is predicting whether Macron will be elected again. To this end, we need to have a brief look at Macron’s four-year term in office.

Macron’s failed tests

Emmanuel Macron faced many challenges in domestic politics after he was elected in 2017. The yellow vests protests and the COVID-19 pandemic were the most important tests. In November 2018, civil protests broke out against the rising fuel prices and living costs. The police response was violent and used disproportionate force against civilians participating in the protests, leading to severe criticism of the Macron administration.

The Macron government did not prevent the excessive violence by the security forces, but on the contrary, made legal arrangements for the use of violence. The General Security Law emerged as a reaction to the protests and was approved in France’s National Assembly, empowering security forces and justifying the use of excessive force to defend and protect themselves.

Macron failed another test in the fight against the COVID19 pandemic. His administration couldn’t efficiently overcome the socio-economic problems that emerged due to the pandemic, reducing confidence in Macron’s leadership. As a result, La République En Marche! (LREM) founded by Macron suffered a great defeat in the municipal and regional elections that took place in 2020 and 2021, respectively. LREM fell short of expectations and lost big cities such as Lyon, Marseille, and Paris to the Greens and Socialists, respectively.

Islamophobic aspects of the candidates

The Islamophobic views of prominent candidates such as Macron, Le Pen, and Zemmour in the lead-up to the election point to a serious threat to Muslims in the country. In fact, the marginalization and securitization of Muslims in France since the September 11 terrorist attacks reveal that the French governments follow an institutionally Islamophobic stance.

The Islamophobic views of prominent candidates such as Macron, Le Pen, and Zemmour in the lead-up to the election point to a serious threat to Muslims in France.

More recently, Macron’s government has closed down 17 mosques with vague claims of violating security laws or not meeting the required safety standards, and has surveyed nearly 90 mosques. Moreover, the government pressured the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) to sign a charter of “Republican values” as a part of its so-called French Islam project.

With elections drawing near, the French government is looking for ways to appeal to far-right voters. For instance, on February 5, 2022, they officially introduced the Forum of Islam in France (FORIF) that took over from the CFCM. What’s controversial about this forum is that all its members will be handpicked by the government, evidently undermining the political representation of Muslims in the country.

As part of their far-right ideology Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour are quite notorious for holding both Islamophobic and anti-Semitic stances. Both oppose the presence of Islam and Muslims in France. More extreme than Le Pen, Zemmour calls for the assimilation of Muslims and demands that French Muslims renounce their faith.

Muslims in France are struggling to decide which candidate to vote for in the election. Whatever the outcome of the election is, difficult days lie ahead for French Muslims, which comprise around 10 percent of the population. The worst-case scenario is a far-right candidate coming to power. Then Muslims would face innumerable difficulties including facing more violent acts in the coming years.

How might the election results affect relations with Turkey?

It seems that two political/ideological factions stand out in the French presidential elections. The first is the relatively moderate line represented by Macron, and the other is the far-right line represented by Le Pen and Zemmour. If Macron is re-elected, as seems probable at the moment, the current tense atmosphere in Turkish-French relations may continue. More specifically the tensions in Libya, Syria, and the Eastern Mediterranean, where the concerned parties are in direct confrontation, are likely to remain.

The second scenario would be catastrophic. If the far right comes to power in France, then, there would be a paradigm shift in France’s relations with Turkey. Turkish-French relations cannot remain healthy under a Turkophobic and Islamophobic government. In such a scenario, ideological motives would dominate the relationship and the bilateral relations may come to a breaking point. Therefore, Macron’s victory in the presidential election seems the more preferable option for Turkey.

What did France’s President think he was doing by visiting Putin in Moscow? On the anniversary of the EU adopting the Maastricht Treaty – heavily backed by France – a lot has changed in the world. But Macron hasn’t changed his own vision of France and is still living in the 90s where the Republic had more clout on the world’s stage and Russia was just rebuilding itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The long table stunt was pure genius by Putin, who knows a good media opportunity when it walks in the room. The ruse, to make Macron look pathetic, servile and very much a servant at the master’s table paid off as Macron was blindsided by the media arrangements, too obsessed with his moment in the global media spotlight.

Compared to other world leaders who visited Putin – Merkel, Trump and just recently Erdogan – Macron was certainly treated with a certain contempt, which reflects exactly how the  Russian leader regards the EU project and Macron himself. Lightweights.

Macron paid a heavy price consequently to agree to the long table photo shoot which served as an example of how out of touch he is and how desperate he is to promote himself as a world leader, weeks ahead of the Presidential elections in France which will probably reinstall him as the country’s premier.

He believes in a European pillar within NATO and that France should lead such a farcical vanguard, which is really what the visit to Putin was about. He undermined NATO entirely and even went as far as to support Russia’s presence in Eastern Ukraine all in exchange for the meeting itself which he really believed would make him shine at home with the voters and embolden his banal ideas of an EU army, led by France which supposedly would deter Putin.

The Russian leader’s threats are very real and Macron’s visit and the hilarious memes which followed gave Putin even more kudos.

All nonsense and wildly deluded. In reality what we saw by the move was that it merely enshrined Putin even more and affirmed him as a powerful leader of a mighty super power which, unlike the West, does not have a reputation of talking big but then retreating when someone calls its bluff. Putin is not Obama. The Russian leader’s threats are very real and Macron’s visit and the hilarious memes which followed gave Putin even more kudos and placed Russia where it has wanted to be but failed for twenty years – in a superior position where the West is actually listening to its security concerns. Macron just walked straight into a media trap and gave Putin exactly what he wanted: a snapshot of the West on its knees with cavernous, weak, ambitious leaders begging for sympathy.

Macron is part of a political elite which since Maastricht has treated Russia with contempt. In particular, the EU’s role in pushing Kiev to mull NATO membership was foolish and has led to the present crisis. The photo itself of the long table will be logged in the annals of history as the key moment where Russia no longer takes the EU and the West seriously as the tipping point now is in Russia’s favor.

Putin will be delighted by how the meeting went. Macron really got nothing accept mockery on the internet, while the EU and NATO had to just look on as puerile spectators while he made everyone look like second rate players.

Aside from the memes on the internet which just made Macron look stupid, there are some important messages there which Putin’s media people manipulated. The main message is that Russia has the advantage however the Ukraine debacle turns out. It is the lion, surrounded by mice.

The winner takes it all. And Putin is winning even more now after Macron gave him this latest media coup.

Macron’s embarrassing charade merely supported this. A French president who has delusional views about his own status in the world organizing himself a personal visit to see the Russian president doesn’t make France look like the super power that it would like to project of itself, more like a corrupt, minor EU member state which allows its president to manipulate its own media, led by a man who clearly doesn’t have any respect for the fourth estate.

France today is struggling to come to terms with its new demise and Macron’s visit just underlined this as he walked away a loser. The winner takes it all. And Putin is winning even more now after Macron gave him this latest media coup.

Another message from Putin is that he is neither scared nor bothered by the threat of sanctions from the West, which is really what the whole row is about. Sanctions alone will be difficult on Putin and in particular his close circle of tycoons who have huge investments in London. But as Biden has proved, secondary sanctions imposed on a handful of countries which buy oil from Iran, are very hard these days to implement and Putin has made it clear that, if necessary, he will trade sanctions for an invasion of some sort, if the West doesn’t engineer a way of Ukraine talking down NATO membership.

Of course, if Putin sent his own troops into those regions, Macron may well be delighted as this would give even more gravitas to his idea of an EU army. The problem of course is that the French leader doesn’t want to send French troops to a war zone with Russia, as he has proved by speeding up his own withdrawal of troops in Mali, once the presence of Russian mercenaries just recently emerged. But it will be that iconic picture of the long table which will haunt Macron as the Russian media machine will be the victor. As Churchill once said, history is written by winners. And that snapshop of the long table makes it quite clear who the winners and losers are.

France was shocked when Jean Marie Le Pen, who was the leader of the far-right party and never invited to be on any television channel in France, went into the second round against Jacques Chirac with 16.86% of votes in the 2002 presidential elections. Expectedly, Chirac was elected president with 82.21% in the second round; meanwhile Le Pen could only increase his vote to 17.79%.

But, according to the newspaper headlines, this was a shameful event and a great disaster for France! This was because Le Pen, who was prosecuted for inciting xenophobia and for his statement that gas chambers were “a mere detail” in the history of World War II, achieved a great success considering he could only win 0.74% of votes in 1974 when he first ran.

That’s all water under the bridge now. Over the last 20 years, far-right ideas have flourished and bloomed. They have even ceased to be “far-right ideas” as they have become pretty common. An ambiguous xenophobia against Africans, Arabs, and sometimes people coming from countries in the European Union was replaced by an overt hatred of Islam and hostility towards Muslims. This new xenophobia moved to the center of politics and gained serious ground in both left-wing and right-wing politics.

French Minister of Higher Education Frédérique Vidal, who gave an interview to CNews channel after Blanquer, said, “Islamo-leftism causes social collapse and I think universities as a part of the society are not free of its grip.” Not only that, Vidal also called on the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) to conduct a study on the “Islamo-Gauchisme [French term of Islamo-leftism] effect and its impact on studies on the decolonization process” in universities.

There are many examples of the so-called valorous breakthroughs in the name of Islamophobia that started in the 2000s. An influential figure in left-wing politics, feminist intellectual and philosopher Élizabeth Badinter, in an interview to the newspaper Le Monde during socialist President Hollande’s incumbency stated, “Don’t be afraid of being accused of being Islamophobic; I’m not afraid, no one should be afraid.” She had also secured the support of Prime Minister Manuel Valls at the time.

Before that, one of the founders of the highly circulated right-wing magazine Le Point, Claude Imbert said in slightly more timid words, “To be honest, I’m a bit Islamophobic,” while Françoise Laborde, a former Radical Party of the Left senator who later joined Macron’s party, said, “Frankly, I like being called Islamophobic.” These are only a taste of what’s going on.

With his talent as a writer, Zemmour expresses in a vulgar but impactful way what others could only whisper or insinuate. He is a republican after all, albeit being “radical” or “overzealous” for some. In France, the definitions of secularism, republicanism, and “Civilization” – whether used together or separately – are extraordinarily useful euphemisms for anti-Islamic sentiment and hostility towards Muslims. When it comes to Muslims, Zemmour’s far-right ideological position of “Civilization and the Republic,” Marine Le Pen’s emphasis on “Secularism,” and a socialist or a right-wing politician’s discourse of “Republicanism, Secularism” or “Civilization” are not different at all.

As a matter of fact, Macron’s “Anti-Separatism Bill” was renamed “Principles Strengthening Respect for the Laws of the Republic” after receiving backlash across the world for being Islamophobic; however, it retained its content. In other words, the state does not openly say “give up your Islamic identity” like Zemmour, but does its best to make Muslims live their faith in their inner world and make their physical attachment to their religion invisible.

The French public is subject to constant manipulation; the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP), one of the leading research institutions in France, for instance, published a survey last month based on students’ responses to the question “Have you observed any behavioral patterns at school that show signs of religious belonging?” Zemmour, then, justified his thesis through this survey.

Horrendous cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed being projected on government buildings or Muslim children being forced to look at these cartoons as a part of their education, and two 10- or 11-year-old students who refused to look at these cartoons being taken from their homes with their families and being subjected to investigation is not dissimilar to what Zemmour promises.

Eric Zemmour announced and propagated this discourse and his racist comments by writing for mainstream media outlets like Le Quotidien de Paris and Le Figaro, along with appearing on prime-time shows on channels such as RTL and France 2. Although he faced trial and was convicted twice, it is not possible to claim that he has faced a hostile response to his person. In the last 20 years, he has become a celebrity in political and economic circles. For two years, he was working at CNews, the news channel controlled by the Catholic businessman Vincent Bolloré, who previously supported Macron.

Eric Zemmour announced and propagated this discourse and his racist comments by writing for mainstream media outlets like Le Quotidien de Paris and Le Figaro, along with appearing on prime-time shows on channels such as RTL and France 2.

Despite all this, there is something about Zemmour that renders him unique. Born in 1958 to an Algerian Jewish family, at his first official political rally on December 5, 2021 he boasted of his minority background, describing himself as a “little Berber Jew from the other side of the Mediterranean.” Zemmour, who was educated at a private Jewish school located in a Parisian suburb, says he practices his faith but does not consider himself Orthodox. However, this is not what makes him unique – he is accused of turning historical events on their head, while some describe him as an “anti-Semitic Jew.”

Indeed, Zemmour claimed that “Dreyfus may not be innocent,” [referring to the political scandal riddled with anti-Semitism known as “Dreyfus affair”] and Philippe Petain, who was president during the Nazi occupation between 1940 and 1944, was actually watching over the French Jews! Shocking at first glance, Zemmour’s connection to anti-Semitic history seems to be his far-right ideology, and the anti-Semitic vein at the base of the far-right may have tactically compelled him to make such comments. Indeed, 93-year-old former far-right party leader Le Pen also declared that he supports Zemmour instead of his daughter. “The only difference between Éric and me is that he is a Jew. It’s hard to call him a Nazi or a fascist. It gives him more freedom,” Le Pen said.

On the other hand, there may be another element to explain his shocking historical “revisionism.” In France, there is a publication called Causeur, which was first established as a website by the Sephardic Jewish journalist and writer Élisabeth Lévy. Causeur has been publishing as a monthly magazine for several years now and is deemed a right-wing and far right-wing publication. Alain Finkielkraut, another one of the magazine’s founders, is one of the country’s most influential and prominent philosophers and of Jewish origin, who is known for being “just like Lévy, but more of an Islamophobe.”

Lévy, in the article titled “Salomon, Will You Vote for Zemmour?” states that Zemmour is the talk after synagogue services. She relays that while part of the congregation says, “aren’t you be ashamed to support him, so you’re going to vote for a Petainist,” others say “Zemmour is our savior.” Due to France’s foreign policy discourse or despite the protection offered by legislation against anti-Semitism, the rise of Islamophobia causes tensions between Arab and Jewish children in the suburbs, especially in Paris. Lévy extracts that while many institutions and organizations of the Jewish community condemn Zemmour for his views and allegations, Jewish families residing in the suburbs see him as a “savior” or even as the “last exit before exile.”

According to polls, with 14-17% of the vote, Zemmour is unlikely to become president. However, in a country where far-right parties and ideas are indisputably on the rise, he will retain a significant voter base and will continue to inflame the debates along with consolidating the anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim rhetoric.

On December 3 and 4, 2021, French President Emmanuel Macron traveled to the Gulf for a short visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. This is likely to be his last foreign trip outside of Europe, as France has entered election season. The presidential election will take place on April 10 and 24, 2022, and

Macron is preparing to run for re-election.

Macron’s trip highlights the importance of the Gulf countries on at least two levels. First, at a time of the United States’ disengagement from the region, France is trying to occupy its place economically, militarily, and politically.

Second, at a time when the issue of Islam and Muslims is at the center of the presidential campaign, Macron wants to seek support for the French position against “radicalism,” and especially so after the adoption of the “Law against Separatism,” renamed the “Law Reinforcing the Principles of the Republic,” which came into force in August 2021 and which has caused much misunderstanding in the Muslim world (and elsewhere) as it appears to be (and is in fact) a law against Islam and Muslims.

The most successful stopover was in Abu Dhabi, where President Macron has a close personal relationship with the Emirates’ strongman, Mohamed bin Zayed (MBZ). The signing of a record contract for the sale of 80 Rafale aircraft was accompanied by the sale of twelve Eurocopter EC725 Caracal helicopters, and the singing of various economic partnership agreements. “This is the biggest military contract with a French component in our history – worth some 17 billion euros,”  Macron said.

For Macron, this is proof of the close ties between Paris and Abu Dhabi. “I think that the Emirates and the Crown Prince saw that France was a solid partner in the fight against terrorism (…), that is to say that we kept our commitments in the region and that we were attached to its balance.” For it is not only a question of arms sales, but of a community of views and coordination between Abu Dhabi and Paris in the “war against terrorism” (notably in Libya), and in the fight against “political Islam,” as shown by the presence on the trip of Laurent Nuñez, the national coordinator of intelligence and the fight against terrorism. MBZ’s support for French laws against “separatism” is particularly appreciated.

We should notice that the French president said nothing about the authoritarian nature of the Abu Dhabi regime, which imprisons and tortures its opponents, about its involvement in the deadly war in Yemen, or about its use of Pegasus spy software. Yet, a few days later, a report by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) highlighted the dark side of the regime and Paris’s complicity in it.

The last and most controversial stop of Macron’s trip to the Gulf, in France at least, was his visit to Saudi Arabia. For the first time since the horrific murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018, a major head of state of the Western world agreed to meet Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the Saudi crown prince, widely considered the mastermind of this crime.

Relations between MBS and Macron had not been rosy since the French president “rescued” Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri in 2018, when he was reportedly kidnapped in Saudi Arabia by MBS and forced to announce his resignation from Riyadh.

Relations between MBS and Macron had not been rosy since the French president “rescued” Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri in 2018.

While the aim of the meeting was also to give a boost to bilateral relations – and to take advantage of the rift between Washington and Riyadh, with President Joe Biden refusing any contact with MBS – one of the objectives was a new mediation with Lebanon, which the Saudis are subjecting to a trade embargo that is aggravating the economic crisis in the country. The result was modest: a conversation between Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati and MBS on Macron’s phone. Nothing more came of the visit – no return of ambassadors and no lifting of the embargo.

During the trip, the question of the nuclear agreement with Iran was not at the center of the discussions. Macron made only one declaration asking the Gulf states and Israel to be associated, a non-starter for Iran and even for the U.S. It is also noteworthy that the question of Palestine was not addressed, as France has supported the Abraham Accords and largely abandoned its traditional position on a solution to the Palestinian question.

There are three obvious conclusions to Macron’s visit to the Gulf. First, the trip was notable for the absence of any reference by France to human rights in the region. It is true that since the reception of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in France in December 2020 and his decoration as “Grand Officier de la Légion d’honneur,” President Macron has not seemed to attach much importance to democracy in the Middle East.

Secondly, Macron’s visit made clear the importance of the “Islam” dimension in French foreign policy, a ball and chain that is all heavier since Paris is the only major Western capital to show such an obsession with Islam and Muslims. Finally, Macron’s visit shows that France can still be an actor in the Gulf and the Middle East, and can defend its interests there; however, its weight is limited, especially in the regional conflicts (Iran, Syria, Palestine, Yemen), not only when compared with the United States, but also with regional powers such as Turkey, Iran, or Russia.

On October 5, Jean-Marc Sauvé, the head of the independent commission charged by the Catholic Church itself to investigate sex crimes in its ranks, publicly and solemnly released the massive 2,500 page report, whose conclusions he shared in a two-hour, surgically and factually devastating live presentation in front of the press, politicians, associations of victims, and Catholic officials.

The result of a three-year investigation by a panel of 22 experts in all relevant fields (law, theology, psychiatry, social sciences, anthropology, history of religions, etc.), based on Church, court, and police archives as well as interviews with victims and witnesses, the Sauvé Report is being hailed by all, without a single exception, as a model to be emulated by other nations and institutions worldwide seeking to investigate sex crimes. In its scope, conclusions, and methodological sophistication both quantitative and qualitative, it is simply unprecedented and has no equivalent anywhere in the world.

It is an understatement to say that ever since its public release, that the report, akin to a fragmentation bomb or cataclysm, has been sending shockwaves across not just the Catholic institution but the whole nation and to a much lesser extent other countries. Although everybody knew the Catholic Church had always been a hotbed of pedophilia and that was an open secret—after all, among other goals Jean Calvin’s reform movement back in the 16th century already intended to react against the massive debauchery he could observe in the Church from top to bottom—and despite widespread common awareness, the Sauvé Report stunned and shocked by the extent and gravity of what it is describing.

Main Findings

A mere few facts and numbers may give an idea:

• Between 1950 and 2020, a 70-year period, less than a lifetime, 216,000 children, 80% of whom young boys, have been raped, often repeatedly over a long period of time (several months or years) by about 3,000 predator priests or bishops (3% of the total), and a few nuns. Some of those priests raped hundreds of children.
• If one adds those who were abused by laymen working for and in the Catholic Church (catechists, monitors of youth camps, etc.), the figure rises to 330,000 victims.
• All along, the Catholic hierarchy from the peers of the criminals all the way to bishops, cardinals, and popes, including Pope Francis, knew the identity and crimes of most of the serial rapists. Yet, not only they did nothing to stop them, but they actively, systematically, and methodically denied and covered up the crimes; sheltered and protected the serial rapists from public exposure and criminal prosecution; and consistently refused to pay any attention to the victims, whose abuse they denied and whom they refused to listen to—as was still the case a mere few years ago.
• In some cases, for decades, highly organized and effective actual networks of pedophiliac priests shared among themselves and with others both the children and the pornographic material (images, etc.) produced during those sessions on church grounds.
• As Alain Cordier and other commission members declared, “I want to emphasize the fact that it is NOT a problem of the past but a problem of the present. Because the problem continues today.”

A second instant achievement of the report has been to completely pulverize all the denial, spin, hypocritical lines of defense, and attempts at minimizing the nature and extent of the crimes the Catholic Church had been able to use to oppose such accusations until October 5, 2021. At least they are no longer trying, as shown by the pope’s reaction when he lamented, “Dignity to our Lord! Shame, shame, shame on all of us!” while the other Church officials, shamed and rendered speechless, could only admit everything and hypocritically feign surprise, and then ask for “forgiveness.”

At least the French Church is no longer trying to hide or minimize any of this as it was still doing yesterday, and it has now fully accepted the conclusions of this horrifying report. Historically, this in itself is colossal progress.

To take the full measure of this, one needs to keep in mind four other facts:

1) The figures above would be terrible for a country the size of a continent like the United States with a population of 330 million. But we are here talking about a small country with a population of 67 million, the size of the state of Texas, a country where one can drive from east to west and north to south in half a day or less.

2) Those numbers include only minors, but sex crimes against legal adults above 18 years old whether nuns or practitioners are also widespread and would need to be added to the already horrible picture.

3) The comparison between the French situation and similar investigations conducted in other countries like Germany, Ireland, the United States, or Australia suggests France may actually be at the bottom of the list. One will remember that the famous 2002 Boston Globe investigation, popularized by the star-studded 2015 blockbuster Spotlight, uncovered nearly 100 pedophiliac priests and thousands of victims in a mere few dioceses of that one U.S. city and that in the years that followed, similar or worse patterns were discovered all across the country in hundreds of cities.

4)  Those numbers, whether French or American, are the “low and minimal estimates” as the Sauvé commission members have always been careful to specify in their many public interventions.

Institutionalizing Rape and Pedophilia

A few quotes by Jean-Marc Sauvé himself will illuminate the systemic nature of the crime, which can no longer be reduced to a mere few rotten apples or a matter of individuals, even thousands of them, in an otherwise healthy institution.

Until the 2000s, the Catholic Church showed a complete and cruel indifference to the victims.

Sex abuse in the Catholic Church has been a massive and systemic phenomenon, covered by a veil of silence.

Catholic authorities covered up the abuse over decades, in a systemic manner.

The cover-up has permitted mass crimes for decades.

The French findings are furthermore fully corroborated by previous findings from other countries, suggesting without a doubt that the exact same has been happening everywhere where the Catholic Church operates:

For the first time, we can all begin to understand the systematic cover-up by Church leaders that followed. The abuse scarred every diocese. The cover-up was sophisticated. The Church protected the institution at all costs […] The cover-ups by the Church served a key purpose—the longer they covered up abuses, the less chance that law enforcement could prosecute predator priests because the statute of limitations would run out. “As a consequence of the cover-up, almost every instance of abuse we found is too old to be prosecuted,” the grand jury found.

To sum up, four main lessons clearly emerge from this picture. First, the Catholic Church has been and, as Alain Cordier made clear, remains a massive breeding ground of organized mass pedophilia and a true safe haven for its thousands of sex predators. Second, pretty much everybody knew everything all along including bishops, cardinals, and popes, who were aware of the identities of the priests and children, when and where this was happening, yet not only did they do nothing but they actively covered it up, guaranteeing, in full knowledge, that this activity would go on—and one should remember here how Pope Francis himself, who now claims shock and surprise in utmost hypocrisy much to the victims’ anger, in 2018, was still defending predator priests while calling their victims liars, publicly accusing them of “slander and calumny.”

Three, besides the family (for obvious reasons such as that is where children spend most of their time, relatives have easy and permanent access, etc.), the Catholic Church has been (and most likely remains) quite simply the institution where the most pedophiliac crimes occur, well ahead of schools, sports clubs, youth camps, etc. In that domain it simply has no match. Four, and this needs to be stated without euphemism: what is described here is a gigantic collective crime—what the Catholic Church has done was to institutionalize mass pedophilia, make it part of its culture, of its DNA, and entrench then preserve and protect it like no other institution besides the family ever did, possibly in human history.

Last year, President Emmanuel Macron launched a war against “Islamist separatism” in France after a terrorist attack that targeted a French schoolteacher. On February 16, the French National Assembly passed a bill to reinforce “Republican Principles,” officially aimed at fighting an ideology associated with extremism. However, the bill targets entire Muslim communities in the country by making it easier for the government to shut down mosques, associations, and schools that are found to be critical or not complying with the vaguely defined “Republican values.”

For the French sociologist Raphaël Liogier, professor at Sciences Po Aix and visiting scholar at Colombia University, Islam in France has gradually been constructed as a problem in the media and became the product of a long history of people perceived as refractory to civilization and progress. “Muslims have a peculiar definition in our minds: enemies of the Christian culture, and enemies of modernity and progress.” If Islam has been depicted like this for a long time, the new rhetoric of “Republican values” used by the French government gives another perspective as to how Islam is also “anti-Republican.”

In the name of “secularism”

The Macron law aims to bring about a radical and reactionary transformation of society and politics by imposing a strict state control over the Muslim religion and a principle of collective responsibility which allows political parties and the police to decide the fate of religious associations, organizations, and schools. The law of 1905 that supports neutrality of the state and freedom of religious exercise is a law of separation which implies that the state must renounce the regimentation of cults.

A secular state has nothing to say about what religious dogma should be. It does not have to intervene in the way believers live their faith as long as they respect the laws in force. “Before 2003, secularism meant the freedom of expression in the public space. However, from 2003 onwards, we changed its interpretation. It was not only the neutrality of the state, but also the neutrality of people, which is very different,” says Liogier.

Stigmatizing not only Islamism but Islam itself, is a symptom of this new unqualified rejection of the Muslim population, which is nevertheless largely integrated into the French society. The 2004 law banning religious symbols in schools has opened the floodgates to significant abuses, explains the sociologist. “In 2004, you can see the act of parliament to prevent the scarf, the simple scarf, in public schools in France.”

The recurring persuasion to ban veiled mothers from accompanying children on school outings even though they are not public officials; the attempt by political figures to constantly direct the debate towards Muslim community are in reality a form of Islamophobic propaganda in the name of French secularism.

In reality, this tactical election strategy shows first and foremost the contradictions of a government that is walking on eggshells. With the responsibility for the catastrophic balance sheet of the health crisis, and a historic economic crisis and its consequences on the working classes and youth, Emmanuel Macron aims to replay the card of the bulwark against the extreme far-right for the presidential elections of 2022.

A strategy that pushes him to carry out an offensive on the reactionary and Islamophobic ground of Marine Le Pen, while at the same time delimiting himself intermittently in order to embody the party against the populism of the National Rally and its leader. A vast program that has nothing to offer to the youth except for the accentuation of the authoritarian and racist offensive.

Emmanuel Macron aims to replay the card of the bulwark against the extreme far-right for the presidential elections of 2022.

This shift towards authoritarianism is linked to the homicidal policy of the ruling class in response to multiple crises within the country. To implement its homicidal policy, the international ruling class is cultivating fascist forces and turning to authoritarian forms of power. “Similar acts reflect the picture all over Europe; and there is something strange with the laïcité in France. It is becoming the object of our narcissistic anxiety,” recalls the sociologist.

Throughout Europe, similar processes are underway. In Spain, the army reacted to last year’s strikes that forced a policy of closure by plotting coups and rehabilitating the leader of the 1936 fascist coup and dictator Francisco Franco. In Italy, banker Mario Draghi is forming a government of “herd immunity,” including both the far-right Lega and the former Stalinist Democratic Party.

For Raphaël Liogier, this narrative shaped a collective paranoia, born out of a narcissistic wound which resulted in imposing an ideology at the expense of Muslim communities. “It is very important for everybody, but it is even more important for Western Europeans because they are used to the idea of being at the center of the world, and this created some kind of a complex. And, anti-Islamism, which exists in some parts of the world, is directly fed, even constructed, through this complex.”

French president Emmanuel Macron gives a positive definition of laicism: “Laicism is the freedom to believe or not believe. The freedom to practice religion as long as it doesn’t disrupt public order, which is guaranteed by the state. And this is the cement of a united France.”

Macron stresses again and again, “The problem and the danger is separatist Islamism.” But when he says, “We cannot victimize Muslims with the stigmatization of polemicists and extremists,” he actually spills the beans! Since right-wing extremists are not the soldiers of laicism and what they practice is cultural racism, when we look at the discourse of the president we see that the problem is precisely “a matter of identity, conditions of being proper French.”

Whatever this being French is, in Algeria under French colonial rule those who took off their headscarves and became Catholic or fought against their own people in the French army in order to overcome half-citizenship status, never really became French. But the state still tries nevertheless. The first thing to do was to ban and impose sanctions on practices of Islam as much as possible. We will be able to see these in the bill of December 9, “115 years after the 1905 Act” as the president says. One article has already been revealed.

According to the bill of Minister of Interior Darmanin, if a man or a woman rejects being examined by a doctor of the opposite sex, they will be sentenced to imprisonment of up to five years and a fine of 75,000 euros. Yet, France recognizes Catholic doctors’ right to decline to perform abortions because of their religious beliefs. No matter how firm and strict a state is, like France’s authority today aimed at Muslims, how close can it get to reaching its goal by banning or punishing?

The French president is clearly serious when he talks about getting to the bottom of the issue. Whatever is deemed to be incompatible with the republic, regarding the beliefs and practices of Muslims must be eradicated. How can that be? A French Islam will be invented, everything suspected to be incompatible with the republic will be assumed foreign.

As a matter of fact, Macron means this when he says, “Islam will be freed from foreign influences, imams from other countries won’t come to France,” and “[i]mams fully compatible with the values of the republic will be trained in France.”

Just like François Hollande, Macron thinks there were no Muslims in France when the 1905 Act, which is considered to be the foundation of laicism, was enacted. However, Madagascar and Algeria were French colonies at the time. Ultimately, France did not need a protocol similar to the agreement with the Catholics to define its relationship with Muslims at the time for the addressees were not citizens!

Macron keeps saying that Muslims came “to our land” during the 1960s-70s. The expression “our land” reveals the fact that Muslims are not accepted as “real” French citizens.

Today, Macron once again echoes the fact that Muslims were not accepted as French citizens when he says Muslims came during the 1960s-70s and keeps using the expression “to our land.” It is debatable whether he is aware of it or not, but it seems he wants a hierarchical Islamic structure similar to Catholicism.

For this purpose, in 2003, when former President Sarkozy was still the Minister of Interior, the French Council of the Muslim Faith was founded. (It seems to make little difference if the government is rightist, socialist, Macron’s administration, or any other party. This is a long-term project that will allow Muslims no respite.) But the French Council of the Muslim Faith had a relatively pluralist structure and seemingly did not meet the government’s expectation.

Now the addressee is invented to a large extent. This addressee is the Foundation of Islam in France founded in 2016, the successor of the Foundation for Islamic Works in France founded during Villepin’s premiership in 2005. In any case, during his presidency, Sarkozy talked about a notion called “French Islam” and not the “French Council of the Muslim Faith.” On the other hand, Macron does not use the term “French Islam”; he prefers a more rhetorical term, “Enlightenment Islam”!

Tareq Oubrou: “The French culture does not want to see the headscarf. Then, Muslims should act like a chameleon wrapping itself in the colors of nature.”

Regarding the answer to the question “How and who will enlighten Islam for France?”, the president of the foundation Ghaleb Bencheikh seems to be the chosen one. He is a physician of Algerian descent but most importantly he is the ideal imam France is looking for. Last year, in an interview for the magazine Marianne, he said, “The headscarf attacks woman’s human dignity.” He also complained by saying, “Unfortunately homosexuality is convicted in the Qur’an,” and stated that women can be imams, and men and women can pray in the same row.

In his various interviews with the French media, a member of the same foundation, the imam of Bordeaux, Tareq Oubrou, defended the idea that Muslims need to be invisible. “The French culture does not want to see the headscarf. Then, Muslims should act like a chameleon wrapping itself in the colors of nature.”

Emphasizing the importance of modesty, Oubrou said, “The headscarf means you are Muslim, and it attracts attention. But Islam says not to attract attention. You cannot expect a Muslim to be a prophet. Just as Allah is not visible; the angels are not visible.” And in case anyone had any doubts, he added, “Also, if we are living in France, we have to accept whatever the society we’re living in accepts – even if it is against Islam. That is the real Islam.”

Another Muslim member of the foundation is Hakim El Karoui of Tunisian descent from the liberal Institute Montaigne. Last year, he published a 617-page report titled “The Islamist Factory” imitating a work titled “The Islamophobia Factory.” Macron’s colleague from his years at Rothschild, El Karoui wrote a study on how to create “French Islam” at the request of the president.

As for how Karoui views the issue, both his statements in various interviews and the primary questions of the field study published in his report answer the question. They are about “the headscarf, halal meat, the issues of virginity and submission to men, and how many times Muslims go to the mosque.”

In short, today’s France instead of creating a multi-religious and multicultural country, a model of integration that will accept Muslims’ differences, which could in turn reinforce their sense of belonging to the republic, it replicates the former attitude towards Jews this time against Muslims in the 21st century. This plan cannot be named as a plan to combat “Islamist Separatism.” It should be named as “Fight to Create More Separatists.”

At the beginning of his speech at Mureaux titled “Fight against Separatism” on October 2, 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron said that it is necessary to understand the current problems of France with a taboo-free approach.

During his speech, which lasted about 70 minutes, he identified the problem and this taboo-free approach: “There is an Islamic separatism that endangers our society, our capacity to live together, our Republic; it is first trying to establish a hostile society parallel to the Republic, and then take it over!”

The president did not mention terror, terrorists, or a terrorist organization, and even said he distinguished these Islamic separatists from the rest of Muslims in France. So, who are the perpetrators of this “separatism?” More importantly, what is the difference between an ordinary Muslim and a separatist Muslim in the eyes of the state? How can one tell a Muslim is not a perpetrator of “separatism”?

According to the French president, the separatist Muslims “propose ideas that turn the republic’s values upside-down, disregard gender equality, and even contradict human dignity.” In France, for almost 30 years, there have been many instances of explanations by high-level officials as to what Macron means by this and who this rhetoric affects.

François Hollande, compared to his successor Sarkozy, gave the impression of a politician with a more respectful and earnest approach towards Muslims. Sarkozy stated, “If a woman with the headscarf is given the opportunity to improve herself, she will be liberated from captivity, eventually throw away the headscarf, and become ‘French’.”

Laurence Rossignol, Hollande’s Minister of Family, Children, and Women’s Rights, explained how women’s dignity is disregarded. “Once there were black people who wanted slavery in the U.S., the women with headscarves are just like them.” Manuel Valls, the former mouthy prime minister of France under François Hollande, said that religious symbols besieged the streets and that this meant a rebellion against the republic. He also assumed the role of a religious authority as the prime minister and said, “The burkini is not in the Qur’an, so it is the symbol of radical Islam.”

Last year, when the sportswear brand Decathlon marketed a sports hijab, the top representatives of the political class became hysterical! Aurore Berge, Macron’s party spokesperson, called for a boycott of the brand.

“Now it is impossible for me to trust a brand that contradicts our values, neither as a woman nor as a citizen,” Berge said. While Marlène Schiappa, who served as Secretary of State for Gender Equality in the government of Prime Minister Édouard Philippe from 2017 to 2020, cried, “This sportswear is obviously a promotion of political Islam, a proof that religion controls everything.”

According to the spokesperson of the Republicans (Les Républicains), Lydia Guirous, the brand’s move was “nothing but chaperoning the submission of women.” And for some members of the French parliament, the brand was “obviously starting the sexual apartheid process.”

After a few days, the company announced, “We have been subjected to unprecedented threats and a wave of insults, our employees were insulted and physically threatened.” As a result, the company withdrew the product from the market.

The French president made other striking points such as “[i]n some municipalities, there are requests for men and women to swim at separate hours in the pools” and “some students in some schools ask for mealtimes at school cafeterias according to their religious beliefs!”

During a TV program, the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin stated, “I am always shocked when I see food aisles applying religious beliefs at supermarkets!” While Macron emphasized in his lengthy speech at Les Mureaux that the government will get to the bottom of this issue, according to the Minister of Interior Darmanin “this is how communitarianism starts” and capitalism is the culprit.

While explaining the difference between “Muslims” and the “separatist Muslims”, Macron stressed that the separatists talk a lot about France’s colonialist era!

Somewhere in his speech, while explaining the difference between Muslims and the separatist Muslims, Macron stressed that the separatists talk a lot about France’s colonialist era. Clearly these separatists talk about the parallel society created by the first-class French citizens who gave a status of half citizenship to the Muslims who survived the torture and massacres in the former colonies of France.

Simple things like the beaches closed to Algerians in Algeria, or 25 Muslims staying in a barrack room whereas five French people staying in similar rooms, or not being able to get a passport! As written on the walls of the barracks, French people needed more oxygen – just like today.

Though French President Macron accepts that France has its “faults” and “responsibility” for the colonial past, he personally thinks the separatists have evil intentions, “otherwise why would they talk about this?” he wonders. “If,” he begins and explains, “their grandparents have been living in our land for many years now, children and their parents who never saw the colonialist era, these separatists entrap them.”

The formula of the French president is simple, and he expresses it whenever possible. He explained his formula last year in January in the old capital of the Republic of Cote d’Ivoire, Abidjan, by saying, “Colonialism was a big and serious mistake of the French Republic!” Implying that it is all in the past now, he made a call to all of Africa, “Let’s turn this page now. Besides, the population of the African continent is young. For example, three-fourths of the population of Cote d’Ivoire never lived in the colonial era. Likewise, I also am not from the generation of the colonial era.”

If the issue of halal food, which could be handled very simply in the school canteens, was considered an issue at the state level, then, the problem is directly the belief and religious practices of Muslims.

Therefore, it could be expected that France would confront Muslims with the strict laicism principle. And then, we could say France’s traumatic past with Catholicism does not legitimize the attack on the Muslim minority today, but that’s not the case.

Islamophobia is on the rise everywhere in Europe, and politicians increasingly play with Islamophobic sentiments for political gains. Following the discernibly hostile rhetoric of French President Emmanuel Macron against the Muslim communities in France, Faruk Yaslicimen and Nihan Duran interviewed French sociologist Raphael Liogier, professor at Sciences Po Aix (Institut d’Études Politiques d’Aix-en-Provence) and visiting scholar at Colombia University, on the history and current state of Islamophobia in France.

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Q. French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent rhetoric and acts targeting Muslims have aroused a lot of controversy not only in France but also in the global public. Where are we now with the eminent rise of Islamophobia?

Islamophobia emerged in the 20th century in Europe, but the very nature of this Islamophobia has changed over the last decade. It is not a change only in intensity, it is a change in the very nature of what Islamophobia is now. Today, we don’t have Islamophobia, but Islamo-paranoia in France.

Because when you are in a paranoid state, it is very different. You think there is a plot, you presume that there is an intention. The very presumption justifies the action. Because whatever the reaction could be of the Muslim community, we always think that they are constantly at war with us. That is the reason why it would be more accurate to call it Islamo-paranoia rather than Islamophobia.

Q. You talk extensively about the transformation from Islamophobia to Islamo-paranoia. Can you date this back to a certain sequence of events or time? When did it start and how did we get here?

It is a collective paranoia, which is borne out of a narcissistic wound. This means that you think you are losing something narcissistically, you are losing the image of yourself, the image you want to show to others, to the rest of the world.

It is very important for everybody, but it is even more important for Western Europeans because they are used to the idea of being at the center of the world, and this created some kind of a complex; again, I am using the psychological metaphor. And, anti-Islamism, which exists in some parts of the world is directly fed, even constructed, through this complex.

Europe was like the center of the world and what we see throughout the 20th and 21st centuries is the loss of this centrality. The first was the military loss at the beginning of the 20th century.

We [Europeans] lost centrality to the United States of America. But still, until 2003, we had something, we kept our symbolic preeminence, meaning that Europe was still supposed to be the land of human rights, or some kind of moral power.

But in 2003, something incredible happened. The U.S. decided to go to war with Iraq without European powers for the first time. They did not even ask them. And when they talked to them, they talked to them as if they were a colony, not a real ally.

That was the moment when there was some kind of a reversal in the European conscience in general, that created the feeling of being surrounded by enemies. And if you look at it precisely, you can see that all the political parties, which we call the new populist parties were either founded or developed this very year of 2003. All across Europe, these new political parties were anti-Muslim. They all have the same program.

Q. Can you give some examples of these?

The French Front National, for example. It already existed. But from 2003 onward, it changed its ideology completely. Before it was recognized more as an anti-Semite far-right party, but now it turned to an anti-Muslim party. What is more interesting is that this party had an anti-laicity stance before 2003, and after 2003, it became a guardian of laicity, completely the opposite. In the meantime, laicity changed its meaning.

Before 2003, laicity meant the freedom of expression in the public space. Well, laicity stands for that, right? It doesn’t stand to prevent people from expressing their religion; it is to allow people to express their beliefs and opinions.

That is the reason why we have the neutrality. Not at all the neutrality of people, but of the state. However, from 2003 onwards, we changed its interpretation. It was not only the neutrality of the state, but also the neutrality of people, which is very different.

So, we changed completely. In 2004, you can see the act of parliament to prevent the scarf, the simple scarf, in public schools in France. Similar acts reflect the picture all over Europe; and there is something strange with the laicity in France. It is becoming the object of our narcissistic anxiety.

The target is now Muslims. Why? Because Muslims have a peculiar definition in our minds: enemies of the Christian culture, and enemies of modernity and progress.

We are losing something, but we do not know what specifically we are losing and therefore, we need to find a target. And the target is Muslims. Why? Because Muslims have a peculiar definition in our minds: enemies of the Christian culture on the one hand, and enemies of modernity and progress on the other. Thus, you can mobilize masses, both from the right Christian conservative electorates and from the left progressivist electorates.

Q. This is where a deep sense of antagonism in the French society emerges, right?

This is related to the other argument that Muslims see themselves as Muslim first, hence, they value their citizenship less than their Muslim identity. Sometimes on the radio during prime-time shows or in widely read magazines, Muslims are depicted as people who think deep inside that they are Muslims first, and French second.

I remember I watched a film, where they go to a depo in a “secret” place. I myself went to this kind of place with my students and it is no secret. So, in the film, the camera is showing shadowy scenes and there are people with beards, face veils, and headscarves everywhere – quite a scene! And while we watch this on TV, a person in the film says, “If the French law prevents me from practicing my religion, I will not obey.”

Aha! A tremendous scandal against the French republic, and people who are watching immediately react “Look at that! It is awful. If a French law will prevent him from practicing his religion, he will not obey and therefore, he is betraying the republic,” or “He is against the republic.”

Religion is the most intimate thing in our lives, so I find it completely crazy to say “oh, they betray the country” just because they say they choose their faith over a political system. I think it is quite the opposite. And now we are coming to what is happening now.

If one day, the French state, the republic, enacts that people cannot practice their religion freely, and that I cannot practice my religion in the public space, I won’t have any problem with disobeying this law, because it means this state is not a republic anymore.

Due to our imagination of who a Muslim is supposed to be, we are “able” to create a sense of unity. So, we know against whom we can fight. This happened after 2003 in the very structure of the discourses we use.

We presume that Muslims have a plan for France. In such a paranoid state of mind, you’re allowed to do anything to protect yourself. You can react and be violent because whatever you do will always be less violent than what they plan behind closed doors.

Q. Do you think this is a strategic move for the upcoming election?

I know, because I know Macron’s advisors and I talk to them. I examined his program in detail before he was elected. And it was almost symmetrically the opposite of what he is doing now. He just believes in the economy. And I think he wanted sincerely to change the economy in France step by step. And suddenly an identity crisis has popped up on his way.

Following the terrorist attack in Paris in October 2019, he changed his discourse, because he knows well that waging a tight war against terrorism can give him the chance to unite larger numbers of people behind him.

At first, he did not pay attention to mosques or to the questions of the veil and all that. He left it to the other members of his government. But it seems that his political advisors convinced him that if he wanted to win the election, he could not carry on the way he used to, and thus Macron took the issue at hand. He knows that the majority of the French population is concerned with these issues, so, he tries to anticipate what they would expect from him.

Q. You say that there is a recent change in the discourse and the overall attitude of President Macron regarding the Muslim community in France. How does this resonate with the French public?

The problem is that the French public is completely immersed in this paranoia. There is some kind of a theater, a tragic one. In the scenario, there are different roles and functions for different actors. You have these populists, saying “the real” French people are in danger. These real and good citizens are in danger. And, in front of them, you invent, “the fake” people, the enemy, the Muslims.

You are either a hero or a betrayer. You cannot be both. It is impossible. Macron was about to become a betrayer. Now, he wants to become the hero again.

So, we found the enemy, right? Now, you need to have heroes. Then, journalists as well as politicians have to choose their sides, whether they are with the “real people” or they are with the “fake” ones. So, you are either the hero or the betrayer. You cannot be both. It is impossible. And Macron was about to become a betrayer. Now, he wants to become the hero again, because otherwise, they will think he is with the “enemy.”

And so, to answer your question precisely, what is preoccupying me is not Macron because he is just a politician. He knows, and he is right, that he cannot be elected if he carries on not caring about the collective anxiety of losing French identity, because he will be perceived as a betrayer and will not be elected because the majority of the French people consider themselves as the “real people” in danger by the “fake people.” I am sorry to say that, but that is the case.

Q. The division seems so deep. Do you think there is a way to overcome these problems? How can France start to debate this from the right angle?

The first thing we should do is to stop talking all the time about Islam. Because when we comment on Islam, we are discussing Islam per se, and not the Muslim people. But we are just manifesting our own complexes. So, this is the first thing.

Secondly, to ease our socio-psychological tensions, we should stop looking for a reason outside and we need to have public debates to address this very complex issue. We should accept that we are not at the center of the world anymore. We feel weak, but we pretend to be strong externally.

By doing that, we are spending our energy in an extremely useless way and not even addressing the real problems of what is happening here and now. It is pointless. So, what are we scared of? We are scared of our own shadow.

Raphael Liogier is a professor at Sciences Po Aix (Institut d’Études Politiques d’Aix-en-Provence), visiting scholar at Colombia University, and the author of numerous books. Among them are The Myth of Islamization: Essay on a Collective Obsession (2012, Turkish edition is published by Epos in 2012), and The War of Civilization Will Not Take Place: Coexistence and Violence in the XXI Century (2016, Spanish edition, 2017; Arabic edition, 2018). His research focuses on identity, religious identities, collective identities, identity reactions including populism, and how people deal with identity by excluding the identity of others.