0:00

This is The Guardian. Today,

0:07

the far right are at the gates

0:10

of power in France. On

0:12

Sunday, will they burst through?

0:20

Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we

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$45 up front for three months plus taxes and fees. Promote it for

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new customers for a limited time. Unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month,

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slows. Full terms at mintmobile.com. A

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few weeks ago, the French

0:58

president Emmanuel Macron took this

1:00

massive gamble. For years,

1:02

support for the far right National

1:05

Rally Party has been growing across

1:07

France, and they are

1:09

pretty extreme. They want

1:11

to restrict the jobs available to

1:13

dual citizens, ban women from wearing

1:15

religious headscarves anywhere in public, and

1:17

make it easier for police to

1:19

get away with using their weapons.

1:22

In European elections on June 9, they

1:25

came out the clear winners, and

1:27

that night, the night of those results, Macron

1:30

did something that from the

1:32

outside seems completely baffling. He

1:35

dissolved the French parliament, called

1:37

for national parliamentary elections, and put

1:40

to the French people a challenge.

1:43

If you really want the far right in

1:46

power, well, here's

1:48

your chance. I

1:50

think we're living in a period which historians

1:53

are going to have to pick over. Everyone

1:55

is still asking themselves why they did it,

1:57

because it seems like an act of complete

1:59

self-destruction. the

8:00

militia of Philippe Pétain's Vichy regime

8:02

during the Second World War. That

8:05

regime during the Nazi occupation collaborated

8:07

with the Nazis and ensured the

8:09

deportation of a quarter of France's

8:11

Jewish population. And in 1972,

8:14

when this party was formed, it

8:16

was formed to present a kind

8:19

of electable front of many disparate

8:21

far-right groups at the time. These

8:24

included neo-fascists, militants known for street

8:26

violence, people who were nostalgic for

8:28

French Algeria. And the idea was

8:30

they wanted to rally around somebody

8:32

who could get them elected. Now

8:34

that person was Jean-Marie Le Pen,

8:36

Marine Le Pen's father, and he

8:38

had been a young MP for

8:40

an anti-taxation movement in Parliament. And

8:43

he'd left Parliament and he'd set up

8:45

a company that sold Nazi speeches and

8:48

German military songs. He

8:50

had volunteered as a paratrooper

8:52

in Algeria. And

8:55

then in the 80s, this party began to have electoral

8:57

success. And as Jean-Marie Le Pen got

9:07

more airtime, that was when he

9:09

started stating his views pretty openly.

9:12

So in 1987, he said that the Holocaust

9:15

was a mere detail of history. He's

9:25

been convicted more than 15 times

9:27

for hate speech and contesting crimes

9:29

against humanity. He

9:31

said the Nazi occupation was not particularly

9:33

inhumane. He said he believed in the

9:36

inequality of races. He's

9:38

been convicted for saying Roma were

9:40

rash-inducing and smelly. He said that

9:42

France should get along with Russia

9:45

to save the white world. Angelique,

9:48

I'm kind of stunned by this potted

9:50

history you've given me. How

9:52

on earth does a party with

9:54

roots like that detoxify

9:56

to the point where it's nationally

9:58

viable? victory.

22:00

He asked himself, and what does that

22:02

mean for these generations that have been

22:04

raised in France? He said to me,

22:07

how will we live our religion normally

22:09

in this country, where we have these

22:11

principles of liberty, equality and fraternity? Will

22:14

we have the liberty to practice our

22:16

religion tomorrow? He asked me, will we

22:18

be equal? One of

22:21

the policies of Schieffer that the RN

22:23

say they will work towards, I mean,

22:25

within the next few years, is a

22:28

ban of the headscarf completely from

22:30

any public spaces in France. Did

22:32

you talk to people about what that

22:34

would mean just for French Muslims going

22:36

about their lives? It's a pretty

22:38

horrific prospect for those who

22:41

are facing it. One

22:43

lady told me, it's like being told

22:45

that I need to remove my trousers

22:47

in public. It's that traumatizing that, to

22:50

me, it's like being naked. And

22:52

so for her, this idea that she

22:54

would be told by the

22:56

government, it was really hard for

22:58

her to maybe swallow. One

23:01

of the things to understand is that France, without

23:04

the RN being in power,

23:07

is in no means a

23:09

place that is free of discrimination. I

23:11

mean, a lot of the interviews that

23:13

I've done, people have already stressed to

23:16

me that they face tremendous discrimination already

23:18

in France. And studies bear that out,

23:20

that it's harder to get a job,

23:22

it's harder to find housing. You're more

23:24

likely to be stopped by police if

23:26

you are Arab or appear to be

23:28

Arab. In reporting on this issue in

23:31

France, I spoke to half

23:33

a dozen people who had left because

23:35

they found that it was just too

23:37

hard to live in France, that they

23:39

felt they could be freer anywhere abroad.

23:42

And so these people were in Australia,

23:44

in Canada, in the UK.

23:46

They were part of a bigger study

23:48

that a professor in Lille had done.

23:50

And it was more than a thousand

23:52

people who responded to a survey. And

23:54

of those, a vast majority of them

23:56

said they had left in order to

23:59

escape discrimination. It's something

24:01

beyond belief. You

24:03

didn't just speak to Muslims though. You

24:05

spoke to other groups who fear the

24:07

rise of the RN. Tell me about

24:09

some of them. This whole

24:11

snap election has coincided with pride.

24:14

And so we've seen kind of

24:16

pride rallies take place across France.

24:19

And what they say is that it

24:21

doesn't feel like we're just rallying together

24:23

to celebrate what we've achieved and push

24:25

to go further. It actually feels as

24:27

though we're under attack. And there was

24:29

one quote that stood out for me

24:31

where someone said, I hope this is

24:33

not the last pride that we

24:35

have. Because our

24:37

N, while they overtly

24:40

don't say anything against the community,

24:42

they have consistently voted against advancing

24:44

rights for the LGBT plus community.

24:47

And so for this community, it

24:49

was fearful. They were wondering what comes next

24:52

and now what happens. And

24:54

is this going to change how our

24:56

lives unfold in this country? France

24:58

is also a racially diverse country. It

25:01

has many of the problems we see

25:03

in places that might be more familiar,

25:05

like the US of police brutality and

25:07

similar issues. Was

25:09

there any sense of what a

25:11

far right victory this Sunday might

25:14

mean for French people of color?

25:16

One of the big promises of the RN

25:18

is that they would change the presumption of

25:20

innocence when an arm

25:22

is used during a police intervention.

25:25

And so we know from studies that

25:27

people who are black and Arab are more

25:30

likely to be stopped by police and they're

25:32

more likely to see force used by police.

25:34

And so for these communities, this

25:37

is terrifying. If you're the mother of

25:39

an Arab child or a black child

25:41

who does get stopped. I mean, you

25:43

hear from people that are 13 years

25:45

old and have been stopped by police,

25:47

you hear that force has been used.

25:49

And to think that there's less recourse

25:51

for them to seek justice is

25:53

quite terrifying. According to

25:56

policies like this, it can be hard to

25:58

understand why somebody would

26:00

cast a vote for a party

26:02

with such an extreme history, with

26:04

a pretty extreme present. But you

26:07

actually encountered several RN voters in

26:09

your travels. Tell me about them

26:11

and what they told you was

26:13

fueling their decision to go with

26:15

the far right this time. I

26:23

was in Marseille recently and I met a

26:25

woman who was in her

26:27

60s and her name was Anne Michelle.

26:29

And I met her at a rally

26:31

for Macron's centrists and she was there

26:33

because a friend of hers had brought

26:35

her along very shortly after we started

26:37

talking about why they were here. Her

26:39

friend said, we're here really because

26:42

she's going to vote for the RN. And

26:48

I asked her why and she said, I'm fed up

26:50

of seeing these migrants who are ordered to go back

26:52

to where they're from but they're still here. She was

26:55

just fed up with seeing the kind of paralysis

26:57

in terms of sending migrants back once they

27:00

had been rejected by the system. She

27:10

mentioned a few high profile

27:12

crimes that migrants were allegedly

27:14

involved in and really picked

27:16

at these and kept pointing at these and

27:18

just said, I'm sick of putting out candles

27:21

over and over to mourn. What

27:23

was fascinating about this is that we

27:25

were at an event at the Armenian

27:27

church and the candidate that the event

27:30

was for was Algerian. And so you

27:32

had all these examples around you of

27:34

people who had built incredible lives in

27:36

France because France had not

27:38

had a party like the National Rally in power.

27:41

When I pointed that out to her that here

27:43

you are kind of standing amongst 300 people

27:46

who most of whom have an

27:48

immigrant background and are not criminals.

27:51

It was like talking to a wall to be honest

27:53

and I think there's something to mention as well about

27:56

the fact that the largest share

27:58

of our invoke came from Hey,

29:09

I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like

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to do the opposite of what big wireless

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does. They charge you a lot, we charge

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you a little. So naturally, when they announced

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we decided to deflate our prices due to

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not hating you. That's right, we're cutting the

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price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month

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to just $15 a month. Give

29:30

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$45 up front for three months plus taxes and fees. Promote it for

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slows. Full terms at mintmobile.com. say

34:00

in fact what she has done

34:02

is not succeeded in fully stamping

34:05

out anti-Semitic views amongst every member

34:07

of her party and

34:09

that also a hatred towards one group,

34:11

they say, a hatred towards Jews, has

34:13

now led to a hatred of another

34:16

group, Muslims, and that is the argument

34:18

of the left. I

34:23

remember we spoke to you a couple of

34:25

years ago, just as Emmanuel Macron was running

34:27

for office, and he presented

34:29

himself as somebody who meant French

34:31

voters wouldn't have to choose between

34:34

the extremes anymore. That was his

34:36

pitch, that I'm going to transcend

34:38

the left-right divide and be something

34:40

new, something different. Is

34:42

it fair to say that after

34:44

last Sunday's results, no matter what

34:47

happens next Sunday, that project,

34:49

that vision he offered of a

34:51

kind of centrism that makes the

34:53

old categories of left and right

34:55

redundant? That has failed. Yes,

34:57

I think you can say

34:59

ultimately that Emmanuel Macron has

35:02

brought his own centrist project

35:04

tumbling down, that

35:06

Macronism, as we call it, which

35:08

is a centrist project built around

35:10

one man who promised to revolutionize

35:13

politics by cherry-picking ideas from the

35:15

left and right, but

35:17

who then veered right himself after his

35:19

2022 re-election.

35:22

Macronism built around one man is

35:24

finished. Macron himself, he

35:26

says, will stay president for another

35:29

three years, he can't run again,

35:31

but his centrist project with

35:34

his centrist MPs is

35:36

over, and those centrists will now

35:38

have to regroup, because whatever happens

35:40

on Sunday, it appears quite clear

35:42

that the centrists have shrunk back

35:44

into third position, they could lose

35:46

half their seats, the

35:48

left have held their position, but they're

35:50

still in second place, and

35:53

the far right, however well it does,

35:55

will be the biggest party in parliament.

35:57

They will either take government.

38:00

at some point, you can get tickets

38:02

to the event or watch it online

38:04

by searching Guardian Live and following the

38:07

links to the election newsroom special. There

38:09

are just a few tickets still available.

38:11

And if you've enjoyed our election coverage

38:13

on Today in Focus, election extra, leave

38:16

us a review, we would love to hear from you. And

38:21

that is it for today. This

38:23

episode was produced by Courtney Yousuf and

38:25

Natalie Ktonup. Sound design was

38:28

by Joel Cox. The executive

38:30

producer was Homer Khalili. And we're back

38:32

with you and maybe a new government

38:34

tomorrow. This

38:40

is The Guardian.