“Hurt” and “worried”: French people of another nationality, of different profiles and considering themselves fully French, demonstrate their amazement after the campaign proposal from the far-right party RN to ban them from jobs and criticize a possible “ precedent of discrimination.”
“I feel touched as a binational and product of the French Republic: although I am Franco-Malian, I owe everything to France, I owe nothing to Mali apart from my family origin, Mali has not not trained; I feel French above all,” says blogger Samba Gassama, 37, to AFP.
“Hearing French people reject me is hurtful,” he confides.
During its campaign for the legislative elections, the National Rally (RN), at the top of the voting intentions, said it wanted to “prevent” dual nationals from occupying “extremely sensitive jobs”, for example Russian dual nationals for “positions of strategic direction in defense.
In January, the RN had already tabled a bill providing for the possibility of prohibiting access to jobs in public administrations and companies to French people with another nationality.
Thus, 3.3 million French people could tomorrow be denied access to a job, according to estimates from the CFDT union.
During a televised debate on Tuesday, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal accused RN President Jordan Bardella of hypocrisy and of having a Franco-Russian representative, Tamara Volokhova, in a sensitive position in the European Parliament, in contradiction with the proposal of the RN.
In France, dual nationality does not prevent access to public service jobs.
“There are nationality reserves in quite a few areas,” Patrick Simon, demographer at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED), explains to AFP. “Non-EU nationals have limitations; there are additional restrictions for professions in sovereign fields such as security and defense in particular.
“However, dual nationals are not among the people subject to these restrictions because they are nominally and fully French,” he emphasizes. “What the RN intends to extend is to consider that dual nationals are not full nationals; It’s obviously dangerous.”
“Great suffering”
We have to go back to the 1930s to find the implementation of restrictions for naturalized people. At the Liberation, these laws mostly disappeared.
In a column Tuesday in the newspaper The worldMohamed Bouabdallah, a career diplomat and dual national, says he experiences “great suffering from the fact that the loyalty of dual nationals can be questioned in this way.”
“We are thousands of dual nationals […] to occupy leading positions in the state apparatus, including so-called “sensitive” positions,” he emphasizes.
According to him, “the RN is in line with the racist Vichy regime […] In 2024, it will no longer be the Jews (their turn will come), but the Arabs and the Muslims.”
The dual nationals interviewed – who also say they are deeply attached to their other nationality – admit at the very least a feeling of discomfort and incomprehension, even injustice, in the face of this RN proposal.
“It’s an insult to all dual nationals,” reacts Amayas Allam, 24, a Franco-Algerian and student at a major business school, who is alarmed by the fact that a certain number of French people support this type of measure.
“What scares me is the precedent of discrimination between French people that this would create”, which could “open the door” to other measures targeting dual nationals on “access to care, public services, etc. . “.
“I don’t understand this approach by the RN,” says Nadjet Aviles, 58, a secondary school teacher, who says she is “worried as a Franco-Algerian.” “It’s completely stigmatizing for dual nationals; I asked myself if I should start packing my bags, when I’ve been living in France for 34 years, my children were born here…”, she exclaims.
Rodrigo Arenas, a Franco-Chilean member of parliament for the LFI-Nupes (radical left), who arrived in France in 1978 at the age of 4 with his parents who were fleeing the Pinochet dictatorship, is also furious. This proposal is a “pragmatic, political, strategic stupidity, which does not meet any need and is on the contrary contrary to the interests of France”, he told AFP.
“The National Assembly, the Senate and even the ministries are sometimes occupied by political figures who are of different nationalities. This is the history of this country! “, he insists.
An emotion shared by younger dual nationals.
Emily, a 17-year-old Franco-British woman living in Brittany, says she feels “fear”. “I’ve already had comments from people who weren’t very nice about my British nationality, but that’s just at school, whereas if it’s people who were potentially at the head of state and putting laws in place, it’s much more serious…”
French-Malian singer Manda Sira, 30, is upset by a “lunar” proposal. “It’s a way of always creating differences and inequalities where on the contrary we fight to move forward and erase them…”, criticizes the artist, who is “alarmed” by the idea of a “classification of French people who would have more value or rights”.
These dual nationals hope that the French Constitutional Council will oppose such a proposal, or refuse “to believe it.”
Olga Prokopieva, a Franco-Russian who arrived in France in 1995 and is president of the association Russie-Libertés, feels “much more French than Russian today”. “I did all my studies and my life here, my daughter is also dual national”.
She considers it “unthinkable” to be deprived of “some of (her) rights and possibilities”. “It’s a very worrying step backwards,” she says. “Perhaps the shock will be terrible after the legislative elections, but for the moment I prefer not to believe it.”