This is not happening in Palestine, but in the Place de la Nation in the heart of the French capital. It is there that, on September 8, an agitator well known to the intelligence services launched a call for an intifada. Elias d’Imzalène called for “leading the intifada in Paris”, “in our suburbs”, “in our neighborhoods” and for the fight to be taken to Marseille and Jerusalem, where “we will be able to pray at the al-Aqsa mosque”. One might think that this was the words of a dark lunatic. However, the activists who listened to him had nothing to say against it. According to Europe 1 and The Parisian, Among them were deputies from the left-wing party La France Insoumise (LFI), who did not express the slightest disapproval.
The example will not have surprised François Ruffin. This LFI deputy from the Somme recently denounced such complicity. Booed at the Fête de l’Humanité last week, he was accused of playing into the hands of the “extreme right”, the National Rally (RN) and compared to the “ghost of [Jacques] Doriot”. A communist activist who collaborated with the Nazis.
The subject of all this fuss is a small 150-page book entitled Itinerary. My France in its entirety, not halfwayRuffin describes the “electoral clientelism”, the “class contempt” and the “racial profiling campaigns” which are the lot of this once marginal party which has become the main left-wing formation in France.
Ruffin meticulously paints the consummate cynicism of the leader of LFI, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Having come within 400,000 votes of the second round of the presidential election in 2022, this great orator and cold calculator has decided to seek out these votes among the abstainers in immigrant neighborhoods, even if it means betraying his own convictions on secularism, abandoning the good old working class dear to yesterday’s left and keeping quiet about the progress of Islamism and anti-Semitism in France. Once in the second round, Mélenchon is convinced that the center and the right will prefer him to Marine Le Pen. Isn’t that what happened during the recent legislative elections?
In his book, Ruffin confides his “shame” at having led a “racial campaign” in 2022, he says. “To the Blacks and Arabs,” with whom Mélenchon was popular, he offered leaflets with his photo. For the “Whites,” for whom he was a repellent, he had another. Ruffin also reports Mélenchon’s disgust, campaigning in the Hénin-Beaumont constituency against Marine Le Pen, in front of these workers who “sweated alcohol,” “smelled bad,” and were “almost all obese.”
Recently, the leader of LFI was recorded without his knowledge ordering his activists to focus only on young people from immigrant suburbs. “Forget everything else, we’re wasting our time,” he said. The “rest” are Marine Le Pen’s voters, who, he said, “don’t even know how to speak.” He even went so far as to compare these constituencies to Germany, which “took 25 years to denazify.”
LFI’s communitarianism is not, however, a new thing. Those who feign surprise forget that this strategy has been openly advocated since 2011 by the highly respected think tank progressive Terra Nova. According to him, the left had an interest in abandoning the traditional working class circles, who vote massively for the RN, to concentrate on young people, women and immigrants, who are called by LFI the “creolized working class”. A winning strategy, at least for the moment, which has allowed the party to become hegemonic on the left. This is evidenced by the embarrassed silence of the socialists, communists and environmentalists on François Ruffin’s book.
As for the contempt for the traditional working classes, it is far from unique. From the “toothless” of President François Hollande to the “guys who smoke cigarettes and drive diesel” of Macronist Benjamin Griveaux, not to mention the ” deplorable ” by Hillary Clinton, the refrain is always the same.
It is not yesterday that communitarianism has gangrened many parties of the left as well as the right. Canada is also considered in France as the laboratory of this type of racialist practices that reduce the citizen to his color, his sex, his ethnicity or his religion. The invitation made to universities to hire more Muslim professors by the special representative of Canada in charge of the fight against Islamophobia, Amira Elghawaby, is only the latest example.
Mélenchon remains a much admired leader on a certain left. In our country, we will remember that he was supposed to be the guest of honour at the Québec solidaire congress in 2017, but that he had contented himself with a video message, in which he called Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois a “friend and brother in the struggle”. In 2012, The Duty had also revealed that QS was distributing different leaflets in French and English in the Mercier riding. The former invited people to “stand up for our country” while the latter, largely aimed at immigrant neighbourhoods, avoided this delicate subject.
The Revolution devours its children, they say. Last Saturday, François Ruffin was jeered by activists at the Fête de l’Humanité to the sound of the Italian anti-fascist anthem We are all antifascistsLet’s give them credit for having unearthed this discovery which will perhaps be a landmark: the far-right left!