France is being overwhelmed by a tide of immigration from Africa and the Muslim world! France is about to be swept into the abyss by a flood of Fascist votes!
With just a week to go to the second round of the presidential election, in which the incumbent President Jacques Chirac faces the National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, both camps are using fear as a means of mobilizing their supporters.
The true picture of France today, however, is different.
The claim that immigrants are flooding into France is hard to sustain. In fact, the intake of immigrants, both legal and illegal, has been dropping steadily since 1988 and is leveling off at an estimated annual total of 65,000, the lowest figure in a generation. The key reason for this is the sluggish state of the French economy that is just emerging from a period of high unemployment.
Bruno Golniche, Le Pen’s chief of staff, claims that over 10 million Africans now reside in France. There is little evidence for this. The latest estimates by the Interior Ministry, published in 1998, showed that 13 million of France’s 60 million citizens had at least one foreign-born parent and/or grandparent. Of these, less than half had any African connection, including those from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
The high visibility of the French citizens of non-European background, however, gives the impression that their numbers are higher than they actually are. Some 80 percent of them are concentrated in just six of the 22 French regions, with especially dense numbers in the Greater Paris area, Marseilles and Lille. There are thousands of French villagers and small towns with almost no Arab-African presence. But those are seldom under the limelight.
Because of high birthrates the Arab-Africans are also highly visible at schools and other areas where children and young adults predominate. One estimate shows that some 17 percent of France’s army now consists of Arab-African recruits. If current trends continue, France could end up having a majority Muslim army in just 20 years’ time. But this is mainly because of demographics on the one hand and the fact that French citizens of European descent shun the military career.
Arab-Africans are also visible in other areas of life. Last year almost half of the best-selling music records in France belonged to various North African, especially Algerian, musicians. French radio and television broadcast more records by Khaled and Sheb Mami than by icons such as Guy Beart or Michel Polnareff. According to most estimates the North African dish couscous has replaced steak and chips as the number one favorite dish in France. Half of the members of the French national football team are Arab-Africans with the Algerian-born Zinedine Zidane its undisputed star.
Where visibility hurts the Arab-Africans is in some 30 or 40 suburbs where the rule of law has ceased to exist. These are rookeries teeming with unemployed, unintegrated and angry youths of Arab and/or African background. Every time there is bad news, we see these youths on television screens. The impression created is that only Africans and Arabs are responsible for crimes in France.
The truth is that a new France has taken shape in the past three to four decades. Even the French language has been influenced by the change and now includes hundreds of loan words from North African colloquial Arabic or amazigh.
France is now a multiethnic, multifaith nation that cannot insist on a fictitious identity that exists only in school textbooks. One little noticed fact is the massive presence of people of African and Arab origin in France’s scientific and high-tech communities.
Should France join the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC)? The question is not academic. There are more Muslims in France than in more than half of the OIC’s member nations. There are more Muslims in Marseilles than in Qatar, the current chair of the OIC.
The Arab-African presence in France, and contribution to it, dates back to more than a century. Almost a million Arabs and Africans have died in France’s various wars, including two world wars.
Is fascism the rising tide in France? Hardly. Le Pen and his brother-enemy Bruno Megret collected fewer votes in the first round of this presidential election than they had done in 1995. They achieved a higher percentage of the votes because of massive abstentions and the multiplicity of candidates on the left and the moderate right.
No, France is neither being Arabo-Africanized nor swept by fascism. But it is certainly forced to focus on some of the issues it has tried to ignore. The second round of the election on May 6 should provide an opportunity for doing just that.
The question is whether Chirac, his reputation shattered by corruption, sleaze and incompetence, is the best person to lead that debate. In any case, there will be the parliamentary elections in just a month’s time.
