France’s riots put migration back on center stage

The riots that have ravaged France in recent days have given Éric Zemmour a second wind. The leader of the right wing Reconquest Party has been on the airwaves and in the newspapers, saying, with a touch of schadenfreude, “I told you so.” 

In a television interview on Saturday evening, Zemmour explained that the reason he entered politics in late 2021 was because of what he described as the Republic’s twenty-year policy of “crazy mass immigration.” It was the issue on which he campaigned during last year’s presidential and parliamentary elections. Unlike Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party, Zemmour barely mentioned the cost of living crisis; immigration and Islam were his main agenda.

His twin obsessions didn’t pay off. He received 2.4 million votes in the first round of the presidential campaign — a long way off his expectations. Not one of Reconquest’s 500 candidates was elected to parliament in the legislative elections. 

Zemmour and his lieutenants spent last summer in reflection. Should they broaden their horizons or maintain their focus on immigration and Islam?

The surge in migrants crossing the Mediterranean into Europe last summer, and a series of violent attacks committed in France by foreigners, made up their mind: stick to the existing strategy. “We are waging a civilizational war to preserve our age-old identity, which is threatened today by the combined effect of uncontrolled immigration and an Islam that seeks to conquer,” declared Nicolas Bay, vice-president of Reconquest, in September. 

A month later France was shocked by the murder of twelve-year-old Lola, allegedly raped and murdered by an Algerian woman who should have been deported. Then in January an Algerian man stabbed six people at the Gare du Nord, and last month a Syrian asylum seeker ran amok with a knife in an Annecy playground, wounding four babies and two adults. 

These atrocities, coupled with a European migrant crisis that shows no sign of being brought under control, had already reinvigorated Zemmour and his party. The events of the past week — that Zemmour described as somewhere between “riots and war” — are, he says, evidence that he was right all along. 

While the United Nations and France’s magistrates’ union blame the riots on the “racism” of the police, Zemmour says there is only one culprit: immigration. “Over the last twenty or thirty years, we have continued to receive hundreds of thousands of people from North Africa and [sub-Saharan] Africa,” he said.  

Zemmour reiterated what he had said during last year’s presidential campaign: that the first thing he would do as president is “stop the flow of migrants.” 

The man who is president, Emmanuel Macron, should have been discussing the migrant crisis at an EU summit on Friday. Instead he was forced to cut short his trip to Brussels to attend a crisis meeting in Paris as the riots worsened. 

He didn’t miss much. The summit ended as most EU summits on migration always end — in an impasse. “I’m really, really not happy,” muttered Slovak prime minister Ludovít Ódor. 

There was no joint statement issued by member states and even an attempt by Italy’s PM Giorgia Meloni to broker a deal failed. The discord was led by Hungary and Poland, who object to the relocation scheme whereby countries will have to accept a set number of migrants or otherwise face a €20,000 (about $22,000) fine for each one they refuse.  

It’s an ill-conceived scheme that will do nothing to diminish the numbers of migrants coming to Europe from Third World countries. Frontex, the EU’s border patrol agency, believes that the only answer is to prevent the migrants from reaching Europe in the first place. So does Zemmour. 

He was an outlier last year on immigration, but in recent months both Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and the center-right Republicans have toughened their position on the issue. On Saturday, Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, called for “a halt to immigration [and] the deportation of foreign criminals and delinquents.” In a television interview on Sunday, Eric Ciotti, leader of the Republicans, claimed that “immigration bears a heavy responsibility for this chaos” as many of those arrested “are of foreign origin.” 

Zemmour has become an immigration influencer in France, and it may not be long before his zero migration policy is adopted by other right-wing parties in Europe. Matteo Salvini, Italy’s deputy PM, was quick to attribute the mayhem in France to, among other things, “years of errors and ideological follies in terms of immigration, especially Islamic.”  

Alice Weidel, the co-leader of Germany’s AfD said that the violence in France is a “glimpse into the future of Germany, which just like Macron, refuses any examination of those coming into the country.” 

What’s happening in France means Europe’s migrant crisis is more divisive than ever. It is even less likely to be resolved any time soon.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK site. Subscribe to the World edition here.