Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Could this self-made billionaire become France’s first Muslim president?

Michel Houellebecq has predicted France will elect a Muslim president by 2022. Could he be right?

The French writer Michel Houellebecq has a disconcerting habit of correctly predicting unsettling events. In 2001 in Plateforme he predicted a terrorist attack on tourists that duly occurred in Bali a year later. Sérotonine, written last year, foretold the gilet jaunes. In Soumission (2015), he famously predicted that France would elect a Muslim president by 2022. This remains improbable, with the three-year timescale. Yet the odds have improved slightly thanks to the businessman Mohed Altrad, a Syrian exile turned building tycoon who employs 30,000 people worldwide and is due to run for mayor of Montpellier next year, in a country where the mairie is a well-trodden stepping stone to higher office. Altrad has pointedly refused to respond to repeated requests that he clarify his political ambitions. Before he could run for the Elysée, he will have to unseat Montpellier’s socialist incumbent. Nevertheless, in a country where the improbable is disconcertingly routine, his candidacy opens an intriguing avenue of speculation. Altrad is by any measure exceptional. The only Arab self-made billionaire in France, his mysterious life story is found in his intensely novelised autobiography, Badawi (1994). The product of a rape, he was born in 1948 to a Bedouin mother, from Raqqa, more recently the redoubt of Isis. He was delivered in a tent and his mother supposedly cut the umbilical cord with her teeth. He came to Paris in 1975 on a government scholarship with the equivalent of €200 in his pocket, and graduated from Paris Dauphine University. A glittering career followed. He worked for Alcatel, then Thomson, then for the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, before in 1984 buying a bankrupt scaffolding company with a British partner. He subsequently bought out his partner, and turned the company around and into a huge success. His current estimated net worth is three billion euros. When I interviewed him four years ago, he said he identifies as a writer, then a businessman.

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