There was a muted reaction among the French political class to the attempt on Donald’s Trump’s life. Keir Starmer sent his best wishes to the former president in the early hours of Sunday morning, but it was another six hours before president Emmanuel Macron followed suit. The caretaker prime minister of France, Gabriel Attal, made no comment, nor did the man who dreams of having his job, Olivier Faure, the secretary of the Socialist party.
Politics in France is a squalid business
One or two figures from the left-wing coalition did offer their lukewarm support to Trump. Sandrine Rousseau, for example, a Green MP, wished him a ‘speedy recovery’ and condemned ‘all violence under any circumstances whatsoever’. Clémence Guetté, a member of La France Insoumise (LFI), said that ‘violence has no place in the world of politics’, but also stated her belief ‘in conflict in politics as a way of expressing a form of anger’.
Guetté was true to her word a few days later when she refused to shake the hands of Flavien Termet. At 22, the National Rally MP is the youngest member of the new National Assembly and tradition dictates that every MP welcomes him to parliament with a handshake. Guetté was one of several LFI politicians to snub Termet because he belongs, in the words of one, to a party of ‘fachos’. Among the MPs who took the moral high ground was Raphaël Arnault; a leading figure in Antifa who is on a police surveillance list because of his extremism; last year he allegedly threatened a woman with death.
Others also refused to take Termet’s hand, including Sandrine Rousseau, Olivier Faure and Agnès Pannier-Runacher, a former minister in Macron’s government. In rejecting Termet, his adversaries are also rejecting the ten million Frenchmen and women who voted for the National Rally in the recent European and parliamentary elections. It is insulting, puerile and ultimately it will prove counter-productive. The left should be trying to win back the millions of working-class who have shifted to the National Rally in recent years, not alienating them.
The refusal to shake Termet’s hand is also a way of dehumanising him and his party. This strategy created an ugly climate on the campaign trail last month. A couple of NR candidates were physically attacked: one suffered a minor stroke after being assaulted, and another was jumped by a mob of Antifa in Cherbourg. There were also cases of Antifa invading NR meetings and threating those present. The response to this violence was silence from the National Rally’s political adversaries.
After Hervé Breuil suffered his stroke, only Andrée Taurinya of LFI offered her support. Shortly after Breuil had been targeted, an MP from Macron’s Renaissance party was assaulted by a group of youths; this time there was an outpouring of support from the political class. ‘Violence and intimidation have no place in our democracy’, declared Gabriel Attal. National Rally activists and MPs receive no compassion because they’ve been categorised as ‘fascists’; they are an affront to decency, a danger to democracy and underserving of pity.
Attal proclaimed during the election campaign that it is the ‘moral duty’ of French people to stop the National Rally coming to power. The vast majority of the electorate interpret such exhortations in the way Attal intended – to vote against National Rally. But there is in every society a small violent minority who choose to interpret them another way. Unfortunately, what happened to Trump in Pennsylvania last week does not appear to have made the French left reflect on the violence of their rhetoric or their actions. They continue to dehumanise Marine Le Pen and her party.
There is a reason for this, what might be termed ‘morality-washing’. It’s the same principle as ‘green-washing’ or ‘sport-washing’, the feigning of virtue to distract from one’s own questionable ethics. It is members of LFI who have brought parliament into disrepute in the last couple of years; they have championed Hamas, waved Palestinian flags in the Assembly, called a Jewish MP a ‘pig’ and, in two cases, been investigated for possible apology for terrorism. It is LFI who are feared by 92 per cent of France’s Jewish community.
Last year one of their MPs, Thomas Portes, posed for a photo with his foot atop an effigy of the head of Macron’s minister of labour. Portes was among those who refused to shake the hand of Flavien Termet. When widespread rioting erupted across France 12 months ago, LFI refused to condemn the violence, prompting the then PM, Elisabeth Borne, to express her ‘shock’ and accuse the party of being outside the ‘Republic arc’.
This is the same Borne who was re-elected to parliament this month with the help of LFI. Their candidate stood aside and called on his supporters to vote for the former PM over the National Rally’s representative. Politics in France is a squalid business. It is devoid of morality and replete with hypocrisy. Above all, it is teeming with a hatred that makes many MPs blind to their words and actions. That is dangerous for parliament and for the country.
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