Legally French #10

An American in Paris

This is a short French election update. The LFI -- La France Insoumise (France Unbowed, extreme left)-- is flexing its newly gained power. The new mayor of Saint Denis, a tall handsome Black man by the name of Bally Bagayoko, whose origins are Malian, entered the Marie with the exuberance one would expect from a winner. His fans were jubilant. As the son of an immigrant family, his election is a breakthrough. When it was time for the outgoing mayor, Mathieu Hanotin, a Socialist who has served in several government positions in the area, to leave the Marie, however, the booing, yelling and pushing were so intense, he needed a police escort to get out of the building.

Meanwhile the new mayor pronounced that he refused a logique de bordélisation, which translates literally as “a logic of chaos.” The phrase itself seems chaotic, but maybe it sounds logical to the French. Bordél means mess. Writers are known to insist the mess on their desks has some kind of order that only they recognize, forbidding the cleaning person to touch it. It was the first time I heard it turned into bordélisation.

Speaking of bordél, the likely candidate for president from the Rassemblement National, the far right party, is led by one Jordan Bardella. Dude is thirty years old and his name is easily transformed into Bordéllo, which is a sort of a unisex word in terms of Franglais. Though the RN, as I’ve said, works hard to overcome its antisemitic past, turns out one of its founders in the early 70’s was no less a Nazi than Pierre Bousquet, who served in the Waffen SS.

But back to Mayor Bally Bagayoko. He has variously said St Denis belongs to “us,” and by us he likely means the Black and Arab people who make up a majority. Fair enough. He has been accused of saying White people are not welcome, but I find no evidence of that. In recent years a large portion of the Jewish population, mostly Sephardim and more likely to look Arab than White, has fled La Seine St. Denis, the departement where St. Denis is located. This can’t be attributed to Bagayoko, of course, but speaks to growing discomfort. He has advocated for gradually disarming the local police. Part of the rallying cry for the LFI, is “Police kill.” In these poorer neighborhoods cops have been at the wrong end of some fatalities. The incidents I’ve heard about appear to have been arrests or chases gone wrong, but at least they are not as a result of an officer pressing a boot on a man’s neck.

Disarming local police (les gendarmes) is a bold experiment. There are still state police, CRS, who are armed to the teeth and show up for large demonstrations (manifestations.) It calls to mind the defund the police movement during the height of BLM. Most neighborhoods wound up wanting their cops to stay put. The talk on the right is often about crime, especially in the banlieues (literally suburbs, but more like the US concept of inner cities.)

The French are lately no strangers to polarization. The outer edge of the right/left push/pull that sometimes spills over into violence, is called les tensions. A few weeks ago a right wing young man (not sure if he was RN or what) was set upon by LFI associated thugs and beaten to death. The far right went nuts. The far left intoned, wasn’t us. Bagayoko has accused the right wing CNews*, the most popular news channel in France, of racism. He cites deplorable racist tropes coming from panelists on the channel. The far right insists, out of context.

The solution to les tensions was clearly to have a manifestation in St. Denis, where everyone could come out and show their solidarity for the new mayor and each other and express their anti-racist bona fides. The recently booed outgoing mayor showed up to express his support. The new mayor said the fight is also against Islamophobia and antisemitism. This latter is a sore point, as the leader of Bagayoko’s party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has made openly antisemitic statements and posters with blatantly Nazi-esque caricatures of Jews.

Thus do the fringes meet. It’s hard to unsee the far right’s origins in Nazi ideology, and equally hard to unsee Mélenchon’s much more recent Nazi caricatures. There’s a real chance a candidate from La France Insoumisewill face a candidate from the Rassemblement National in the 2027 presidential elections. The French have rejected both these extremes in past national elections. Will they again?

*CNews is somewhat comparable to Fox, though I only know about Fox second hand as I’ve never watched it.I’m going to hazard a guess that CNews is more intelligent in its debate if similar in its leanings.