French Muslims don’t fear Marine Le Pen

The French absolutely love their elections. But only for a while. Soon enough they view them like many of us view the FA Cup after we’ve passed the age of 16. You know someone won something but you can’t quite remember who or what. And as you look out of your window at the inflationary clouds in the expensive sky, you’re dismayed to find out how little it mattered after all.

French elections are not really elections. They’re bar fights. Where everybody keeps their hands to themselves and flaps their mouths like angry starlings. I was astounded to see that the British media paid as much attention to the French political drama as their own concurrent domestic one. Perhaps in journalism’s love for a horse-race story, the UK election was too thoroughgoing a foregone conclusion. The idea that National Rally, seen as a motley selection of racists, anti-Semites and homophobes, might nab themselves a French government was more exciting than how historically awful Rishi Sunak’s defeat would be. That’s fair enough. But it is to deeply misunderstand France.

France is not really a democracy. It has probably never been a democracy. It’s a proper republic (I’ve seen a priest in the street twice in 15 years) but it’s nowhere near a democracy. It’s more like a stylish Stalinist state with extra oral sex. In the past 30 years, every time the immigration-resistant, far-right vote threatens to break through, French democracy basically cheats. Its two-round system of voting helps. If the far right gains significantly in a first round of voting, all political entities – left, centre and soft-right – spend two weeks swallowing their distaste for each other to combine in a frenzy of single-ticket opposition and tactical voting. It ain’t any version of vox populi. It’s playground exclusion of the new kid, private-club blackballing of some unbearable oik.

And for decades now French elections have been euphemistic, too. The French rather despise euphemism. They see it as Anglo-Saxon puritanism. It’s what makes French racism such a great spectator sport. There’s no real hedging your bets here. If you’re feeling that Big Dislike, you take it for a test drive to see what it can do. French racism speaks loud and proud. It lets that dog have a big old bark.

But the elections were about urgently defeating the far right without too much emphasis on why. Commentators and opposition alike were mealymouthed about their own declared emergency. It was as if we were meant to keep these people out of power because of their cheap suits and bad haircuts. It’s the lie the international left – so-called, despite none of them having ever met a working-class person – tells itself all the time. Grindingly obsessed with race and race alone, at election time they act as if racism is an alien imposition on a blameless population to whom the idea would have simply not have occurred had not Marine Le Pen turned up to say how yucky brown people are.

This election, like many recent elections, asked only one question. How much do you hate Arabs? A bit? A lot? Only at the weekends? No one talked about the economy, unemployment or supermarket prices. But nobody talked about that big question either. How much do the French hate Arabs?

I go to the Vizir, the cheapest bar-tabac in my neighbourhood. Which inevitably means it is heavily Kabyle, Berber, Muslim. I’m a regular now, accepted as a surprisingly freckled part of the furniture. It was a good place to watch the weather of the election roll harmlessly by. They almost all know what I do and hugely don’t care – they didn’t give a stuff that I worked for Charlie Hebdo for nine years.

They would occasionally chip in with choice sarcasms about the election. How they weren’t afraid of the far right (four or five of them actually vote for the far right). How they prefer the up-front racism of the right to the obsessive and disguised racism of the left – which fools none of them. One guy, Momo, a cop, told me with near tears in his eyes that he had had enough, couldn’t take it any more and was going to leave if the far right won. When I said ‘Really?’, he laughed his ass off. ‘What the fuck is wrong with you’, he said, ‘Are you mental?’.

It’s basically a barful of every Belfast knacker I’ve ever known but with suntans. To say that they didn’t much care about the election is to egregiously understate the case. Racism is just a law of physics in the Vizir (Jesus, you should hear what Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians and Berbers all say about each other!). Nobody gets too excited about the laws of physics. Nobody’s got that kinda time.

Chaban, the Vizir owner, has all the grandiose elan of a circus ring-master. He told me:

‘Écoute, Robert. It’s the same election as the last four or five. It changes nothing. People are cursed by their short memories. Especially now. Europe has always been a hot-pot for racial and religious conflict. They franchised it out to the Middle East or North Africa here and there but this is the crucible. And make no mistake, it’s as simple and nutritious as couscous. Fear is fun. People enjoy fear.’

Chaban then proceeded to draw me a diagram of its simplicity. A list of historical immigrant ethnicities in France, one on top of each other, each one shitting on the one below. The French shitting on Italian immigrants; who shit on the Spanish; and then the Portuguese have to pucker up. Asians, Arabs and Africans all follow. He looked into my face like some kind of gleeful alchemist, giving away all the secrets. The only problem he had was where to place the Jews in this excremental flow-chart. He laughed richly. ‘It’s always hard to know where to put the Jews.’

It’s very blokey, the Vizir. If you want to hear about Maghrebin women, I’m gonna need another four or five articles. If you think you know something about sexual liberation or intellectual freedom, you should try eavesdropping on a table of young Maghrebin women in a bar or café. They’ll have switched to ridiculously perfect English so no one can overhear. They’re all doctors, lawyers and university professors and will do 10 minutes of complaining about how work is so bad, it’s really interfering with their ‘weekly wank’ (and I quote with absolute fidelity). Then it’s an hour of cackling about the lucrative possibilities of inventing an imam-approved Muslim dildo and how Muslim men aren’t the problem – it’s their fucking clit-chopping mothers. It will blow the back of your head off.

Like everyone else, French Muslims are multitudinous and complex. These elections were about an idea of Arabs, not about the unpredictable reality. Brown, black and even white, French Muslims will constitutionally surprise you. Dislike, disdain or fear them at your leisure. I can respect that, the eccentric and unpredictable denizens of the Vizir have taught me that. But no election or political party is going to go there, deep into the private heart of people. Meanwhile, if you are going to express your loathing of the Arab kid who steals your phone or grabs your ass, dignity demands that you do it to the chubby chick in a headscarf who is doing open-heart surgery on you. Who knows? In my experience, it might just make her laugh and kindly pat your head.

Robert McLiam Wilson is a novelist and regular contributor to Charlie Hebdo.