BONDY, France — Abdelkrim Bouadla enthusiastically voted for Emmanuel Macron five years ago, drawn to his youth and his message to transform France. But after a presidency he believes has harmed French Muslims like him, Mr. Bouadla, a community leader who has long worked with troubled youth, is torn.
He compared the choice he faced in Sunday’s French presidential election — to Mr Macron and Marine Le Pen, whose far-right party has a long history of anti-Islamic stances, racism and xenophobia — as “breaking your ribs or break your legs”
Macron and Ms Le Pen are now battling for the 7.7 million voters who supported Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the left-wing leader who took a strong third place in the first round of the election. If they broke strongly for one of the candidates, that could be decisive.
Nearly 70 percent of Muslims voted for Mr Mélenchon, the only major candidate to have consistently condemned discrimination against Muslims, the Ifop polling station said.
By contrast, Macron got just 14 percent of Muslim voters’ support this year, compared to 24 percent in 2017. Ms. Le Pen got 7 percent in the first round this year. Nationally, according to Ifop, the turnout of Muslim voters was a few percentage points higher than the average.
As the two candidates battle it out in the final days of a In a tight race, Mr Macron’s prospects may rest in part on whether he can convince Muslim voters like Mr Bouadla that he is their best option – and that staying at home risks installing a chilling new anti-Muslim leadership.
However, according to Mr Bouadla, that will be a bit of a challenge.
“If I vote for Macron, I would participate in all the bad things he has done against Muslims,” Bouadla, 50, said during a long walk in Bondy, a town just northeast of Paris. He hesitated between abstaining. vote for the first time in his life or reluctantly cast a vote for Mr Macron, just to ward off someone he deemed “worse and more dangerous”.
Most polls show that Macron’s lead, about 10 percentage points, offers a comfortable path to reelection, but it is much narrower than his 32 percentage point margin from the win over Ms Le Pen in 2017.
But as Éric Coquerel, a national legislator and close ally of Mr Mélenchon, said the rise of Muslim voters could tip the balance if the race “gets extremely tight”.
Much of the anger of Muslim voters towards Macron revolves around the pushing through of a widely condemned 2021 law and the subsequent closure of more than 700 Muslim institutions that authorities say encouraged radicalisation, a charge many Muslims and some human rights groups dispute. But it remains unclear how this resentment can be turned into a political force.
The estimated 6 million Muslims in France make up 10 percent of the population, but their political influence has long been undermined by high abstinence rates and divisions based on class and origin. Given that history, Mr. Mélenchon may have signaled a shift, analysts say.
Julien Talpin, a sociologist at the National Center for Scientific Research, said the Muslim mobilization behind a single candidate was “something entirely new.”
“In the past, there were only vague calls to vote for candidates favorable to Islam,” he said.
Mélenchon had his biggest victories across the country in Bondy and throughout Seine-Saint-Denis, the department just north of Paris with strong concentrations of the capital’s poor, immigrant and Muslim population.
The department is the source of much of the capital’s service staff and also sparks fear and anxiety, especially among elderly French people, whose feelings about immigration and crime are fueled by the right-wing news media and politicians. Éric Zemmour, the far-right TV pundit who came fourth in the first round after a campaign aimed at attacking Islam, described the department as a “foreign enclave” suffering from “religious colonization.”
In Bondy, first-round turnout was reported in neighborhoods with historically low votes.
“The number of young people, families and especially the people waiting in line – something happened,” said Mehmet Ozguner, 22, a local organizer of Mr. Mélenchon’s party.
Many imams, social media influencers and other community leaders called on Muslim voters to cast their vote in favor of Mr Mélenchon.
“There was no formal organisation, but a lot of ad hoc alliances, mobilization by union activists and anti-racism activists,” said Taha Bouhafs, 24, a journalist with a large online following and an ally of Mr Mélenchon’s party, who plans to in the parliamentary elections in June.
In 2017, Mr Macron had reassured many Muslims that he would be more open about issues of French secularism, known as “laïcité, diversity and multiculturalism,” said Vincent Tiberj, a sociologist at Sciences Po Bordeaux University who has studied the voting patterns. studied. of French Muslims. Macron even called colonization a “crime against humanity” during a visit to Algeria.
In a keynote address at what Mr Macron described as an Islamist-driven separatist movement in French society, Mr Macron acknowledged that successive governments had encouraged the trend by settling immigrants in areas of “abject poverty and hardship,” such as Seine-Saint. – Dennis.
But Mr Tiberj said there was a gap “between what he said as president and what his administration did in his name.”
Macron hardened his stance after the beheading of a high school teacher, Samuel Paty, by an Islamist fanatic who was angry that the teacher had displayed caricatures of the prophet Mohammed in a profanity class.
In response, Macron pushed for his anti-separatism bill despite widespread criticism from international and national human rights groups, including the government’s National Human Rights Commission. The law gave the government more power over religious institutions, schools and other associations.
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Following the adoption of the law in August 2021, authorities have conducted 24,877 investigations until last January, according to the government. They closed 718 mosques, Muslim schools and associations to encourage separatism and seized goods worth €46 million.
But many institutions have been closed for vague, unwarranted reasons, according to a study of 20 cases by an umbrella group of academics and rights groups, the Observatory of Associative Freedoms.
Talpin, the sociologist and co-author of the report, said the law “and the debate surrounding it has contributed to the stigmatization of Muslims”.
In a TV debate on the law, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin tried to outflank Ms Le Pen on the right, accusing Ms Le Pen of being “soft” against Islamism. The minister who oversaw public schools further alienated Muslims by saying the hijab, or headscarf, was “not desirable in society”.
Feeling betrayed, some Muslims have even voted for Ms Le Pen as a way to punish Mr Macron.
“I am voting against Macron,” said Ahmed Leyou, 63, a taxi driver in Trappes, a city southwest of Paris, who voted for Ms Le Pen in the first round and planned to do it again on Sunday. “I am Muslim “Arab, but French. Marine Le Pen can’t tell me to go back home. She can’t do anything to me.”
In Bondy, Muslims were not the only ones to criticize Mr Macron’s policies.
“The law against separatism is dangerous,” said Rev. Patrice Gaudin, 50, the priest of the Roman Catholic parish in Bondy. “We have to recognize that Muslims do not feel welcome in France because they are Muslim. This law can stir feelings leading to radicalization.”
“You can’t humiliate people,” Father Gaudin said, referring to the 2021 law and criticizing the recurring political debate over whether Muslim women should be allowed to wear headscarves and under what circumstances.
During a campaign shutdown last week, Mr Macron touted a young Muslim woman’s decision to wear a headscarf as a feminist choice she had made of her own accord — a change from 2018 when he described it as not “consistent with the civility in our country ” and against equality between men and women. In a TV debate between the two candidates on Wednesday, Mr Macron said Ms Le Pen’s stance on the hijab — banning it in public — would lead to a “civil war”.
On the defensive, Ms Le Pen said last week that the issue was a “complex issue” that the National Assembly should debate and that she was not “close-minded”. Her top officials eventually said banning the wearing of the hijab was not a priority.
The rapidly changing positions of the candidates for the headscarf can be explained by the presence of voters such as Islam Menyane, 29, who bought sweets from a bakery near Bondy’s train station to break the fasting month of Ramadan.
Ms Menyane, who works in the food service, voted for Mr Mélenchon in the first round and now leaned towards Mr Macron, although she felt France had “stalled” during his presidency.
Ms Menyane does not wear a headscarf, but Ms Le Pen’s views on Islam worried her. She also liked Ms Le Pen’s economic policies and her focus on helping the working class and young voters like her. She also preferred the personality of Ms. Le Pen, who has managed to soften her image in recent years.
“She’s a human being, she’s a mother, she seems to want to defend her country,” Ms Menyane said, adding that she was not afraid of a Le Pen victory. “Maybe it’s a nice surprise.”