By Arnaud Bertrand

Some thoughts on why I’d never vote for Le Pen or some of the other French so-called “extreme-right” parties as someone who’s generally very suspicious of liberalism and who can be called a “sovereignist”. Hopefully it can be useful to some who share my thinking.

First of all, a personal experience. I went to high school in Lyon, France in an extremely conservative private catholic school with many sons and daughters of Front National officials (now called Rassemblement National). About half my “friends” back then went to the Front National youth movement (“Front National de la Jeunesse”). So it’s fair to say I was partly raised in that environment. And my big learning from that experience is that the primary ideological driver for these people isn’t a love of France or its culture, but a hatred of “foreign elements”, of course mainly Muslims but also Jews (as in actual antisemitism, not anti-Zionism). To begin with, this vaccinated me for life against their ideology…

Secondly, another personal experience. I left France when I was 18, 22 years ago, and have since lived in 7 different countries: Switzerland, the UK, the US, India, Nepal, China and Malaysia. Which means I myself have lived the majority of my life as a “foreign element” in a wide variety of other countries and as such have been able to understand a) how other countries approach diversity and multiculturalism and b) generally how other countries are managed. The most important thing I’ve come to realize during these experiences is that cultures endure. For instance I truly love China as a country (if you follow me you must have noticed by now), it has a culture that I find fascinating, but there’s no way I would ever become Chinese, nor would China ever ask foreigners to assimilate in a way that they become Chinese, they’d just laugh at the very notion of it. I’m French, raised in France and I’ll never escape this. I can live in other countries, respect and love them and be respected and loved in return, but I’m never going to be “not French”, it’s just impossible to become another people.

Which I think goes at the core of what the so-called “extreme-right” in France gets so wrong. They conflate the requirement for “foreign elements” in France to respect and love the country (a perfectly reasonable demand) with a requirement to give up their own culture and assimilate, which is unreasonable and impossible. And as a corollary, since it is impossible to change peoples’ cultures and assimilate them, in order to coexist within the same country the only reasonable way forward is mutual accommodation and respect. With an emphasis on “mutual” because every relationship is two-sided: if there’s no respect and accommodation one way, you can’t expect to get it in return. You can perfectly question the historical wisdom of welcoming mass immigration in France but it’s an established fact, it’s done, there’s no going back. So now we need to live together in harmony.

Also, what makes a country strong and great? If as a thought experiment France was tomorrow composed entirely of indigenous French, would it change anything to France’s fundamental strengths as a country? I’d argue that no, it wouldn’t change a thing.

First of all I think that what makes a country strong is primarily its capacity to make decisions for itself, for its own interests. Nothing is possible without this: if you’re at the mercy of others’ interests, you’re weak by definition because you can’t look after yourself…

Excellent education is also crucially important because from it derives a country’s ability to build itself independently: without local ingeniousness you cannot have competent elites, local economic champions, your own cutting-edge technology, etc.

Another aspect of strength is, yes, a strong national identity and cultural pride. This might seem paradoxical because for some it seems incompatible with a multi-ethnic society but I don’t think so: plenty of examples out there of countries that respect and accommodate other ethnicities in their midst whilst having developed strong national identities. For instance it is funny – and actually paradoxical – that so many of the so-called “extreme-right” parties in France allegedly profess to admire Russia when Russia is actually an example of a society that does this: it’s hard to argue they do not have a strong national identity, yet they are immensely more accommodating towards Muslim ethnic minorities for instance than France today, let alone a France managed by the Rassemblement National. As an example, it is forbidden by law in Russia to insult the Quran or to generally act in a way that insults religious feelings. One notable case involved Nikita Zhuravel, who was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for burning a Quran in Volgograd.

Last but not least, a key aspect of strength is unity, harmony and stability. Nothing makes a country weaker than internal divisions. And it’s on that aspect of things that I believe the so-called “extreme-right” is the most dangerous because their very DNA is to pit one share of the French population against another, to agitate the red herring that “foreign elements” in our midst are the main source of our problems when the very act of doing so makes France weaker. I don’t think there should be any taboo against reforming immigration, that’s perfectly fine and undoubtedly needed, but you should never do so by demonizing other ethnic or religious groups because it’s ultimately very self-defeating.

I would also add that so-called “extreme-right” parties in France today are the most ardent supporters of Netanyahu and more broadly Israeli policies, which to me is a clear sign that my analysis is correct: they back the notion of a “battle of civilisation against barbarism” and find no qualms with adopting the most extreme measures, including apartheid and genocide, to wage that war. Policies which are currently destroying Israel and would undoubtedly similarly destroy France.

What does that leave us with? With those ideas, which French party can we then turn towards? Not many I’m afraid. Whilst all of this seems to be extremely common sense to me, France is weirdly void of parties that defend such a platform. I personally vote for Mélenchon’s LFI because it’s a party that understands the need for France to be independent and the need for everyone in France to live together in mutual respect… but I’m the first to say they’re far from ideal. They support more immigration when I don’t and I don’t get from them much of the rigor and extremely hard work that’d be necessary for France to get back on track economically and technologically. They also participate in many of the liberal “culture wars” which I absolutely despise. As such I actually find them quite bad but they’re probably the least worse…

Macron, Glucksmann and all the liberal centrists are by far the worst because, and that’s the key characteristic of liberals, their ideological core is hypocrisy: they’ll tell you they support “strategic autonomy” but will then do everything to vassalize France in a multitude of ways, they’ll tell you they have humanistic values but will then support the worst atrocities, they’ll tell you they want better education and health services in France while gutting the corresponding institutions from the inside, etc. I actually have more respect for someone who will say they’ll do bad things in a straightforward way than someone I can’t trust, because at least we know where we stand…

Anyhow that’s liberal democracy in France today, a non-choice between non-ideal candidates who’d anyway gain power in a country that is so constrained in what it can actually do that, at the end of the day, choosing a candidate is something purely theoretical. It’d take a statesman of extraordinary capabilities to actually restore France’s independence and put it back on a reasonable path, a figure like De Gaulle, and these types of people just don’t exist in France today. As the saying goes: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” I think the good times are over, and we’re only left with weak men: we need to go through the hard times now to get strong men and I suspect that will take a long time, I might not even see in my lifetime.