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Paris:\u00a0 Muslim voters are increasingly worried about the prospect of a far-right victory less than two weeks before France’s snap parliamentary elections, fearing the possible restrictions that could follow.<\/p>\nParis:\u00a0 Muslim voters are increasingly worried about the prospect of a far-right victory less than two weeks before France’s snap parliamentary elections, fearing the possible restrictions that could follow.<\/p>\n
For Sarah, there’s a “real risk” of seeing the\u00a0National Rally\u00a0(RN) win the ballot, called by President\u00a0Emmanuel Macron\u00a0after the far-right party trounced his centrists in early June’s EU elections.<\/p>\n
The 23-year-old member of a Muslim women’s collective told AFP that would give the party of\u00a0Marine Le Pen\u00a0free rein to pass laws restricting her freedoms in matters of dress and worship.<\/p>\n
The RN has made no secret of its hostility to ritual slaughter, which would effectively ban halal and kosher meat.<\/p>\n
A bill it tabled in 2021 called for bans on “Islamist ideologies” and on the wearing of headscarves in all public places.<\/p>\n
The current law prohibits the wearing of headscarves in public schools and bans the wearing of full-face veils, such as the burqa, in public.<\/p>\n
The centrist government of Macron also banned the wearing in schools of the abaya gown worn by many Muslim women from this school year.<\/p>\n
‘Tool of discrimination’<\/p>\n
Appearing on French TV this week, RN party leader\u00a0Jordan Bardella\u00a0said it wanted to ban the wearing of the\u00a0Muslim\u00a0headscarf in public, describing the hijab “as a tool of discrimination between men and women and not desirable in our society.”<\/p>\n
But he said even if the RN won the polls the measure would not come into force until after the next presidential elections in 2027.<\/p>\n
Sarah — who like most people interviewed did not want to give her last name — was also concerned about the “legitimisation” of hostility to Muslims.<\/p>\n
For her, if there is “an openly racist party in charge of the state, Islamophobic acts will multiply”.<\/p>\n
With around six million people of Islamic faith or background, France is home to one of Europe’s largest Muslim communities.<\/p>\n
On Saturday evening, around 40 ultra-right-wing supporters marched through the streets of the southeastern city of Lyon, chanting “We are\u00a0Nazis” and “Get Islam out of Europe”, according to videos on social media.<\/p>\n
The march was condemned by the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, Chems-eddine Hafiz, who called on the authorities to act in the face of “the liberation of extremist speech”.<\/p>\n
“Scapegoats”<\/p>\n
Hafiz had already condemned the “worrying rise of the extreme right” on June 11.<\/p>\n
For him, Muslims and North Africans had “become the scapegoats, the symbols of all that is perceived as threatening, as foreign, as incompatible with a supposedly homogeneous national identity.<\/p>\n
“It’s all mixed up in people’s minds now: immigration equals\u00a0Islam… and religion equals the invasion of a population,” Bordeaux’s imam Tareq Oubrou told AFP.<\/p>\n
Many Muslims complain about the media treatment reserved for them in the wake of the wave of militant attacks committed in France in the name of Islam since 2015.<\/p>\n
“As soon as I turn on the TV, it’s dramatic: it’s Islam Islam Islam, they confuse it with Islamism, they tar everyone with the same brush,” said Maryam outside the Grand Mosque in Paris.<\/p>\n
The 46-year-old mother-of-two has advised her grown children “to study so that they can go elsewhere”, as life as a Muslim in France had become “more difficult than it was 15 years ago”.<\/p>\n
This echoed a recent sociological survey, “La\u00a0France, tu l’aimes mais tu la quittes” (“France, you love it but you leave it”), charting the unease of some young Muslims tempted to leave the country.<\/p>\n
‘Scared’<\/p>\n
Yet older Muslims are also expressing their dismay at the upcoming two-round election on June 30 and July 7.<\/p>\n
“We’re scared, not so much about religion, but more for everyday life,” said 70-year-old Fatima.<\/p>\n
However, Karim Tricoteaux, a 32-year-old French-Algerian, told AFP he took hope from the feeling that “the left-wing parties are coming together and are more powerful”.<\/p>\n
He said he would vote in the parliamentary polls, convinced that “that’ll do the trick”.<\/p>\n
At the European elections in early June, 62 percent of Muslim voters who went to the polls opted for the hard-left\u00a0France Unbowed\u00a0party (LFI), according to an Ifop poll for the newspaper La Croix.<\/p>\n
But as many as 59 percent of Muslims abstained. (AFP)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Paris:\u00a0 Muslim voters are increasingly worried about the prospect of a far-right victory less than two weeks before France’s snap parliamentary elections, fearing the possible restrictions that could follow. For Sarah, there’s a “real risk” of seeing the\u00a0National Rally\u00a0(RN) win the ballot, called by President\u00a0Emmanuel Macron\u00a0after the far-right party trounced his centrists in early June’s EU elections. The 23-year-old member of a Muslim women’s collective told AFP that would give the party of\u00a0Marine Le Pen\u00a0free rein to pass laws restricting her freedoms in matters of dress and worship. The RN…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":661594,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47743],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-661593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=661593"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":661595,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661593\/revisions\/661595"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/661594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=661593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=661593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malayalamdailynews.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=661593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}