After the controversy whipped up over the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games, a smile has returned to the faces of France’s far-right politicians. They have been largely pleased with the atmosphere of the ensuing games, hailing an omnipresence of police, French flags flying everywhere and daily renditions of France’s national anthem amid the continuing successes of the country’s athletes.
While Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National party does not have a developed programme concerning sport – an activity that above all serves it for denouncing athletes who wear the headscarf or football clubs that supposedly favour players from immigrant backgrounds – its Members of Parliament (MPs) have been crowing over every medal won by France.
The party’s chairman, Jordan Bardella, has gone about publicly spreading his congratulations to the country’s different sporting federations, as have many of the 123 Rassemblement National (RN) MPs elected to the National Assembly in July (and whose numbers make it the largest single party in the chamber).
The start of the games, however, had met with their widespread disapproval over the opening ceremony themed by artistic director Thomas Jolly, and which he designed as being socially inclusive and irreverent, but which subsequently prompted he and his colleagues to receive death threats and insults about Jolly’s homosexuality. “I above all want this ceremony to include everyone,” said Jolly ahead of the event. “We should all celebrate this diversity.”
While both RN figurehead Le Pen, and Bardella, stepped back from joining in the protests over the ceremony, and which were relayed over several days on the CNews channel of media tycoon Vincent Bolloré, others in the party had no hesitation.
One of them is Philippe Olivier. A close advisor to his sister-in-law Marine Le Pen and who is an MEP for the party he joined more than 40 years ago, when it was called the Front National, Olivier is also the founder of an association called “parliamentarians against wokeism” and described the opening ceremony as “an act of militancy rather than Olympic spirit”.
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Meanwhile, Jean-Philippe Tanguy, a re-elected MP for the party (for a constituency in northern France) and who has been publicly open about his own homosexuality, dismissed the organisers of the ceremony as “subsidised wokeists”. Fellow RN MP Franck Allisio (whose constituency lies close to Marseille) took to X (the former Twitter) to declare that “if they had represented [the prophet] Mohammed like they represented Christ, France would experience an umpteenth epidemic of knife attacks and the nth wave of riots”. His fellow RN party MP Béatrice Roullaud, representing a constituency close to Paris, spoke of her “shame” at the “flaunted will to glorify wokeism and transgender [sic]”. Newly elected RN MP, Guillaume Bigot (not a spelling mistake) announced that “in Macronism, only the negation of oneself and the forced mixing [of races] can be celebrated”.
Burgundy MP and RN spokesman Julien Odoul, who is never one to shy from controversy, described the performance during the ceremony of French-Malian singer Aya Nakamura as “a ransacking of French culture”.
Once the games got going, however, there was a different tone. The RN MPs have shown a particular interest in the numerous competing athletes who are members of the French military, and many relayed a post by the armed forces ministry on social media X on August 3rd announcing that 12 medals had been won by what it called “the army of champions”.
Matthieu Valet is a former police officer and union official within the force, who is now an RN MEP since his election this year. In a post on X at the weekend he included a video of himself at home watching a table tennis match between French medallist Félix Lebrun and his Brazilian opponent Hugo Calderano, jumping up and down and fist pumping as Lebrun won. Valet is particularly attentive to police and gendarmerie competitors, describing middle-distance runner and police officer Anaïs Bourgoin as a “golden cop”. When gendarme Manon Apithy-Brunet won a gold medal in sword fighting at the Paris games, Valet posted “all my congratulations” to her along with a reminder that she is “godmother to the Republican Guard’s 1st infantry regiment”. As for Camille Jedrzejewski, a police officer who won a bronze medal in the shooting sports events, Valet congratulated her as someone who was an “honour to their uniform”.
Meanwhile, in reaction to a social media post by the European Commission listing the medals total for athletes from European Union member states, in which it congratulated “all the medallists from Team Europe”, RN MEP Mathilde Androuet was quick to take to X to announce “there is no European nation”. In the runup to the French presidential elections of 2017, Marine Le Pen commented that she enjoyed sport which “in face of a globalisation which erases national identities, is one of the effective ways of reuniting the French nation”.
It was no surprise that several from the far-right party joined social media campaigning against Algerian female boxer Imane Khelif, who has faced allegations that she is not a real woman. RN spokesman Julien Odoul denounced the integration of “male transgender athletes in female sports competitions”, while MP Antoine Villedieu similarly commented that “men do not have a place in feminine sport”.
What the party’s representatives appear to have particularly enjoyed is the vast deployment of extra police numbers during the games, and the clearing of the homeless off of the capital’s streets and out of squats. “Since the beginning of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, insecurity in the capital has drastically diminished,” wrote RN MP Laurence Robert-Dehault in a post on X which was illustrated by a picture of a police officer emblazoned with the words “Gold Medal for our forces of law and order!”.
“More police and gendarmes = equals public tranquillity and serenity regained,” she added.
Her party colleague Matthias Renault, elected as an MP in June, announced: “Olympic Paris is secured. There are no longer either pickpockets or street hawkers. A circular organised the temporary evacuation of migrants from their camps. National fervour is expressed everywhere, and the inhabitants are happy.”
“I have the impression that the RN’s programme is very much in application during these Olympic Games,” commented Aleksandar Nikolic, an MEP in charge of sports issues at the RN. “There is a strong police presence, fewer grab-and run thefts and pickpockets, [fewer] sellers of illicit products on the streets of Paris, and [there is] national cohesion, a valorisation of the flag. Yes, these Olympic Games very much resemble the France that we would like.”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse