Fall of Aleppo reveals fault lines in French politics

TheThe fall of Aleppo has revealed the splits and different lines both within and between France's different political movements. On the Right, the newly-designated candidate for next year's presidential campaign, François Fillon, has set himself apart from many of his own political camp in his support for Russia leader Vladimir Putin and even for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Indeed, his line has been close to that of the far-right Front National. On the other hand the ruling Socialist Party and the Greens have unhesitatingly condemned the dictatorial Syrian regime and supported the non-jihadist elements of the Syrian opposition. As for the radical left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélencon, he has adopted an anti-imperialist stance that has created some lively controversy.

François Fillon used a short press release on Thursday December 15th to break his lengthy silence since the fall of Aleppo. “We need indignation but that has never saved a life,” he explained. “There are only two solutions to stop the massacre,” said Fillon who, isolated in his own political family, has for months been advocating a strategic alliance with the regime in Damascus.

The first solution, he says, is a “military intervention that only the Americans can conduct”. He does not back this approach “taking into account what happened in Iraq”. The second approach, which he does support, is “a powerful European diplomatic initiative to get around the table all those people who can stop this conflict, without excluding anyone, thus including those who are committing crimes today”. François Fillon believes that resuming a dialogue with Assad and also Putin is the only way out of the Syrian conflict.

A few weeks ago Fillon refused to speak of “war crimes” in Aleppo. “One mustn't use words like that without being able to verify them,” he told the France 2 television programme L’Émission politique. “When you're at war, you must choose your main opponent,” Fillon wrote in his book Vaincre le totalitarisme islamique ('Defeating Islamic Totalitarianism') published by Albin Michel in 2016, justifying closer links with Damascus and Moscow. “There are two camps in Syria and not three as is said,” he also declared on October 13th during one of the conservative primary debates, referring to supporters of a “totalitarian Islamic regime” and “the others”- forgetting the non-jihadist elements of the Syrian opposition. “I choose the others because I consider that the danger there is too serious for world peace,” he said.

But on Thursday December 15th, in keeping with his desire to reunite his political family after his victory, Fillon named one of his primary rivals Bruno Le Maire as his “representative for European and international affairs”. This however is the same Bruno Le Maire who supported diametrically opposed views to Fillon on Syria during that primary contest, going so far as advocating military intervention on the ground led by France. “France must take the leadership of a European coalition that will bring together European states and some states in the region. There is an alternative choice between alignment with the United States and blind veneration of Russia: independence,” he told Le Journal du Dimanche newspaper. So does choosing Le Maire mean that Fillon is changing his line? “There is no reorientation and there's only one leader, that's François Fillon,” says his spokesman Thierry Solère.

Nonetheless, the pro-Assad line taken by some of Fillon's traditional supporters, such as the Member of Parliament Thierry Mariani who welcomed the fall of Aleppo (see Tweet below), risks causing problems for the conservative presidential candidate. Many of their positions on the subject could be mistaken for the line adopted by the far-right Front National (FN).

Front National: initial silence on Aleppo and support for Putin and Assad

The FN's president Marine Le Pen did not immediately react after Aleppo fell to a regime that she has always defended. Yet on Monday, following a bloody attack on a Coptic church in Cairo, the FN presidential candidate immediately issued a statement of support for Egypt's Christians who had been “savagely attacked by Islamic fundamentalism”.

FN vice-president Florian Philippot, however, did respond to the latest news from Syria. “Aleppo was infested with Islamists, that doesn't mean that there are no tragedies involving civilians … there are,” he told BFMTV on Thursday. He repeated the FN line on the issue, saying that the West had to speak to Russia. “Rather than observe and complain, we should have been an actor …. France should have worked to create a real global coalition with the United States, with European states including France and also with Russia: that would have been more responsible,” he said.

In addition to its close links with Russia, particularly financial ones (see for example Mediapart's story here), the FN has always followed the Assad regime's propaganda, almost to the letter. In 2013 MP Marion Maréchal-Le Pen claimed that the Syrian regime permitted the “peaceful” coexistence of minorities “who tomorrow will be massacred”. Meanwhile Marine Le Pen's entourage has on occasions had business links with the Assad regime. As Mediapart has revealed, a company called Riwal, run by Le Pen's official advisor Frédéric Chatillon, received between 100,000 euros and 150,000 euros a year from Damascus for handling the regime's public relations.

Socialist primary candidates back Syrian opposition

The main candidates for the Socialist Party's presidential primary election, to be held on January 22nd and January 29th, may differ on many policy areas but they are in broad agreement on the Syrian crisis. Their line follows the one first defined by President Nicolas Sarkozy and retained by his successor President François Hollande: condemnation of the Assad regime and support for the moderate Syrian opposition, in other words not the jihadists. But few of the candidates venture much further than this onto the diplomatic terrain. The only real point of divergence among them is the question of how to deal with the refugees resulting from the crisis. On one side is former prime minister Manuel Valls, who in a speech he gave as premier in Munich earlier this year criticised Angela Merkel's policy on Syrian refugees, and on the other are all the other primary candidates.

On Tuesday December 13th, Valls tweeted an appeal to Putin's Russia to save Aleppo's civilians (see below) before criticising the “pro-Russian affinity of François Fillon”. France had to speak to Russia “but also say with the greatest firmness that what is happening in Aleppo is intolerable, disgraceful, a scar on humanity”, he said to the online site Brut.

On Wednesday the former education minister Benoît Hamon, another candidate in the PS primary, started a speech by paying tribute to “our brothers and sisters in humanity” dying in Aleppo, and by speaking of a “war crime” and a “crime against humanity” in Syria. “I refuse to grade the horror according to whether it is perpetrated by Daesh [editor's note, Islamic State] or by Bashar al-Assad,” Hamon said, without offering any diplomatic solutions of his own.

However, Hamon drew a clear distinction between himself and Manuel Valls when it came to taking in refugees, referring to the latter's Munich speech in February. “I was ashamed that some leaders went to criticise a [German] chancellor to tell her not to do so much for the refugees,” said the former education minister. He wants to create an humanitarian visa, leave the Dublin Regulation on migrants and speed up the granting of the right to work for migrants.

There was a similar tone from Hamon's predecessor as education minister, Vincent Peillon, another candidate in the socialist presidential primary, who called for Syrian refugees to be taken in. “If there is one thing we can do, it's to welcome them,” he said (see Tweet of his radio interview below).

The only one of the candidates to go further in terms of proposing a diplomatic solution was former economy minister Arnaud Montebourg. In a statement published on his website he welcomed “the diplomatic efforts that France has undertaken in recent years with Laurent Fabius and Jean-Marc Ayrault [editor's note, the former and current foreign ministers respectively]”. He then added: “But we cannot act or have influence alone … in the coming hours we must demand a common initiative of all the heads of government to mobilise the other global powers, in particular China and the United States, to put pressure on Russia, Iran, so that one of the most destructive episodes and one of the biggest diplomatic failures of recent decades comes to an end.”

The Greens, faithful to their traditions

As for the the leaders of the green party Europe Écologie-Les Verts (EELV) and their presidential candidate Yannick Jadot, they have stuck to their movement's traditions of basing foreign policy on human rights, humanitarian aid and appeals to the international community. Having condemned the Syrian regime's massacres, Jadot and the essayist Raphaël Glucksmann used a comment article in Le Monde to call for the toughening of sanctions against Russia. “This Russian regime is also an oligarchy which must be hit in the wallet,” they wrote, insisting as well that the 2018 football World Cup should not be held in Russia.

The two authors also criticised several French political leaders. “Aleppo's been dying for months and Marine Le Pen has applauded Assad and Putin, her model and her sponsor. Alepp is dying and François Fillon, in a debate in the democratic primary for the French Right, said 'choose Assad' before going on to justify Putin. Aleppo is dying and Jean-Luc Mélenchon has stated on a popular programme on public service [television] 'I think that Putin is going to sort out the problem in Syria',” Jadot and Glucksmann wrote.

At the beginning of last week the former EELV minister in the Hollande government, Cécile Duflot, went to the Turkish-Syrian border with a Parliamentary delegation that also included socialist MP Patrick Mennucci and conservative MP Hervé Mariton. They asked, unsuccessfully, to be able to accompany Brita Hagi Hasan, the mayor of East Aleppo, to the war-torn city. Meanwhile several green leaders, including Yannick Jadot and Jacques Boutault, mayor of the 2nd arrondissement in Paris, joined Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo on Thursday in a demonstration to mark the departure of a humanitarian aid convoy (see below).

Mélenchon against American imperialism – but at what price?

On the Left only Jean-Luc Mélenchon stands out with a distinctive policy on the Syrian crisis and the fall of Aleppo. Having been embroiled in many rows on the subject, he has in recent months chosen his words carefully. In his latest review of the week on YouTube, broadcast on Thursday (see below), the presidential candidate for the movement La France Insoumise ('France Unbowed') insists that news of the plight of the people of Syria's second city has left him shocked. “In recent hours we have all been devastated by the broadcast of the images coming from Aleppo and from the eastern part of that city, of the bombardments which it is suffering,” said Mélenchon. Then he used the opportunity to respond to detractors who make him out to be “a friend of the bombardments of that part of the city”. He continued: “How can one think that there is anyone here or there who likes the bombardments and their consequences? To those who ask these questions I say to them that I am like them: outraged, wounded.”

In his video Jean-Luc Mélenchon explains again the series of arguments that he uses to define himself as “non-aligned”; on his blog on Wednesday December 14th he had declared that “deadly propaganda bans all debate, all criticism, all non-aligned points of view”.

The first argument is that as far as he is concerned the war in Syria is really about a battle for raw materials, gas and oil. “It's about a war for oil and gas pipelines from which there is no way out without a universal coalition! No one admits, in spite of the facts themselves, that it is the United States and France who refused the setting up of a universal coalition with Russia to fight the armed gangs of Daesh, the Al-Nusra Front and company,” said Mélenchon. “The problem with the war in Iraq and Syria is not religion, it's the oil and gas pipelines … they are traditional wars for access to raw materials and the accumulation of wealth. And in the case of Syria that is absolutely its starting point,” he said on the television programme Question politique.

However, back at the start of the Syrian uprising in 2011 Jean-Luc Mélenchon's Parti de Gauche was among those political groups who welcomed the 'Arab Spring', including the rebellion in Syria. On August 28th, 2013, the party's co-president Martine Billard signed a press statement clearly condemning the chemical weapons attacks carried out by the regime a few days earlier. “After more than 100,000 victims killed since the start of the uprising in Syria in 2011 and the destruction of entire regions of the country, the Parti de Gauche denounces the massacre using chemical weapons of hundreds of Syrian civilians on August 21st. This increase in the horror is unacceptable,” the statement read. But already Billard was warning that “an armed intervention by the United States and other allied countries including France would only aggravate the conflict, especially as Russia intends to continue to support the criminal regime in Damascus, in particular to preserve its interests in the region.”

If the Parti de Gauche has since changed its approach, this is down to a number of reasons. They include the rise in power of armed Islamist and jihadist groups (the two are sometimes confused in the party's comments) among the Syrian opposition, the support of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey for some of these groups, and the start of the international intervention led by the United States. According to a statement from the party's conference in June 2015 “the world has entered the era of 'global empire wars'”. Little by little this analytical viewpoint has replaced the previous approach which saw the Arab Spring as an uprising of the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Syria against their dictators, independent of any external agenda.

“In Libya, Iraq, Syria and in the Yemen, the United States use the pretext of the chaos that they have themselves created, by arming Islamic terrorists, to justify interventions with the help of their allies that have been deadly for the people. Four years after the popular uprisings in the Arab world the people remain caught in a vice between the authoritarian and dictatorial regimes (such as the Assad regime), the advance of fanaticism funded by the Wahhabi monarchies in the Gulf, and mafia warlords,” the party declared in 2015.

Mélenchon's refusal to speak of “war crimes” is a consequence of this approach. On October 16th, 2016, after President Hollande had suggested Russia could face war crimes charges over the bombardment of Aleppo, Mélenchon told the Journal du Dimanche: “All war is an accumulation of crimes! What's the point of Hollande's verbal escalation? We're already in danger of a generalised war. Why add to it with this threat of the International Criminal Court? Are they aware that neither the USA nor Russia recognise it? Saying that is not supporting Putin. Besides, he's put my friends in prison in Russia.”

France's entry into the war in 2015 with air strikes in Iraq and Syria has simply entrenched Mélenchon in his analysis of the situation. He has also presented himself as a defender of France's interests. “Since the start of the crisis, from one extreme to the other, French foreign policy has pointlessly identified itself with the camp of North American hawks,” he wrote on November 4th 2016. “There is no French diplomatic representation in Damascus any more. How can one envisage a discussion about peace and even a democratic transition in Syria by maintaining a break in all diplomatic relations with the Syrian state? That's not the choice made by all European states. Seven EU countries are maintaining diplomatic relations with Syria, including Greece and Spain … the voice of the French presidency is currently getting lost in the blind support for Islamist Turks, it's up to us to represent the France that doesn't mistake its friends in Turkey. We did so in a concrete way by inviting Parliamentarians and leaders from the HDP [editor's note, the left-wing pro-minorities Peoples' Democratic Party from Turkey] to our summer conference,” noted Mélenchon.

Mélenchon's positions have stirred up controversies and annoyed a section of the radical left in France. On Wednesday December 14th Clémentine Autain, spokesperson for one of the groups, Ensemble, who make up the Front de Gauche, condemned what she called a “crime against humanity” in Aleppo carried out “in the name of the fight against Daesh”, and her movement called on people to demonstrate in Paris with the collective group Avec la Révolution Syrienne, denouncing a “bloodthirsty dictator” in Damascus.

The French Communist party, the PCF, has been much more measured in its approach. In a statement on Wednesday the communists demanded a ceasefire for the civilian population of Aleppo but equally criticised “each of the belligerents and their supporters”. It stated: “War crimes have been committed by all parties involved, and their allies, since the start of the offensive in Aleppo and the war in Syria.” The PCF called for “democratic transition” in Syria with a “process reconciling today's enemies”, without a word of condemnation for Bashar al-Assad.

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• The French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter