A well-known former Argentine rugby player shot dead by far-right activists in the centre of Paris a year ago. There was not a word of reaction from interior minister Gérald Darmanin. Local councillors threatened with death and rape for having backed plans for a refugee centre at Callac in Brittany in west France. Not a word from Gérald Darmanin. A family planning clinic in the Gironde département or county in south-west France daubed with hateful graffiti. Not a word from Gérald Darmanin.
Anti-fascist activists attacked in the centre of Poitiers in central west France. Not a word from Gérald Darmanin. The mayor of Saint-Brévin-Les-Pins in west France becomes the victim of an arson attack after weeks of threats. Not a word from Gérald Darmanin. A Muslim centre vandalised at Wattignies in the north of the country. Not a word from Gérald Darmanin. Students in Paris assaulted by a extreme-right group calling itself the 'Waffen Assas'. Not a word from Gérald Darmanin.
The list of silences from France's minister of the interior is a long one. And, given that he is a man who communicates a lot and who generally takes to Twitter at the drop of a hat, it is also telling. Last weekend the former Nicolas Sarkozy loyalist turned Emmanuel Macron supporter appeared in the columns of Le Journal du Dimanche newspaper and in the studios of CNews, two media outlets owned by the unspeakable Vincent Bolloré, to attack what he described as “far-left intellectual terrorism”.
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Faced with police violence and mired in his own lies, Gérald Darmanin chose to respond by talking of “clear complicity” between “some people who entered the Assembly National - “some people” whom he obviously refuses to consider to be Members of Parliament – and “far-left movements who terrorise”.
Unafraid of verbal excesses, and with minimal concern for nuance, he also accused the leftwing alliance the Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale (NUPES) of “holding the Republican Left hostage” and warned about an “extremely violent and dangerous” network. He even had figures to support his claims. “The intelligence services have drawn up a list of 2,200 files on the far-left in France,” he said.
The terrorist threat from the extreme right
Put like that, it does seem like something of a concern. In any case, Gérald Darmanin was perhaps simply looking to provoke a little reaction and encourage collective awareness when, with all the solemnity of a whistleblower, he declared: “I'm sounding the alarm.” However, the minister's swagger has recently been undermined by a dose of reality.
One simply has to look at the recent interview given to Émile magazine by the director-general of France's DGSI, the domestic intelligence service, to understand the reason for feeling that this is all a complete (and we are being polite) sham. In that interview Nicolas Lerner assessed his track record over the last four years as head of the intelligence agency and explained that “nine planned terrorist actions motivated by ideological extremism, essentially from the extreme right, were prevented”.
A little later he even added: “Many Western democracies thus consider that the threat from the supremacist, accelerationist extreme right is today the main threat they are facing … France, like all democracies, is exposed to this same threat, the prevention of which the intelligence services are actively involved in.” Curiously, there was no mention of “ecoterrorism”.
MPs at the National Assembly, who on Monday debated the fight against far-right terrorism, would doubtless have liked to have heard Gérald Darmanin's views on the subject. But the interior minister preferred to leave that to his junior minister in charge of overseas départements and territories, and instead reserved his comments for the issue of law and order when appearing before the Assembly's law committee on Wednesday.
The interior minister is essentially sticking to a line that he had already formulated some years ago, and that many members of the government and ruling Renaissance (formerly LREM) party have since adopted: by all means talk about the far right, but only to highlight the alleged compromising behaviour of the Left with the far-right Rassemblement National (RN). Once again, this is a contention that combines serious claims and bad faith in equal measure.
For when you yourself took your first political steps alongside Christian Vanneste (a former hard-right MP who once declared homosexuality to be a threat to humanity's survival), when you have written for a publication of the far-right monarchist group Action Française, when you have have debated in friendly terms with far-right politicians Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour, and when you have quoted the journalist and historian Jacques Bainville – a leading figure in Action Française - from the podium of the National Assembly, then perhaps you should avoid looking in the mirror too often if you are going to have the nerve to hand out lessons.
Gérald Darmanin is talking nonsense. His sweeping generalisations are poisonous. His political strategies are as crude as they are dishonest. His way of pitting statistical studies against the “common sense of the butcher in Tourcoing” - the northern town where Darmanin served as mayor – is ridiculous and rabble-rousing. However, it would be wrong just to focus on one person.
After all, the interior minister is simply copying – and quite poorly at that – the methods of Nicolas Sarkozy, in the hope that he will one day share his mentor's destiny and become president. At another time, one might simply brush aside the issue and argue that Gérald Darmanin's future is of interest only to him.
The depoliticisation of the public arena
But in reality the problem is much more serious. For the fact that the interior minister screws up so frequently, and in particular does so without ever being brought into line for spouting what former socialist justice minister Christiane Taubira has described as the “garbage of human thought”, says a great deal about the role he plays inside the Macronist political ecosystem and about the ambitions of a government which has transformed cynicism into a way of life.
The normalisation of the far right, the demonisation of the Left, the lowering of public debate … throughout the past six years Emmanuel Macron and his supporters have played the role of sorcerer's apprentices in relation to political triangulation, striking all the matches they have at their disposal. Rather than taking citizens' aspirations seriously, they have constantly denied them.
The grand declarations, the public relations exercises and the false promises of “change” have served to mask their impotence. By lumping the united Left together with the far right they have brushed aside the very Republican values they like to drape themselves in. They have also depoliticised the public arena, weakened democracy and normalised the far-right RN's elected representatives, of whom there are now quite a number at the National Assembly.
A disdain for reality – consisting in particular of denying the existence of police violence, or of speaking of “democratic development” while increasingly railroading measures through – has not only legitimised the discourse of the far right, it has also handed the latter an opportunity to remind the government of some fundamental principles.
So from now on we will have to get used to Marine Le Pen, the head of a party co-founded by a former member of the Waffen SS, and whose manifesto tramples all over fundamental rights, calmly explaining on the airwaves or in television studios how Emmanuel Macron is making the democratic crisis worse; and she cannot be contradicted.
Some in the president's entourage have begun to realise the dangers of short-term strategies. They regret the fact that no one at the top has drawn lessons from the crises of Emmanuel Macron's first term, and from the fact that Marine Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential elections twice in a row. But no one, yet, dares say so out loud.
The pension reforms have once again shone an unforgiving light on a government which tramples all over social democracy in favour of petty political calculations. Only very recently, rather than meet union leaders and talk to the workers who are protesting, Emmanuel Macron preferred instead to give an interview to Pif Gadget, the children's comic now run by Frédéric Lefebvre, a former minister under President Nicolas Sarkozy.
That same week the junior minister for the social economy and solidarity, Marlène Schiappa, who has been in political difficulty over revelations about the foundation that she created after the murder of teacher Samuel Paty in 2020, caused controversy by posing for the cover of Playboy magazine. Meanwhile, amid all the controversy about police violence, the head of the Paris police, Laurent Nuñez, appeared on the 'Touche pas à mon poste' television programme hosted by Cyril Hanouna as if nothing were amiss.
A world in which everything is equal and nothing matters
A few years ago such media events would have provided rich material for the parody website Le Gorafi. But because these events are so real – they make us to pinch ourselves every day – they did not even raise a smile. The lowering of public debate overseen by the head of state and his supporters under the guise of 'disruption' is quite simply pitiful.
Pitiful and inconsequential; for this way of communicating has helped create a media-political world in which 'buzz' has become the norm, which inevitably paves the way for excess and ambivalence. In this brave new world, which would make even the most ardent supporters of profound change regret the passing of the old order, everything is equal and nothing matters.
A justice minister can be sent for trial to the Cour de Justice de la République (CJR) – a special court for ministers – for “illegal conflict of interest” without ever having to fear for his job. The secretary-general at the Élysée – the president's chief of staff – can be placed under formal investigation for a similar alleged offence and remain the second most powerful man in the French Republic. Ministers can play with fire without there being any consequences – for now, at any rate.
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter