France’s minorities pay the price of a polarising election campaign

To judge from Sunday’s election result, French politicians can set aside their differences in order to keep the far right out of power. Now they will need to summon the same spirit of unity to heal some of the damage visible in the campaign: a rise in hate crimes by extremists.

The far-right Rassemblement National, a party long shunned as incompatible with the French republic’s values, did not achieve its goal of taking power. But it still won more than a third of all votes cast.

The campaign emboldened extremists at a time when tensions in French society were already running high. Minorities were the first to pay the price as reports of hate crime poured in.

“Since June 9, we have seen an explosion of reports from people flagging racist or antisemitic speech and acts . . . There has been a liberation of speech that is directly linked to the political context,” said Tina Théallet, a spokesperson for Licra, the International League against Racism and Antisemitism.

Little more than a week after the election was called, two teenage boys were charged with raping a 12-year-old Jewish girl. Reports of antisemitic acts had already risen after the Hamas attack on Israel in October and jumped threefold from January to March compared to the first three months of 2023, according to the government.

Other hate crimes are also coming to light. Karim Rissouli, a journalist for public broadcaster France 5, received a letter at his home address that read: “The one and only fundamental reason behind the RN vote is that the historic French people are fed up with all these bicots [a slur for north African] . . . Real French people who stem from France will never accept you nor your brothers, and despite how many of you there are, you will never belong in France.”

Mohamed Bouhafsi, another French journalist of north African descent, received insults on social media. “This type of speech was not around during the 2022 presidential election,” Bouhafsi told France 5. “I did experience some of it before June 9, perhaps once a month . . . Now it’s three or four messages every day.”

Other reported incidents included the attempted drowning of a French teenager of north African descent who aggressors called a “dirty Arab”; “Stop Black people” leaflets in Chatou, a town near Paris; and the filming of RN supporters screaming at their black neighbour to “go back to [her] dog kennel” as “this is our home”.

With the far right’s defeat, the exhilaration of its supporters is turning to frustration, which is no less conducive to violence. On Sunday, rugby player Melvyn Jaminet expressed his disappointment in a social media video in which he said he would hit “the first Arab I see on the street” with his helmet.

Racism towards immigrants from former French colonies existed before this time. I recently came across footage of my mother interviewed about the rise of the far right in 1986 in Marseille. It showed “Front National” and “Death to Melons” — a slur for north Africans — on the walls of the banlieues that housed and still house many immigrants.

And politicians have long exploited racial tensions to gain votes. Most recently, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the radical leftist leader, has played down the rise in antisemitic crime as he courted Muslim voters.

But before the second-round vote, a far-right government seemed a distinct possibility. It generated fear and confusion that some French psychologists compared to the widespread anguish among their patients after the 2015 Paris terror attacks.

The climate of confusion is likely to persist as France now has a hung parliament, with no clear path yet for how it will be governed until the next election, which may come next year.

The campaign did see demonstrations against the far right in Paris and other cities. But overall, the picture is bleak. In a survey by pollster Ipsos, more than half of voters who supported the far right in the election’s first round admitted to being “rather” or “a little” racist.

President Emmanuel Macron’s gamble may not only have exposed but widened fractures within French society. Politicians need to urgently start work on mending them. This could determine France’s fate after the next election.

akila.quinio@ft.com