Amid all the speculation on the left about the future of French politics, one prediction has crowded out all others for the past two decades: we’re heading towards fascism. In the late 2000s, Nicolas Sarkozy’s cult of the police, his law-and-order obsession and his targeting of young people from immigrant backgrounds – ‘scum’ to be cleaned up ‘with a Kärcher’, as he famously said – prompted widespread criticism.

Then, around 2015-16, Islamist terrorist attacks, panic over ‘radicalised youth’ and an influx of refugees from the Middle East helped to entrench, in the eyes of some, the idea of an ‘enemy within’, ready to strike at the Republic with the complicity of a section of the left.

A further step came with François Hollande’s proposal to strip French-born dual nationals of their citizenship if convicted of ‘a crime constituting a serious attack on the life of the nation’. With the repression of social movements, the media’s normalisation of subjects once confined to conservatism’s furthest fringes, the National Rally’s (RN) almost uninterrupted advance during Emmanuel Macron’s two terms and business leaders warming towards the party, what began as a hypothesis has turned into a certainty: fascism is taking hold in France.

Undeniably, invoking Mussolini’s regime and the 1930s gets attention. It presupposes a lurch towards authoritarianism if the far right comes to power as a result of traditional parties conceding the terms of political debate to their opponents. So, this line of argument goes, what is required is action while there is still time, inspired by famous anti-fascist struggles of the past, even unsuccessful ones.

Towards legalised segregation?

Yet does the spectre of fascism conceal a less dramatic but much more concrete danger? That of an almost imperceptible slide towards a system of legalised segregation in which, as in Israel, part of the population, classed as alien in origin, would be disciplined (…)

Full article: 2 547 words.