In recent weeks the rulers of both France and Britain have moved along parallel lines in seeking to counter increasingly hostile public opinion.
Disastrous local election results in England in May caused Sir Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, to
start talking tough about controlling immigration, legal or illegal, to ward off the threat his party faces from the populist Reform party.
In France, the prospect of a populist Rassemblement National (RN) candidate winning the 2027 presidential election – a prospect that has grown since Marine Le Pen was banned (for the moment) from standing in that election – has provoked desperate reactions.
Talk of migration control is at the forefront, with a promise to control Islamism.
The British government has been warned about the threat from the Muslim Brotherhood, but has yet to act on it.
President Macron has not held back. Following a report into the activities of the frères musulmans in France, he announced that Islamic extremists were infiltrating key institutions of the French Republic – such as schools and local administration – and becoming a threat to national unity.
The president asked the government to give a practical response to the report quickly; his own reaction was glossed not so much as hostility to Islam, but as consistent with France’s 120-year long adherence to the principle of secularism.
That may well be so: but it is hard to imagine such a response to comparable activity by, say, the Jesuits.
France's fear of institutional change
Sir Keir touched a similar note when speaking about unrestricted migration leaving groups of Britons feeling like “strangers” in their own country.
Meanwhile, parts of the French media look at British lassitude in these matters with astonishment: it provoked comment when it emerged that a devout Muslim had been appointed as the interim head of the British educational standards body Ofsted, precisely the sort of thing President Macron pledges to stop.
France is coping with a shift from separatism – where its substantial Muslim population lived in an effectively parallel society and made little attempt to integrate with the majority French population – to what Mr Macron called ‘entryism’, or a determined attempt by the Muslim minority to infiltrate French institutions.
What the French elite now fears is that Muslims are infiltrating these institutions at the bottom and progressing upwards, and shifting them from their traditional French cultural base to one more compatible with Islam.
The report said that the Federation of Muslims of France (FMF) – the current manifestation of the Muslim
Brotherhood in France – controlled 7% of French places of worship, 21 schools and 280 bodies in sports, education and charities.
It claimed their aim was to impose the Muslim way of life more overtly on French society: notably on girls and women in terms of dress and customs.
The FMF has responded forcefully to the allegations: but they have been seized upon by Bruno Retailleau, the minister of the interior who, in May, was elected by an overwhelming majority to be leader of the centre-right Les Républicains.
Mr Retailleau spoke of ‘below the radar’ Islamism seeking to inveigle its way into French society – rhetoric that no mainstream British politician would dare use for fear of being branded racist.
But France is in a different place and has developed an awareness of a cultural threat that Britain, despite Sir Keir’s recent remarks, is likely to take some time yet to admit.
Mr Retailleau, long noted in French political life for his complete absence of charisma, has suddenly become a firebrand for the preservation of French culture and the distinct French way of life.
One can only presume that he expects this to be the only way he could make any impact in a 2027 contest featuring either Jordan Bardella or, if she wins the appeal against her ban, Marine Le Pen.
Mr Macron mulls his own future
The appeal of the RN has set off various alarms in French politics. As well as the Républicains choosing Mr Retailleau as their leader – ignoring his quadruple personality bypass for his record of quite hard-line pronouncements on immigration – Mr Macron himself was minded to make a remarkable statement about his own political future.
As is well known, he is not allowed to run for a third consecutive term in 2027; but he would be allowed to run for a third term in 2032, and has hinted he would consider doing so.
In both his and Mr Retailleau’s cases we can perceive an example of what 18th-Century essayist and lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson would have called the triumph of hope over experience.
Mr Macron has had a disastrous second term as president, being in a near-permanent battle with parliament and governing by attrition.
There has been talk of his not being able to reach the end of his second term in one piece, so it is brave of him to aspire to a third.
As for Mr Retailleau, his friends are seeking to make a virtue of his dullness, contrasting it with the showmanship of recent presidents and suggesting that, were he to win the highest office, he would be a man of action rather than of gesture.
It is a further sign of Mr Macron’s weakness that Mr Retailleau can put himself forward as a presidential hopeful as he does, while being a senior member of the government.
He has promised, like the British Prime Minister, to cut legal migration and fight against illegal migration; a statement that puts him not merely at one with Sir Keir Starmer, but with the RN.
To be fair, he has held these views on migrants since he was a student in the 1980s. From the margins, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of left-wing La France Insoumise, rails about what he considers the racism and Islamophobia of all this talk about Muslims.
One senses fewer and fewer are listening to him and people like him, and that the main battleground for the 2027 election has already been mapped out.
