A homogeneous electorate that massively voted, at 70%, for a candidate – according to Ifop data – in the first round of the presidential election in 2022—what a boon for anyone who aspires to the supreme magistracy. After all, the Elysée Palace is well worth an Islamic headscarf: to each era its own references.
This is what the president-candidate understands, who spared no effort between the two rounds to capture the Muslim vote. On April 15, 2022, two Muslim federations have thus called for slipping a paper ballot in the name of Emmanuel Macron into the ballot box on Sunday April 24.
It is in a grandiloquent style that the rector of the GMP – a federation close to the Algerian regime – tried to justify his union in good and due form to the LREM candidate: “malicious forces are speaking out today and calling for the banishment of Muslims. How to react to this malevolence that banalizes and settles in people’s minds? By voting for the continuity of the Republic,” writes Chems-eddine Hafiz.
On the same day, but in a separate press release, it was the RMF which took a similar stance, through its president, Anouar Kbibech: “we consider that only a vote for Emmanuel Macron will allow our country to preserve Republican principles and to consolidate the values of openness, tolerance, and solidarity that have always animated it,” says this close friend of the Moroccan regime.
Joining actions to the words, the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris has even paid the luxury of offering his co-religionists a “ifar support” – a break in the great Ramadan fast – “in support of the re-election of Emmanuel Macron.”
A feast that was held on April 19 in the vast restaurant of the mosque where Christophe Castaner, president of the LREM parliamentary group, represented Emmanuel Macron: a new illustration of a republic with variable secularism, like a Breton weather forecast.
But make no mistake, behind the perfunctory smiles, the positioning of the two federations is far from unanimous in the nebula of Islam in France, which, at the beginning of 2022, counts in France 2,623 officially listed mosques and prayer rooms, of which 21 are currently closed and around 100 are being monitored by the authorities due to risks of radicalization…
Be that as it may, the advances of the National Federation of the Grand Mosque of Paris of the Union of Muslims of France in favor of the outgoing president directly echo recent statements by Marine Le Pen.
The National Rally (RN) candidate recently made it known that she wanted to ban the Islamic veil in public space which, in her own words, “is an Islamist uniform used by Islamic fundamentalists to serve a totalitarian ideology.”
A sign of the importance of the Muslim vote in the context of the presidential campaign, the Grand Mosque of Paris (GMP) and the Union of Muslims of France (RMF) have just given strong support to the candidacy of Emmanuel Macron.