Resist and repeat
The day after the crisis, new hope, same repressive system
Eight hours after the protesters gathered at the Place de la République made their way home, their eyes bleary with tears of joy or tear gas after a night of celebrating the unexpected left-wing victory in the second round of the French elections, migrants and refugees living beneath a highway overpass in Saint-Denis, north of Paris, awoke to the sound of construction vehicles humming. The trucks carried several-foot-long cinderblocks. They began to clear the tents and barricade the area. Another migrant camp was being evacuated.
That this eviction came the day after the historic victory of the New Popular Front — the left-wing coalition that won a relative majority of seats in France’s snap elections, beating out the far-right and the center-right party of current president Emmanuel Macron — is not anodine. Nor is the fact that the police didn’t even need to be called. The repressive system put in place by seven years of Macronism more or less runs on its own.
On Sunday, the architect of this system, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, was elected by a wide margin in his political district in northern France, now a bastion of the far-right and testing grounds for anti-migrant policies like using rocks to prevent migrants from camping and making food distribution illegal.
As I type this, rumors that Macron might name Darmanin his Prime Minister are swirling online, despite Macron not having convened a government and despite the resounding victory of the left-wing coalition. Even if this doesn’t happen, the fact that Darmanin could even be considered for the role of Prime Minister after passing repressive security and immigration bills, parts of both of which were ruled unconstitutional and discriminatory by France’s highest constitutional body, shows just how delusional Macron has become — and how far to the right he has moved.
As he seeks to form a governing coalition, the current president — twice elected thanks to left-wing voters who held their nose to prevent the far-right from taking power — again appears to be looking to the right, and not the left, in the wake of the legislative elections. In a way, it makes sense. The left-wing coalition’s proposed program includes the retraction of Macron’s immigration bill, more resources toward the asylum system and the creation of a “climate migration” refugee status — reasonable, humanist policies that rather than opening the floodgates to unchecked immigration would reduce the current burden on the broken system.
Over the coming days, we’ll doubtless see this progressive platform wielded as a dog-whistle as Macron tries to divide the left into camps. The left won the battle, but the war is only beginning. Throughout it, we can’t forget the stakes, what another round of a Macronist government means for France’s most vulnerable residents: those evicted from bridges and squats, facing deportation back to dangerous countries, kicked out of social housing, struggling to meet ends meet.
It’s good, too, to bask in the glory of the moment. This week, I’ll be holding on to the memory of the Place de la République at golden hour and the banner draped over the statue: “La France est tissu de migrations,” “France’s tissue is made up of immigrants” — a play on the term “Français issus de migrations,” or “French people of a migration background.” I’ll remember the two young Arab men riding a bike down the avenue de la République trailing a French flag and cheering “Vive la France” to the tune of cheers and honks.
But every day France wakes up and repression remains the ordre du jour is a day to resist.
