[Peace-discuss] daily life under a Front National council and mayor in four different parts of France.

[David Johnson]

Eighteen months ago, the New Statesman published an article of daily life
under a Front National council and mayor in four different parts of France.

In Hénin "former communist voters have shifted to the far-right, swayed by
an interest in local grievances they believe to be honest, and a populist
anti-capitalism that appeals to their intellectual roots. 

“The mayor has been using the exact same speeches as the far-left
syndicalist movement,” says Octave Nitkowski, a local blogger studying in
Paris. ”It’s working because the socialist and communist parties are
completely rotten.” ( Neo-Liberalism ).

This old CP/SP town is where Marine Le Pen received around 60% of the votes
last week.

 

The mayor Steeve Briois said "Our programme was based on budgetary matters,
local taxes, crime and punishment. We talked about the local swimming pool,
the football pitch, cultural issues, public servant pay.” Race, immigration
and the “contradictions” of Muslim settlement are curiously absent from this
discourse. But after only a month in office Briois’s image as a pragmatic
town manager has been dented by ordering the eviction of a local branch of
the Human Rights League, a group that has fought anti-Semitism and racism
since the Dreyfus Affair."

 

In another town, Mantes-La-Ville, "Under plans ratified by the last mayor
the mosque will be torn down and replaced by a parking lot. Blueprints for a
much larger place of worship, adapted from a regional treasury building, had
been accepted by the previous administration. But Cyril Nauth, the new FN
Mayor, has now refused them. Once the present council-owned building comes
down, the local Muslim community will have no place of communal worship.

“Things have changed a lot,” say Abdelaziz El Jaouhari, the mosque’s
president, just after afternoon prayers. “Tensions are rising very
seriously. We received several letters from FN militants with insults and
threats. They put pork in the letterbox and said the mayor should cleanse
the city of the Muslim race. The FN wants to normalise themselves as a
republican party. But the ideologies of the FN militants haven’t changed at
all.”

 

In the children's fairy story, The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids the wolf
disguises his rough voice by eating a piece of chalk in order to eat the
family of goats:

 

"It was not long before someone knocked at the door and called out, "Open
the door, children dear, your mother is here, and has brought something for
each one of you."

But the little kids knew from the rough voice that it was the wolf. 

"We will not open the door," they cried out. "You are not our mother. She
has a soft and gentle voice, but your voice is rough. You are the wolf."

So the wolf went to a shopkeeper and bought himself a large piece of chalk,
which he ate, making his voice soft. Then he came back and knocked at the
door, calling out, "Open the door, children dear. Your mother is here and
has brought something for each one of you.""

 

The FN has eaten the chalk and uses phrases from the left to bamboozle
disillusioned socialist and communist workers. And has succeeded in getting
them to open the door to the wolf.

 

The whole article is here:

 
<http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/05/what-happens-your-town-once-fa
r-right-party-comes-power> What happens to your town once a far-right party
comes to power?

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