Is Macron Orchestrating a Coup? – Yasser Louati

Talia Baroncelli

Hi, I’m Talia Baroncelli, and you’re watching theAnalysis.news. Today, I’ll be joined by political analyst Yasser Louati. We’ll be discussing President Emmanuel Macron’s authoritarian decisions after the results of the French legislative elections. We’ll also be discussing his decision to ban Muslim female athletes from wearing the veil at the upcoming Olympics.

If you’d like to support the work we do, please go to our website, theAnalysis.news. You can hit the donate button at the top corner of the screen and get on to our mailing list; that way, you’re always up to date every time we publish new interviews. Please like and subscribe to this show on YouTube or wherever else you watch this show, be it on Apple or other podcast streaming services such as Spotify. See you in a bit with Yasser.

Joining me now is Yasser Louati, a political analyst and head of the Committee for Justice and Liberties. He’s also been featured in a documentary film on Islamophobia called The Flag, directed by Joseph Paris and set to come out on October 30th. Thanks so much for joining me today, Yasser.

Yasser Louati

Thank you for having me.

Talia Baroncelli

We’ve been speaking about this in the past as well, speaking about Macron and French democracy, the dynamism of French democracy, but also the controversies of laïcité, secularism, and Islamophobia in France. I first wanted to start off with the results of the French parliamentary elections. Of course, as everyone knows, as people have been following, the New Popular Front was able to gain 182 seats. The National Rally gained, I think it was 143 seats, so that’s Marine Le Pen’s party. Macron’s Ensemble or Together Coalition got 168 seats.

Macron said that no one coalition or no one has actually won the parliamentary elections that no one coalition or one party has won. But if you look at the numbers, the New Popular Front, which is comprised of four different political parties, including Jean-Luc Mélenchons, France Unbowed, they won the most amount of seats. Is Macron engineering a coup here?

Yasser Louati

Well, the coup is actually the term I thought of. First, we have to remind our audience abroad that Emmanuel Macron made this gamble that he will call for snap elections and give a minimum amount of time for the campaigning in order to outmaneuver both the right and the left, and then position his party as the sole one capable of winning the election because they would have been prepared because they had been in power for the past two years, actually seven years, if we count the previous legislature.

However, Emmanuel Macron lost on all fronts. The right, of course, fell in defeat. They got defeated. The far right came ahead, but the left won even more seats. However, Emmanuel Macron lost his own game because while he gambled or bet that the left wouldn’t be able to unite in such a short amount of time, we’re talking about four days, and the [inaudible 00:03:20] has been in a civil war for years, if not decades, they did manage to get their act together to position themselves as a single coalition. They did so to come ahead in the election. However, they fell short, very short by a large margin from having the absolute majority.

If Emmanuel Macron says that no one won the election because no party indeed got the absolute majority in the National Assembly, then that would apply to his own party, which failed to secure an absolute majority back in 2022. So how is it that he can accept for his party to have no absolute majority to the point of governing with the 49-3 Article of the Constitution, the infamous [inaudible 00:04:11], which allows the government to pass legislation without the votes.

What we are seeing right now is Emmanuel Macron holding on to his power, accepting that his own ministers remain in power despite having given their resignation. Basically, we have a president governing on his own without a government and without acknowledging the defeat of his party and also the victory of the New Popular Front.

Talia Baroncelli

Yeah, just to remind our audience, an absolute majority would require winning 289 seats out of 577 seats. As you mentioned in the past, Macron didn’t even have that absolute majority, and yet he was able to form a government because that’s how the French tradition in the Fifth Republic, ever since 1958, works. Macron is now saying that his Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, should stay on as a caretaker until after the elections, but he’s refused to pick a Prime Minister from the New Popular Front, which is the left alliance.

I wanted to speak to you about Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s statement. Jean-Luc Mélenchon is the leader of France Unbowed, and he released a statement. This is the English translation, obviously. Mélenchon, in response to Macron not recognizing that the left alliance actually won the most amount of seats, said:

“This isn’t an event just like any other. No one committed to our Republic can minimize its political significance or the extremely serious moment we’re in. In a letter to the French people, the president of the Republic claims that nobody won the election. This is not true. Everyone knows that the Nouveau Front populaire came out on top in the election, and it is up to it to form the next government. In all the world’s democracies, this is how elections decide who the government will be, whether or not it has an absolute majority of MPs.”

What do you make of what Mélenchon was saying there?

Yasser Louati

Actually, what Jean-Luc Mélenchon said is absolutely true. We can disagree with him on many things, but on this one, he’s absolutely spot on. But beyond what Jean-Luc Mélenchon wrote and actually said time and time again is that we are seeing a man like Emmanuel Macron who thinks democracy is only about going to the booth every five years. What he is actually displaying by refusing to acknowledge not only his defeat but also the victory of the New Popular Front and the fact that he must offer them the opportunity to designate a prime minister. We have here an explicit display of a lack of democratic culture coming from the president. This actually falls in line with the fact that Emmanuel Macron had never won an election before becoming president back in 2017, which means we have a man who thinks power should be held by a strong man.

This is where French democracy, especially with the Constitution of what you just reminded our audience, the Constitution of 1958, which set the Fifth Republic [inaudible 00:07:31], is coming to its limits because Emmanuel Macron is using this grey area in which there is no clear obligation for the president to designate the prime minister from the winning party using the fact that they did not win an absolute majority.

At the same time, we have to look into what’s happening in the Halls of the National Assembly. The President of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, who has tremendous powers in organizing the debate in the National Assembly, has been re-elected despite her coming from the party that came third. Which means we have the losing party re-electing its former president. This is a problem.

First, if she had some common decency, she wouldn’t run for re-election. She would acknowledge, my party lost. I should step aside and let someone else take over. That did not to happen.

The second point, the New Popular Front came up with a candidate, Mr. [André] Chassaigne, from the French Communist Party. He actually secured a win in the first and second round, but she won in the third round. This is again a loophole in the French Constitution because the ministers of the Macron government under Gabriel Attal had handed their resignation. But because they handed their resignation, they became MPs again.

However, we have two interpretations of the Constitution. Should they come back as MPs and not vote or come back as MPs and then be allowed to vote? Where we can speak of a coup is not only was Braun-Pivet re-elected, but she was re-elected with the vote of those former ministers. So, the ministers of the political party that lost the election voted for her and made her again the President of the National Assembly. While at the same time, the President refuses to let the New Popular Front put forward a candidate, now we have Ms. Castets being chosen by them, and despite the threat of the far-right, which has still secured nearly 11 million votes, Emmanuel Macron right now is showing tremendous signs of immaturity and also a lack of democratic awareness.

Talia Baroncelli

Yeah, he’s a very Jupiterian leader. It seems like he’s displaying immense autocratic characteristics right now. There’s this contrast when you perceive it from outside of France. You see him trying to hold on to power, but then you also see the dynamism of the French parliamentary system, wherein the second round of elections, in these three-way run-offs, you had parties standing down so that this far-right majority or absolute majority was able to be prevented. Different parties came together, and some of them dropped out of the race in order to prevent the far-right, the National Rally, from gaining even more seats.

When you see that compared to a system, for example, in the United States, where despite weeks and weeks of pressure, it took a really long time for Joe Biden to drop out of his re-election campaign. It’s quite incredible to see this contrast in how people and parties are able to mobilize, but you still have a figure like Macron.

I wanted to ask you, though, who were the other potential candidates that the left could have put forward as Prime Minister? It seems like Mélenchon would have been too much of a divisive figure. Who was Huguette Bello, for example, the President of the Regional Council of Réunion, which is an overseas territory of France in the Indian Ocean? Would she have been a potentially better candidate?

Yasser Louati

Huguette Bello, she ticked all the boxes in terms of experience, tenure, in terms of political backbone, political courage. Actually, she was dismissed partly because she had dared to vote against the 2004 law banning the headscarf in public schools at a time when you had a massive agreement across all parties that the headscarf should be banned. She said, “The protection of the secular law means protecting the state from religious interference, not imposing religious neutrality on users of state services.” It takes tremendous courage to go against the dominant narrative and say, “I, as a non-white woman, will vote against it.”

Her own experience on the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean showed that she had a track record of left-wing policies. But what she was also being blamed for, especially by the Socialist Party, which is the equivalent of the elitist democratic party in the U.S. They are neoliberal compatible. They don’t believe in reforming capitalism. They should just show, follow the footsteps and minimize its effects on people, and that did not work. The reason why the Socialist Party almost went extinct a few years ago is because François Hollande, who was elected on a leftist platform, ended up passing the most right-wing social-economic policies of the past two decades.

This same party has dismissed Huguette Bello because they were afraid she would be too much of a leftist and she would be too critical of Emmanuel Macron. Of course, the Socialist Party deemed her to be too close to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is perceived as a divisive figure. It’s a loss, actually, for France. It would have made history to see a non-white woman from the Indian Ocean becoming the first female, actually the first non-white Prime Minister in France, but also not only acting as a symbol. This is not Kamala Harris in the U.S. with her intellectual and political background. We are talking about a woman with the shoulders to carry the country forward.

Unfortunately, the leftist elites of France prefer to cast her aside. We will see now what will happen with Mrs. Castets, who so far shows signs that she might be able to carry this left-wing platform forward.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, this takes us to the question of what is the far left or the extreme left? I’ve spoken about this in the past with other guests, but what does that really mean? Jordan Bardella, who is leading the campaign of the National Rally after the left alliance did so and gained the most amount of seats, he called them the “Alliance of Dishonor,” probably referring to the accusations and the weaponization of anti-Semitism against Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his party, France Unbowed. Of course, Jordan Bardella, by mentioning that, is obviously not being genuine himself because there’s obviously racism and actual anti-Semitism within the National Rally itself. He’s lobbying that accusation against the left to discredit them. But that aside, he also called Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party the extreme left.

Who is really the extreme one here? Obviously, I would argue it’s the National Rally and Marine Le Pen’s Party, but even Macron. Macron, isn’t he, in what he’s doing by almost orchestrating a coup, and with his pension reforms and neoliberal policies, isn’t he the extreme one?

Yasser Louati

Well, we have a history of that in France. Back in the 1930s, we had the original Popular Front, and the French financial and political elite had a famous chorus, “Hitler, mieux que le Front populaire.” It is better to have Hitler in power than the Popular Front. They prefer to have the far-right in power, and that’s why the French bourgeoisie had Philippe Pétain rule France instead of Léon Blum, for instance.

In our case today, in 21st-century France, we are seeing the same thing. Emmanuel Macron first made sure that his sole opposition was the far-right. He made sure that in 2017 and 2022, he would only debate against the far-right, the idea being to hijack the election and tell French people that it is either me, despite my eye and popular stature, or chaos and the far-right. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what you wanted with the snap elections less than a month ago.

We see that first, the extremist in power is Emmanuel Macron. A true Democrat would never, never do what he’s doing right now. Second, the far-right party is the party that was set up by former Waffen-SS, former supporters of Vichy, and the OAS, the Organization of the Secret Army, that tried to overthrow France back in the 1950s.

We have a party set up by truly anti-Semites with a proven track record in torturing people and deporting Jews, telling the left that they are the anti-Semites. This is truly an Orwellian moment where we see that the extremists are calling the left the extremists.

If you have to put things into perspective, the current Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is dubbed the left-wing extremist, is less on the left than the left-wing government of François Mitterrand in the 1980s. He’s not calling for abolishing capitalism. He’s only calling for fiscal justice and environmental justice. That’s what he’s calling for, and that is deemed extremism in France. The indices has actually been theorized by the Macron sphere with the Republican arm, that they will decide who is a legitimate opponent, provided that they are incapable of reaching power. So to them, the far right are more a part of the Republican arm than the [inaudible 00:18:10], because the political elite in France, the financial system in France, and the bourgeoisie in France do not want to see a left-wing government putting into question the neo-liberal policies of the past 40 years, let alone impose fair and just taxation on their profits, but also on the stock market.

Talia Baroncelli

Yeah, just to give some more context, you’ve also had some high-profile Jews in France, such as Holocaust survivor and famous Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, whose father was deported to Auschwitz, never to return. He said that he would actually vote for the National Rally despite its historical links to Vichy, to fascism, and the war in Algeria. In a way, this also represents the way the National Rally has tried to purify its image to present itself as being neither left nor right, as being more of a nativist party. But the links to the party it came out of, the National Front, that is still obviously there.

Yasser Louati

There has been no revamping. I’m sorry for interrupting you.

Talia Baroncelli

Go ahead.

Yasser Louati

There has been no revamping. They only cleaned the showcase. We had candidates in France taking pictures with an SS hat. We had staunch anti-Semites declaring that the Jews were rotting the French political system and that their corruption was bringing France to the abyss.

The National Front made a strategic turn under Marine Le Pen by steering clear from anti-Semitism, showing absolute and unconditional support to Israel, but focusing their racism on Muslims because Islamophobia is, in fact, an acceptable and even an encouraged form of racism. Serge Klarsfeld, the famous Nazi hunter, can today come forward and say he would vote for Marine Le Pen shows not only his own moral collapse but also that anti-Semites get a pass in France but also in Austria and in the U.S., likes of Steve Bannon or the likes of Geert Wilders, as long as they support Israel.

Conflating being Jewish and being an Israeli Zionist involved in the genocide of the indigenous population, this is where the collapse of these elites who claim to speak on behalf of Jews are fueling anti-Semitism by whitewashing historic anti-Semitic organizations in the name of protecting Israel’s Apartheid and genocide in Palestine.

Talia Baroncelli

Yeah. What are the charges against Mélenchon? He supports basic human rights, including the rights of Palestinians to self-determination and to have their own state. There’s no substance to the charges there.

Yasser Louati

Because the fact that you can dehumanize Palestinians sufficiently to give them the right to exist as a people and to fight back against oppression. I mean, to me, in the moment where everyone is chanting support for Ukraine while at the same time chanting support for Israel and dismissing Palestinians’ right to self-defense is absolutely an abomination in our time and age. Why? Because people are watching a genocide unfold before our eyes, and the West is constantly looking for an excuse not to look at it. I’m sorry, Jean-Luc Mélenchon might be criticisable for many things, and I’ve been a staunch critic of Jean-Luc Mélenchon for years, if not decades. But on this one, he’s been unfairly targeted the same way Jeremy Corbyn has been targeted for his Palestinian support. Again, this shows these unbearable double standards that are actually accelerating this historic moment because the West can no longer claim to have the moral high ground when it comes to international affairs. Ukraine has shown Western hypocrisy when it comes to fighting against oppression and pushing back against an occupation.

I’m going to speak as a French citizen here. I, Yasser Louati, say, Palestinians have their way to self-defend against occupation and to fight by all available means against the ongoing genocide targeting them. This is a human stance, and if people think that this should be conditional, well, I’m sorry. You are too racist to see Palestinians as equal human beings.

Talia Baroncelli

I agree with you, but I would also, again, and I’m speaking as Talia, who’s a Canadian-Italian citizen here. If you want to bring it more to a personal level. I personally don’t think violence against civilians is ever justified, but that it is, of course, justified against military–

Yasser Louati

No one does, of course. No one does. No one said it is okay to target civilians. We are saying when you are being targeted and expelled from your homeland, when you don’t even have access to water, food, and you live under the biggest open sky prison, you cannot be told, well, you should wait for the UN or the European Union to make up its mind about your right to fight back or not. We’re only saying if you are conditioning the existence of Palestinians to your murder compass, Palestinians are going to be wiped out. I’m sorry, they have the right. I’m not saying that we’re going to condone anything. I’m just saying Palestinians have the right to defend themselves. Conditions should not be put upon them. Conditions should be put upon those occupying them, the occupying military force, with far greater means than the occupied Palestinians.

Talia Baroncelli

I should just point out this is something that’s often left out of the discourse when speaking about violence is that there was a huge march, I think it was in 2019, which Hamas actually supported, a non-violent march in which the Israeli soldiers then, they were shooting at protesters, shooting at their kneecaps, trying to see how many peaceful protesters they could shoot. This is an instance in which nonviolence was used as a form of protest, and that often gets ignored in the discourse. Again, I’m not saying that they should have then switched over to violence.

Yasser Louati

Let’s be factual and look at the track record. Boycott is anti-Semitic. Marching is anti-Semitic. Self-defense is anti-Semitic. But supporting anti-Semitic organizations by Israel and Israeli embassies across the West is not anti-Semitic. At some point, we have to look at the facts, and the facts are stubborn. What are Palestinians left with? Just to exist? I mean, for God’s sake, we are watching this in horror, and our feeling of powerlessness is compounded by the hypocrisy of our governments.

I’m in Paris right now. We are welcoming the Olympics. Welcoming is a big word. I’m not a fan of them with the way they are being organized, but that’s a side question. We can ban Russian delegations, but we can welcome Israeli athletes with some of them having taken part in the killing of innocent civilians in Palestine and on top of it, welcoming the genociders chief, either Netanyahu or the Israeli President, who compared the Palestinians to human beasts and spoke of the Amalek’s in order to justify their wiping out. Honestly, this is an unbearable moment. But of course, when we see that Emmanuel Macron is supporting that with either his silence or opening his arms to the Israeli delegations, we see that at the same time, it is the people in the streets who are standing for Palestine, which means that we have, again, a split between the people and the elite.

Talia Baroncelli

Yeah. Just to add to those facts that you mentioned, there was, of course, a recent decision taken by the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, in which 68 members voted against the creation of a Palestinian state. I think there were maybe eight or nine people who opposed that, which just shows the degree of fascism in Israel right now when it comes to their government. Then the ICJ, the International Court of Justice, also ruled in an advisory opinion, which unfortunately isn’t binding but still consists of international law, that the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza is actually an annexation. It is unlawful and illegal. If it would just be a temporary occupation, it could somehow, under international law, be justified, but it’s not. It’s been going on for far too long. They’ve definitively said that the conditions in which they’re imposing on the Palestinians there are unlawful and amount to annexation. That’s the same annexation that the international community says Russia committed against Ukraine by annexing Crimea. If we want to compare those two totally different contexts, of course, these laws mean something. There is substance to them. That ICJ ruling was incredibly important.

Israel also just voted to characterize UNRWA, the relief and works agency for Palestinians, as being a terrorist organization. I’m 100% with you on what you’re saying. It’s clear what’s going on here. This is plausibly a genocide. In legal terms, plausibly a genocide. I would say in moral terms, it is a genocide. It’s a massacre. It’s horrible.

I think if we get back to the French context and the Olympics, just leading into the Olympics, you see how the discourse of secularism is used to paper over some of the divisions within French society. I wanted to ask you about laïcité, which is the secularism law instituted in 1905. Macron is using and weaponizing this law to say that female athletes should not wear or are not allowed to wear a veil in order to compete in the Olympics. This is something that Amnesty has said is not something that should be accepted. It’s not in line with the spirit of the Olympics.

To give some context here, what is laïcité? Article 1 says the Republic ensures freedom of conscience. It guarantees freedom of worship limited only by the following rules in the interests of public order. Those rules would be in Article 2, which talks about the separation of religion and state. Article 2 states that the Republic neither acknowledges nor pays for, nor subsidizes any form of worship. That all seems reasonable to me. Can you speak about how this secularism has actually been distorted to oppress the freedom of religion of Muslims?

Yasser Louati

Well, the racism of the French elites and its deep rooting in French society was no longer acceptable by the 1970s and 1980s after the organizing of Arab and Black workers coming from predominantly Muslim countries, which were themselves former colonies. They had to find a legal argument to justify that. The French Jim Crow, if I may, of course, I’m just choosing that for ease of language, was that laïcité was a forgotten law. No one spoke of laïcité for decades since 1905, which is the religious neutrality of the state and the complete separation between church and state. That’s it.

By the 1980s, as these Muslims became visible and were no longer a statistic, they became social beings organizing and marching against racism, against unfair payment, against police brutality, etc. This came as a shock to French elites. Oh, they feel so French they can demand equality. So let’s rig the game again in our favor and use what we have at hands. Laïcité was redefined from the neutrality of the state to the neutrality of users of state services.

In the case of France right now, as a speaker of the Olympics, the banning of the headscarf shows how France has been and continues to be the laboratory of Islamophobia, which inspires other countries abroad. France being, of course, a shining beacon of human rights, other more autocratic regimes can say, “If France can do it, so can we.” Same applies with China, India, etc.

In the case of France, they banned the headscarf for Muslim female athletes, whereas this contravenes the rulings of FIFA, for football or soccer in North America, contravenes the Olympic Committee, etc. So much so that as we speak right now, foreign female athletes can wear the head scarf, but not French female athletes. This is open religious segregation taking place, bluntly in the face of the Olympics Committee without them saying anything.

The second point is that France, of course, gets a pass. How is it that international federations are asked to abide by human rights, civil liberties, equality, and fairness between men and women, etc, say no to racism before each football game across pitches in Europe, while at the same time, French football players get dismissed for either fasting the month of Ramadan, for wearing the head scarf, let alone the support for Palestinians.

We see here that we do have a deep-rooted racism that transpires even in sports organizations, the same organizations that are supposed to be a safe haven for everyone. If society is racist, at least in sports, I can exist. This is where the secular law has been mobilized time and time again to exclude Muslims from mainstream French society if they choose to exist as Muslims. But also to put millions of Muslim women in a position of a social death sentence.

A few statistics. If you are a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf, you stand a 1% chance of having a job. 1%. That’s from the European Network Against Racism, the Forgotten Women study. If you are a Muslim person applying for a job in France, according to the Paris School of Business, under Marie-Anne Valfort, it shows that you have to apply five times more to secure one job interview, discounting the result of you being dismissed because your name is Muslim, etc. So, unfortunately, an excellent law like the laïcité of 1905, which was meant to protect minority religions, Jews, protestants, and, of course, Muslims, has been weaponized to become a tool of mass discrimination in France.

Talia Baroncelli

Well, Yasser Louati, it’s been great speaking to you, especially leading up to the Olympics and in light of what’s going on in France right now with the elections.

Yasser Louati

Thank you for having me.

Talia Baroncelli

Hopefully, we can have you on again soon. Thank you for watching theAnalysis.news. If you’d like to support us, you can go to our website, theAnalysis.news, and give a donation if you’re in a position to do so. See you next time.