Paris Sends a Loud Message to the Far Right
“You go, you go searching, and you always come back.
You go searching, you find something, but you always come back to Fanta Citron.
You go away, you go far, but you always come back.
All the paths you take, always bring you back to Fanta Citron.”
This was the favorite anthem of the elders during my childhood in Mvog-Ada, the slum in which I grew up in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Fanta Citron was the poorest neighborhood of the ghetto. This is where many families like mine, who had arrived in the capital Yaoundé in search of a better life, crowded together. It was seen as a first step before finding a decent job and rising socially. All you had to do was listen to conversations in the many bars of our neighborhood. In many African countries, and particularly in Cameroon, bars are spaces for social interactions, community places where people often meet to gossip and to kill time, while often hoping that someone will buy them a drink. Bars are where you sometimes have to go to learn about the daily life of the neighborhood. In my neighborhood, people’s dreams always had one thing in common: getting out of poverty. Everyone imagined the day when they would leave Fanta Citron. It was the eternal dream which was far from a chimera. Everyone was putting together their exit plan. It was rarely about winning the lottery (in any case, we all thought that the lottery was a ploy of the rich to further enslave us). The plan often revolved around becoming a civil servant, despite the fact that corruption ensured that such positions were for the well-connected. Some dreams were also about a small business that suddenly took off or some sort of successful venture.
For us children, dreams were forbidden. The elders kept telling us that, for the moment, we should confine ourselves to serving them. So we dreamed in silence. We kept silent about our secret ambitions, our secret hopes, hidden deeply within us. Fortunately for us, Christophe, the neighborhood carpenter, had unwillingly become the reality check for the “dreamers.” It was he who uttered the words which subsequently became so popular in the many homes of the neighborhood, so that when someone shared their plans for social uplift, the response from their audience was:
“You go, you go searching, and you always come back.
You go searching, you find something, but you always come back to Fanta Citron.
You go away, you go far, but you always come back.
All the paths you take, always bring you back to Fanta Citron.”
Taken literally, Christophe seemed to discourage dreamers from dreaming. He seemed to be telling us that it was wasted effort. He seemed to be telling us that we were doomed to be poor. He seemed to be telling us that, despite our efforts, one will end up back to square one. It sounded like a call for resignation. Needless to say, that didn’t make him popular.
“They get angry for nothing,” Christophe often smiled when he was thrown out of a conversation because of his words. “I am not against them succeeding. I want everyone around here to make it. What I’m saying is that Fanta Citron will always be there for them, for all of us. We have become a family, because we share the same misery, despite the fact that we are from different tribes. Fanta Citron is our rock. Fanta Citron will always welcome us back, no matter what happens. Fanta Citron will never abandon us. If you fail in your quest, if you encounter adversity, if everything is against you or you went looking for a better life and failed, turn back and come back to Fanta Citron. You will always be welcome here. You will always be at home here. No matter the pitfalls, the changes, the failures, Fanta Citron will always be here. That’s all I’m saying.”
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As I examined the results of the June 30 legislative elections in France, especially in Paris, the city that welcomed me many years ago and where I spent a large part of my adult life, I immediately thought of Christophe. I replaced Fanta Citron with Paris. And it made me smile, as the far right is on the doorstep of power. According to various polls, the National Rally, the far-right party, is set to dominate in the second round of July 7, which will make it the majority political party in the national assembly, the lower chamber, and propel it to power. To say that a far-right government instills fear among immigrants, legal and illegal, those who are not white and Christian, those who are different, is an understatement. We are afraid, very afraid. “To stop migratory submersion, drastically reduce legal and illegal immigration and expel foreign delinquents” is one of the eight goals of the National Rally’s program. “Make way for renewed French pride,” wrote Jordan Bardella, who is projected to become Prime Minister in the event of a victory for the far right on July 7.
Many people say that a France governed by the far right will undoubtedly take the path of Italy, where Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has rebranded Brothers of Italy, her neo fascist party as a mainstream conservative party. Meloni has taken a more realistic approach in governing, by implementing a more centrist agenda. But Italy is not France. France believes it is unique. It is first in class, and as such, it believes it should show the path to follow and not copy others.
Parisians are aware of it. As a result, they don’t want to experiment, and just sent a message during the first round of the legislative elections. The City of Lights erected a giant wall against all racism. It rejected the National Rally. Paris simply said no. Paris is blocking a political party that advocates the rejection of everything that is different; a party whose strength is in pointing fingers without really proposing anything new; a party whose mantra is that immigrants are to blame of all our ills. Paris tells us, those it adopted and those it continues to welcome, that it will always be there for us, in adversity as well as in fits of laughter. Paris tells us that it will protect us, that we will always be welcome, that we have our place there. Paris tells us: “I got your back.”
In the 18 seats alloted to Paris, voters chose the left and more specifically the Popular Front, a new coalition party created to block the rise of the National Rally. When it was not for the left, Paris voted for candidates of centrist President Emmanuel Macron’s party. Nine left-wing candidates, or half of the seats, were elected in the first round, meaning that they received more than fifty percent of the votes cast, which is rare. For the second round, the nine seats at stake will more than certain be won either by the left or by the candidates close to Macron. The National Rally was quite simply swept away in Paris. The message is clear: Paris does not want the far right. Lyon, the second largest city in France, and Bordeaux, another large city, have also erected anti-extreme-right walls.
Seen this way, it would be easy to summarize the rejection of the far right in Paris as the contrast between big cities and the countryside; the elites against the average people; the haves versus the have-nots; globalists against the nationalists. Cities, those who defend this theory will say, have not suffered from globalization. They have kept almost all the services, such as public transport, hospitals, etc. The post offices have not closed. Which is the opposite in the countryside, which has become a medical desert (few young doctors in France agree to settle in small villages, forcing local officials to bring doctors from Romania, for example). Post offices, which were often the permanent link of the populations to the State are closing gradually, while the factories have disappeared one after the other from the rural areas, the companies relocating manufacturing either to Asia (China, Vietnam, Bangladesh etc.), or to former Eastern Europe (Romania, Bulgaria), where the cost of labor is much lower than in France, in order to maximize their profits.
But if you look closely, it is the reality of living together that explains the rejection of the far right in big cities. In Paris, as in my childhood neighborhood of Fanta Citron, people come from different backgrounds and agree to live together. In the countryside, the closure of the local post office is attributed to people who don’t look like the locals. It’s their fault. Everything that goes wrong is the fault of immigrants. Long before the waves of immigration, it was the neighbor’s fault. The neighbor has now been replaced by the immigrant.
Paris, like other large French major cities, is more likely to have safety issues, which the National Rally has always made one of its campaign themes, and is more impacted by immigration than the small towns. There are areas in east Paris where it is not safe to walk at night. But does this mean that going after immigrants will solve the problem? There were safety problems in France and Europe long before the waves of immigration from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. France, like many European countries, has long been a state of “war of all against all”, dominated by the bestiality in relationships, to quote the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The postulate has always been clear: “man is a wolf to man.”
This was reinforced by capitalism, which created economically what the monarchy had created in France: on the one hand, the nobility and its privileges, on the other, the bourgeoisie and the people. Starved, the people got fed up and overthrew the monarchy during the French Revolution. Since then, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has created a climate of permanent insecurity. Capitalism and the pressure on business leaders to make big profits and to please shareholders has ended up creating a schism between employees and the upper economic caste. Inequalities keep growing. As long as the gap between haves and have-nots continues to widen, there will be no state of security. Deporting immigrants, legal and illegal, as the National Rally promises to do, will not solve the problem. Paris gets it and it’s making it known as loudly as possible.
