Veteran leftist French prime ministerial candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon is counting on the Muslim vote to overturn President Emmanuel Macron’s majority in parliament in the June elections, French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut said in an interview with French television channel Europe 1.
During the interview, Finkielkraut said that modern France is “disintegrating,” with huge swathes of the country having been “either conquered by Islamism or delinquency.”
“Sometimes the two are interconnected,” Finkielkraut added, and accused Mélenchon of supporting the Islamist ideology “including antisemitism.”
Finkielkraut also said that Mélenchon is leveraging dramatic demographic shifts in the French electorate in order to come to power, with the voting bloc of ethnic French giving way to a growing population of Africans and Middle Easterners.
“Jean-Luc Mélenchon is betting on the Great Replacement to gain power,” he said during the interview.
It was not the first time Finkielkraut mentioned the Great Replacement. In January of this year, he said the phenomenom of European peoples being replaced by Africans, Asians and Middle Easterners was “obvious.”
“This is in fact a fragmentation and yes, this risk does exists and in any case, I think the demographic change of Europe is extremely spectacular. The historical peoples in certain municipalities and regions are becoming a minority,” Finkielkraut said in January. “A whole part of French people now live not in the suburbs, but beyond the suburbs, because they are no longer the cultural reference they used to be, because all the butchers are, for example, Halal.”
Finkielkraut, who is Jewish, is one of France’s elite public intellectuals, and one of 40 lifetime members of the 400-year-old Académie Française, which serves to safeguard the French language and culture.
Public polling seems to bear Finkielkraut’s claim that Muslims will back Mélenchon. Although 85 percent of Muslims ended up voting for Emmanuel Macron in his second round content with Marine Le Pen, in the first round the majority of Muslims actually voted for Mélenchon, who is known for his strong ties to the Islamic community.
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Finkielskraut reminded viewers that during his campaign so far, Mélenchon had spoken of a coup at the ballots to “reboot” France.
Mélenchon, the leader of the leftist La France Insoumise movement, has entered an election coalition with the far-left in the hope of gaining a majority in parliament at the June elections. In the upcoming parliamentary elections, the majority of the Muslim vote is expected to once again go to Mélenchon.
“This alliance has been celebrated by the leftist press as a resurrection of the Front Populaire, (former French President Francois) Mitterand’s leftist union,” Finkielskraut told the channel. “This means that the radical left is at the controls,” he warned.
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“This leftist coalition is promising price freezes, the nationalization of banks, wage rises that are supposed to be followed by an increase in productivity, which are all untenable promises.
“But there is an even more worrying aspect to this radicalism: The radicalism of La France Insoumise is a submission to radical Islamism,” Finkielskraut said, which he described as an “unconditional surrender.”
“The joint program of this new popular, ecologist and social union is in fact giving up the law on separatism.”
Finkielkraut also reminded viewers that Mélenchon said “I am not afraid to say (that) what you are seeing there in these neighborhoods is the new France.”
“This means, without doubt, the new French people,” Finkielkraut added.
