France’s Anti-Immigration Far-Right Gets Boost from Riots Over Police Killing of Teen 

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen talks with National Rally group members at the National Assembly, Monday, Feb. 6, 2023 in Paris. (AP)
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen talks with National Rally group members at the National Assembly, Monday, Feb. 6, 2023 in Paris. (AP)
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France’s Anti-Immigration Far-Right Gets Boost from Riots Over Police Killing of Teen 

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen talks with National Rally group members at the National Assembly, Monday, Feb. 6, 2023 in Paris. (AP)
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen talks with National Rally group members at the National Assembly, Monday, Feb. 6, 2023 in Paris. (AP)

Widespread riots in France sparked by the police killing of a teenager with North African roots have revealed the depth of discontent roiling poor neighborhoods — and given a new platform to the increasingly emboldened far-right.

The far-right's anti-immigration mantra is seeping through a once ironclad political divide between it and mainstream politics. More voices are now embracing a hard line against immigration and blaming immigrants not only for the car burnings and other violence that followed the June 27 killing of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, but for France's social problems as well.

“We know the causes” of France’s unrest, Bruno Retailleau, head of the conservative group that dominates the French Senate, said last week on broadcaster France-Info. “Unfortunately for the second, the third generation there is a sort of regression toward their origins, their ethnic origins.”

Retailleau’s remarks, which drew accusations of racism, reflect the current line of his mainstream party, The Republicans, whose priorities to keep France “from sinking durably into chaos” include “stopping mass immigration.”

“As soon as we want to be firm,” Retailleau said Tuesday on RTL radio, “they say, ‘Oh la la. Scandal! The fascists are arriving! You’re like the National Rally,'” the main far-right party. “We’re sick of being politically correct.”

His response marked the latest fracture in a crumbling concept dubbed the “Republican Front,” under which French parties, whatever their political color, used to stand together against the far-right.

By linking immigration to the riots, Retailleau violated France’s near-sacred value of universality by which all citizens, whatever their origin, are recognized only as French.

The far-right appeared to capitalize on a sudden shift in the national mood to make further inroads: Shock and horror at Merzouk’s death quickly morphed into shock and horror at the violent unrest, which spread from the outskirts of major urban areas to cities to small-town France. In just four days, an extreme-right crowdfunding campaign raised more than 1.5 million euros ($1.6 million) for the family of the police officer accused of killing Nahel.

Far-right figures have long blamed immigration from majority Muslim North Africa, and some immigrants' failure to assimilate into French culture, for France’s social problems.

“We suffer an immigration that is totally anarchic,” the National Rally's Marine Le Pen, the leading far-right figure in France, said last week on France 2 television. She claimed the riots were the work of “an ultra-majority of youth who are foreign or of foreign origin,” and said there was “a form of secession of these youths from French society.”

Le Pen’s critics note that successive French governments have failed to integrate new arrivals, and that communities with immigrant backgrounds face disproportionately higher poverty, unemployment and deep-seated discrimination.

But the far-right leader's voice resonates ever more loudly in France. Le Pen has spent years scrubbing up the image of her National Rally, and gained a powerful perch in parliament in legislative elections a year ago with 88 lawmakers. Le Pen now sits at the heart of institutional France.

Le Pen’s party has progressively anchored itself among French voters. She won more than 41% in the runoff presidential vote last year.

“There are practically no more categories of the population immune to a (far-right) vote,” polling agency Ifop said after a recent survey showing a steady rise in voters who have cast a ballot for Le Pen’s party.

President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist government took a tough line against the recent violence, but disputes Le Pen’s characterization of those who rioted, with Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin stressing that only 10% were foreigners. At a Senate hearing last week, he noted that some children with immigrant roots enter the police force.

Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne criticized the GoFundMe campaign for the police officer's family as unhelpful in tense times. But its success appeared to reflect a clamor for security, another prize issue of the far-right.

Jean Messiha, a former official in the National Rally and the upstart hard-right Reconquest party, called the enormous response to the fund that he started a “tsunami” in support of law enforcement officers “who in a certain way fight daily so that France remains France.”

The French far-right has many faces, inside and outside the political sphere, ranging from the National Rally to Eric Zemmour’s Reconquest, whose vice president is Le Pen’s niece Marion Marechal. Both Zemmour and Marechal espouse the racist “great replacement” theory that there is a plot to diminish the influence of white people and replace cultures, particularly through immigration.

On France's fringe is an ultra-rightist movement, which includes conspiracy theorists, whose potential for violence worries authorities.

“The terrorist risk it engenders has grown in recent years within Western democracies — France, in particular,” Nicolas Lerner, head of France’s internal security agency, DGSI, said in a rare interview published in Le Monde newspaper. The ultras believe, he said, that they must do the job of the state in protecting Europe from terrorists and the "great replacement,” and one way to do that is to “precipitate a clash to have a chance to win while there is still time.”

Ten attacks have been thwarted by people from the fringe movement since 2017, he noted.

Mainstream politics is not inoculated.

The tone of political discourse, even in mainstream politics, can contribute to forging ultra rightists, Lerner warned.

“Last year’s presidential and legislative elections ... marked by debates reflecting traditional concerns of the far-right, notably on migratory issues, had a tendency to channel energy,” he said.



Sudan's Doctors Bear Brunt of War as Healthcare Falls Apart

(FILES) A Sudanese army soldier mans a machine gun on top of a military pickup truck outside a hospital in Omdurman - AFP
(FILES) A Sudanese army soldier mans a machine gun on top of a military pickup truck outside a hospital in Omdurman - AFP
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Sudan's Doctors Bear Brunt of War as Healthcare Falls Apart

(FILES) A Sudanese army soldier mans a machine gun on top of a military pickup truck outside a hospital in Omdurman - AFP
(FILES) A Sudanese army soldier mans a machine gun on top of a military pickup truck outside a hospital in Omdurman - AFP

Sudanese doctor Mohamed Moussa has grown so accustomed to the constant sound of gunfire and shelling near his hospital that it no longer startles him. Instead, he simply continues attending to his patients.

"The bombing has numbed us," the 30-year-old general practitioner told AFP by phone from Al-Nao hospital, one of the last functioning medical facilities in Omdurman, part of greater Khartoum.

Gunfire rattles in the distance, warplanes roar overhead and nearby shelling makes the ground tremble, more than a year and a half into a grinding war between rival Sudanese generals.

Embattled health workers "have no choice but to continue", said Moussa.
Since April 2023, Sudan has been torn apart by a war between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, leader of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

The war has killed tens of thousands and uprooted 12 million people, creating what the International Rescue Committee aid group has called the "biggest humanitarian crisis ever recorded".

The violence has turned the country's hospitals into battlegrounds, placing health workers like Moussa on the frontlines.

Inside Al-Nao's overwhelmed wards, the conflict's toll is staggering.

Doctors say they tend to a harrowing array of injuries: gunshot wounds to the head, chest and abdomen, severe burns, shattered bones and amputations -- even among children as young as four months.

The hospital itself has not been spared.

Deadly shelling has repeatedly hit its premises, according to medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) which has supported the Al-Nao hospital.

Elsewhere, the situation is just as dire. In North Darfur, a recent drone attack killed nine at the state capital's main hospital, while shelling forced MSF to evacuate its field hospital in a famine-hit refugee camp.

- Medics targeted -

Sudan's healthcare system, already struggling before the war, has now all but crumbled.

Of the 87 hospitals in Khartoum state, nearly half suffered visible damage between the start of the war and August 26 this year, according to satellite imagery provided and analysed by Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab and the Sudanese American Physicians Association.

As of October, the World Health Organization had documented 119 confirmed attacks on healthcare facilities across Sudan.

"There is a complete disregard for civilian protection," said Kyle McNally, MSF's humanitarian affairs advisor.

He told AFP that an ongoing "broad-spectrum attack on healthcare" includes "widespread physical destruction, which then reduces services to the floor -- literally and figuratively".

The national doctors' union estimates that in conflict zones across Sudan, up to 90 percent of medical facilities have been forced shut, leaving millions without access to essential care.

Both sides of the conflict have been implicated in attacks on healthcare facilities.

The medical union said that 78 health workers have been killed since the war began, by gunfire or shelling at their workplaces or homes.

"Both sides believe that medical staff are cooperating with the opposing faction, which leads to their targeting," union spokesperson Sayed Mohamed Abdullah told AFP.

"There is no justification for targeting hospitals or medical personnel. Doctors... make no distinction between one patient and another."

- Starvation -

According to the doctors' union, the RSF has raided hospitals to treat their wounded or search for enemies, while the army has conducted air strikes on medical facilities across the country.

On November 11, MSF suspended most activities at Bashair Hospital, one of South Khartoum's few functioning hospitals, after fighters stormed the facility and shot dead another fighter being treated there.

MSF officials say they believe the fighters to be RSF combatants.

In addition to the endless stream of war casualties, Sudan's doctors scramble to respond to another threat: mass starvation.

In a paediatric hospital in Omdurman, across the Nile from Khartoum, malnourished children arrive in droves.

Between mid-August and late October, the small hospital was receiving up to 40 children a day, many in critical condition, according to one doctor.

"Every day, three or four of them would die because their cases were very late stage and complicated, or due to a shortage of essential medicines," said the physician, requesting anonymity for safety concerns.

Sudan has for months teetered on the edge of famine, with nearly 26 million people -- more than half the population -- facing acute hunger, according to the UN.

Adnan Hezam, a spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said there must be "immediate support in terms of supplies and human resources to medical facilities".

Without it, "we fear a rapid deterioration" in already limited services, he told AFP.

To Moussa, the doctor, some days feel "unbearable".

"But we can't stop," he said.

"We owe it to the people who depend on us."