Amid Crucial French Elections, My Reflections on Becoming a Citizen (with audio)

...and how my winding, trying path to getting a passport shifted my perspectives on civic duty (and bureaucracy)

Dear Subscribers,

In early June, President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the French National Assembly and called a snap parliamentary election, after his centrist political coalition was miserably defeated by the far-right candidate Jordan Bardella in European Parliament elections.

Parliamentary elections usually result in low voter turnout, not to mention enthusiasm. But the one scheduled for late June (with a second round in July) is probably the most important in decades.

Political sands are shifting in France, with a historic share of voters who now say they’re prepared to vote for far-right candidates. The National Rally party led by Marine Le Pen and her protegé Bardella may even succeed in forming a government, thanks to a proposed alliance with the center-right.

This is all raising huge alarm bells for those of us who believe it poses one of the greatest threats to pluralist democracy in France since World War II.

And if you suspect I’m being alarmist, consider this: the National Rally party is the rebranded successor of the National Front, a far-right party that for decades was blatantly neo-fascist and antisemitic in both its rhetoric and its platforms. Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, former leader of the National Front party, has been fined multiple times for calling the Nazi gas chambers “a detail of history”.

Sure, Marine Le Pen has made strong efforts to render her re-branded party palatable to the mainstream— including by expelling dear old Dad from the ranks, and attempting to distance the National Rally from any association with antisemitism (they’ve arguably traded it for open xenophobia and Islamophobia). But beneath the veneer of respectability and softened rhetoric, the National Rally is still at heart a nationalist, and even neo-fascist, party with quote-un-quote“traditional” anti-semites still lurking in its highest ranks, as a detailed report in Foreign Policy magazine revealed.

Marine Le Pen, currently President of the National Rally group within the French National Assembly/Wikimedia Commons

And as a much more recent article in French newspaper La Libération underlines (in French and paywalled), the founders of the FN included former members of the French SS and a journalist who once worked for Radio Vichy, with ties to the French collaborationist government.

With all this in the background, and as I prepare to cast my vote this summer, I find myself reflecting on how being naturalized as a French citizen a few years ago has made my sense of solemn civic duty even stronger.

In 2010, I became a French citizen after a long, painstaking decade of renewing visas and residency cards, struggling at times to make ends meet as a student, and on several occasions feeling more than tempted to throw in “la serviette”, as it were, and return to the US.