Emmanuel Macron was always a racist
He kinda gave it away by exaggerating African birth rates to explain Africa's "civilizational" problems and instability
Reeling from the blows of Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory, centrists embraced Emmanuel Macron in 2017 as a supposed relief from right-wing populism, “the savior of liberalism” who would turn the tide on populism and restore “normalcy”. Most importantly, he beat back the racist far right with his “pro-European, centrist response to populism and nationalism”. Left-wingers were less sanguine, with a terse graffito summarizing their worry: “Macron 2017 = Le Pen 2022”.
In the lead-up to Samuel Paty’s murder and beyond, the centrist hope has been destroyed and the left wing’s fear vindicated, though “in a different sense than anyone predicted”: Macron and his party took up Le Pen-style authoritarian, Islamophobic nationalism themselves.
One of his closest advisers had lunch with the far-right politician Marion Maréchal, niece of Marine Le Pen.
His party proposed a security bill that would have effectively criminalized publishing photographs or videos of police.
He sought to “free” French Islam from foreign funding by choking off the supply of foreign imams.
He brought forward a bill, now passed, to restrict home-schooling to help combat “Islamist separatism”.
He “ruled out issuing an official apology” for France’s colonial “abuses in Algeria”.
Last year his minister of national education denounced the ravages of “l’islamo-gauchisme”, to be one-upped this year by his universities minister demanding an investigation of “l’islamo-gauchisme” in academia.
Another minister one-upped Marine Le Pen herself by accusing her in a television debate of being too soft on Islam, to Le Pen’s visible surprise.
These lurches to the far right are now getting play in the Anglophone media, but they didn’t come out of nowhere. There were warning signs all along, as when French police rounded up schoolchildren protesting against education reform in 2018, putting the children on their knees, facing a wall, hands bound behind their backs; when Macron announced a plan to honour Philippe Pétain; and when France’s legislature made emergency police (and executive!) powers permanent just 5 months after Macron became president.
Most memorable to me was one of the earliest clues. Just two months after becoming president, Macron spoke at a G20 summit. Answering a question there, he said that the challenge faced by “Africa” was “civilizational”, and a fuller transcript recorded that, in Macron’s eyes, Africa’s civilizational challenge was a lot deeper than that addressed by the Marshall Plan, with the demographic transition being a core difficulty; with countries still having “7 to 8 children per woman”, “you can decide to spend billions of euro, you shan’t stabilize anything”.
Twitter picked up on Macron’s Africa-bashing at the time, but mainstream journalists tried to nuance it away. Politico’s Christian Krug whined that “many social media commentators missed the broader context” of Macron’s full 3-minute monologue. Jesse Singal, relying on a translation posted on Reddit’s r/neoliberal subreddit, shrugged that “Macron doesn’t seem to be saying anything horribly controversial?” (“c’mon”). On Vox’s website, Sarah Wildman questioned whether Macron really said “what he really said”, and wrote that in the video of Macron’s full monologue, Macron was not “quite the racist” that he was in the abridged clip infamous on social media. The last paragraph of her article? “Coming from the West’s great hope for the future, [Macron’s answer’s] a disappointing, careless response. But it’s too soon to say it was anything more than a stumble.”.
Well, with the benefit of years of hindsight, we can certainly say it was more than a stumble.
And it was always racist.
How can I write that? Isn’t it possible that Macron was just telling everyone a hard truth?
No, because it wasn’t a truth. Sub-Saharan Africa’s total fertility rate was only 4.77 in 2017, and the total fertility rate in north Africa ranged from 4.62 to only 2.2. Macron doesn’t even have the excuse of lacking up-to-date data and being caught out by a sudden fertility drop: fertility rates were only marginally higher in 2015 and 2016, peaking at 4.74 in north Africa (Mauritania) and averaging 4.8–4.9 in sub-Saharan Africa. Still nowhere near “7 to 8”.
Maybe Macron was just talking about the specific African countries where the fertility rate was 7 or 8? Does zooming in on a few countries get him off the hook?
No! A list of the countries with the highest fertility rates in 2017 reveals zero countries with a total fertility rate of 7 or higher. The highest was Niger, at 6.49, followed by Angola, at 6.16.
Worst of all, Macron didn’t learn from his error. The next year, he returned to African demography at a Gates Foundation event. After alleging that a “critical issue” was “that this is not chosen fertility”, he snarkily demanded: “Present me the woman who decided, being perfectly educated, to have 7, 8, or 9 children.”.
So, weeks after becoming France’s president, Macron made a false claim about the birth rates of Africans in general. That false claim exemplified well-established stereotypes of black, Arab (and specifically North African Arab), and African people. Macron used the claim to explain the “civilizational” challenge of Africa in general and why, supposedly, spending billions of euro couldn’t make Africa in general stable. Finally, instead of apologizing for the claim or retracting it, he recycled it with swagger months later.
Macron’s argument ticks every obvious box for bigotry:
he didn’t just stereotype Africans in general, which might conceivably be justified if the stereotype crudely reflected an approximate statistical reality;
he didn’t just stereotype Africans falsely, which might be understandable as a ham-fisted, pro-African gesture if the stereotype were at least positive;
he didn’t just stereotype Africans falsely and negatively, which might be forgiven as an unthinking ad lib;
he didn’t just stereotype Africans falsely, negatively, and unapologetically, which might be downplayed as irrelevant to his policy beliefs;
he stereotyped Africans falsely, negatively, unapologetically, to argue against providing Africa with resources.
From his earliest days as president, Emmanuel Macron was a racist.
And not just a racist, but a French (i.e. white) supremacist. And not just a supremacist, but one advancing French interests in "post"-colonial Africa. By dialling back earlier fig leaf promises of quid pro quo investments in African public services.