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Paris police ban hijab protest football match outside parliament

Paris police have banned what they describe as a ‘demonstration’ in which a group of women intended to play football outside the French parliament while wearing the Muslim headscarf.

Published: 9 February 2022 12:17 CET
Paris police ban hijab protest football match outside parliament
Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba / AFP

Wednesday’s event – a game of football on the esplanade des Invalides, next to the Palais Bourbon which houses the National Assembly – was planned by Les Hijabeuses, a group of Muslim women, to protest against an amendment to a sports bill making its way through Parliament that would prohibit the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols while participating in sporting events.

The match was timed to coincide with the bill – on the democratisation of sport – returning to the Assembly after the contentious amendment was added in the Senate at an earlier reading.

READ ALSO OPINION: Muslim headscarves are legal in France, so why the moral panic about a sports hijab?

“It is feared that this demonstration will attract, in addition to those who support it, people hostile to the cause,” the Préfecture de Police said in a statement published on Twitter.

The ban on the rally was justified, “both for the safety of the demonstrators themselves and for the maintenance of public order,” it added.

The group is, however, not giving up without a fight. “We have obviously taken the case to court to challenge this arbitrary, unfair and completely disproportionate, act” said the collective on Twitter after the announcement by the Prefecture of Police.

READ ALSO ‘My body, my choice’ – French Muslim women speak out about headscarves

“A hearing will take place tomorrow morning, and we hope that the Prefecture will be brought to reconsider this ban. On our side, we will play whatever happens. Surely elsewhere … but we will play,” said the collective on the social network.

Les Hijabeuses staged a similar demonstration in front of the Senate last week. They were moved on by gendarmes.

A week previously, senators had added an amendment prohibiting the wearing of “conspicuous religious symbols” during a sports competition, which is not supported by the government and was promptly removed by MPs in the parliament.

The bill is due before the Assembly again on Wednesday, before its final readings on February 16th.

The French Football Federation still prohibits the wearing of the headscarf within its championships, despite the fact that Fifa authorised it in 2014.

Due to France’s laws of laïcité (secularism) conspicuous religious garments such as the hijab are banned in government buildings such as schools or local government officers, while public servants such as police officers are banned from wearing them while on duty.

The full-face veil is banned in all public spaces in France.

READ ALSO What does laïcité really mean in France?

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JOHN LICHFIELD

OPINION: A European disaster for Macron could lead to messy autumn elections in France

The approaching European elections are predicted to be a disaster for the Macronists - but will this actually have any effect on France? John Lichfield predicts that it will, possibly even bringing fresh - and very messy - domestic elections in the autumn.

Published: 25 April 2024 10:10 CEST
OPINION: A European disaster for Macron could lead to messy autumn elections in France

There is a paradox at the heart of Macronism. The President was elected in 2017 as a young, white-collar revolutionary who would detonate France’s repressed energy by scrapping the stifling, consensus politics of centre-left and centre-right.

And yet the profile of his voters has become progressively older. His most loyal supporters are the status-quo loving over-60s – or rather they have been until now.

One of the most striking aspects of the disastrous opinion poll results for the President’s centrist alliance before the June 9th European elections is the desertion of part of Macron’s grey army.

At the 2022 Presidential election, 39 percent of over-65s voted for Macron in the first round, compared to 28 percent in the wider electorate.

Without the oldies, Macron might have come second to Marine Le Pen in the first round two years ago. The second-round run-off, which was won 58.5-41.5 percent by Macron, would have been a very close-run thing.

In the polling before the European elections, the lead candidate for Macron’s Renew alliance, Valérie Heyer, is running neck and neck in the “grey” vote with Jordan Bardella, the lead candidate of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National.

They are on 25 percent each among the over-65s in an Ipsos poll for La Tribune.

READ ALSO Can foreign residents in France vote in European elections?

Older voters are prized by political parties because they are reliable voters. No longer, it seems. Something like half the over-65s who voted for Macron in 2022 say they won’t bother to leave home on Sunday June 9th.

The shifts in the old vote largely explains why Le Pen’s camp is leading Macron’s camp overall by 14 to 15 points – roughly 32 percent to 17 percent – a score which will have seismic consequences for French politics if confirmed in 45 days’ time.

Why are the oldies so angry with the government? Here lies another paradox.

Macron, the youngest ever President of the Fifth Republic, with the youngest ever Prime Minister, has been kind to oldies (including myself). Rather than a “President of the Getting-on-well”, he has been a “President of the Getting-on-a-Bit”.

His unpopular (but necessary) pension reform was intended, in part, to protect the comfortable pensions of those already retired.

The two Covid lockdowns (probably necessary) protected the old at the expense of the liberty of the young.

The President recently shot down the idea of a one-year freeze on pensions which would have filled the €15 billion hole in the French state budget this year.

Why then so many grumpy old men and women?

One minister blames the constant drum-beat of alarm and despondency in the 24-hour TV news channels. “Retired people are sitting in front of their televisions all day and watching images of a country they no longer recognise,” he says.

Maybe. It is natural that older people are anxious about security and inflation. They also disapprove of the fact that Macron has let the country’s finances spin out of control (but forget that they benefited from the government’s open cheque book during the Covid crisis and the energy inflation caused by the Ukraine war.)

Another striking feature of the opinion polls has been the resurrection of the centre-left, which appeared to be extinct after the Socialist candidate, Anne Hidalgo, scored only 1.75 percent in the first round of the presidential election two years ago. The Socialist champion in the European elections, Raphael Glucksmann, is running at around 12 percent and vaguely threatening to push Macron’s camp into third place.

Is this the beginning of the end of the pro-European New Centre created by Macron in 2017? Is France, which invented the terms Left and Right, lurching back towards binary Left-Right politics?

I doubt it. Glucksmann will not be a candidate in 2027; no convincing moderate politician is yet emerging to challenge the death grip on the Left of the radical, anti-European Jean-Luc Mélenchon. This is a space worth watching, all the same.

In the remaining six weeks of the European campaign, Macron’s strategy will be two-fold. He will finally get involved. He will try to remind voters that European elections are about Europe.

Starting with a big speech on the future of the EU at the Sorbonne university on Thursday, he will seek to persuade the French electorate that Le Pen is a leap into muddle and darkness and that a stronger EU is their best protection in a scary world.

Above all, Macron will try in the weeks ahead to persuade the pro-European over-65s to continue the habit of a lifetime and turn out on June 9th. He may have limited success. Le Pen’s party performs better in polls than in elections. The most recent polls shows a slight narrowing of Bardella’s lead.

But 14 points is a big gap to close in six weeks. Whatever Macron may say in his speech, most French voters, young or old, do not see this as a European election. They see it as a free-hit: a chance to bash Macron after seven years without running the risk of electing a Far Right government.

They may be wrong about that.

A Macron “defeat” by ten points or more on June 9th will increase the chances of a successful censure motion against the government in the National Assembly this summer. Macron will refuse to call an election just before the Paris Olympics. He will prolong the crisis until September when the Gabriel Attal government might fall.

We could be heading for a messy, parliamentary election in France this Autumn – at the same time as a potentially cataclysmic election in the United States and a very predictable election in the UK.

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