ISLAMIC VEIL. The ban on the veil, a measure included in Marine Le Pen’s program for the presidential election, was the subject of debate between the two rounds of the election. What does the RN candidate really offer and is it feasible?
[Mis à jour le 20 avril 2022, à 23h23] Marine Le Pen was questioned, at the end of the inter-round debate, this Wednesday, April 20, 2022, on the banning of the Islamic veil which she calls for in her program for the presidential election. If she ended up confirming her desire to proceed with a ban, the RN candidate explained at length in the preamble that this was part of “a whole”: in short, “the fight against Islamism”.
The ban on wearing the veil in public space, included in Marine Le Pen’s program, made Emmanuel Macron jump during this end of the campaign, who remains committed to the law and to respect for the principle of secularism as established by the law of 1905. The president-candidate pointed to this desire of his rival with a shock formula, warning: “you will create civil war by doing that”.
The debate on the veil is also that, complex, of the freedom of Muslim women to choose or not and without constraint to wear this religious sign.
What Marine Le Pen says: the ban on the veil appears black on white in the program of the candidate of the RN and even appears in the synthesis of its 22 major proposals, online on its website. The measure even culminates in second position under the title “Eradicate Islamist ideologies and all their networks from national territory”. A Law proposition “aimed at combating Islamist ideologies” is presented here on a turnkey basis. And it is in its article 10 that “the prohibition in the public space of Islamist outfits” is mentioned. “Are prohibited, in the public space, signs or outfits constituting by
themselves an unequivocal and ostentatious affirmation of the ideologies referred to in Article 1. For the purposes of this article, public space consists of public roads as well as places open to the public or assigned to a public service.
Marine Le Pen temporizes on the ban on the veil
Yet last Saturday, during a campaign trip, Marine Le Pen preferred to temporize, believing that wearing the veil was a “complex problem” and that the ban should be seen as an objective more than as an immediate measure. The candidate therefore put a little water in her wine at the risk of putting her bill in a drawer for a while. Since then, his lieutenants have multiplied in the media to try to explain this reversal, as recently explained by TF1 on its website. “Parliament will take up this question and provide practical answers so that the 70-year-old grandmother who has been wearing her little veil for years is not concerned, because she is not the target. The target, this are the Islamists”, justified the spokesperson Sébastien Chenu, before the mayor of Perpignan Louis Aliot affirms that the priority was to protect “those who are under pressure” family, social or community to wear the veil.
What Emmanuel Macron says : the Head of State, for his part, sticks to the spirit of secularism inherited from the law of 1905 and refuses to make the veil “an obsession”, as he indicated on April 15 on franceinfo . Far from denying the existence of radical Islamism (the law on separatism, adopted during the five-year term in a deleterious climate, is there to remind us of this), he tries to keep this subject at a good distance from the question of wearing the veil itself, which is already prohibited by law in public services, at school, college and high school. When a young woman veiled “by choice” and calling herself a “feminist” arrested him on April 12 in Strasbourg, the Head of State judged that she was “the best answer to all the nonsense” uttered on the question according to him.
What there is to know : according to several observers including The Decoders of the World, the ban on the veil in public space could prove legally difficult to adopt and apply because it is contrary to several principles and in fact establishes a difference between religions. Emmanuel Macron was able to play on this risk of censorship of the law proposed in Marine Le Pen’s program, arguing that the latter would be forced to also ban in the street “the yarmulke, the cross, other religious symbols” so as not to not discriminate between religions.