Dieudonné doing the quenelle gesture. AFP/Getty Images
On Tuesday, French President François Hollande backed a daring, and legally dubious, move by the country’s top cop, Interior Minister Manuel Valls, who has called for a ban of controversial comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala’s shows.
The comedian (known widely as Dieudonné) has come under heavy fire from France’s highest echelons for his unapologetically anti-Semitic remarks — and in particular his trademark “quenelle” gesture — and was set to debut a national tour on Thursday. Until, that is, Valls issued instructions Monday to French officials to ban his appearances, based on a generous interpretation of France’s law on the right to public assembly. (Nantes, Bordeaux, and Marseilles have followed through on the directive as of this writing.) This is not Dieudonné’s first brush with the law; he has been charged — and acquitted — fifteen times for disruption to the public order.
Hollande’s support for the ban is unsurprising. The president badly needs to boost his flailing approval ratings, and a categorical stance against anti-Semitism sounds like a politically sure bet. (Especially coming after an unsettling spike in anti-Semitic incidents in France over the past few years.) The president declared in Paris on Tuesday: “No one should be able to use this [comedy] show for provocation and to promote openly anti-Semitic ideas.” Yet the Elysée is taking a risk by wading, alongside Valls, into murky legal ground; if Dieudonné wins his inevitable appeal, the comedian will have gained invaluable publicity for his shows, even as Paris’ aggressive attack reinforced his cult, and self-dubbed “anti-system,” image. Indeed, even France’s Human Rights League is shying away from supporting the ban, noting “the authorities should concentrate on punishing crimes once they are committed.”
More broadly, the Elysée’s stance on the Dieudonné controversy also serves as a reminder that Hollande has yet to present a clearly defined platform — instead shifting left on social policies like gay marriage, and right on fiscal policies and immigration, albeit inconsistently. On the same day that Hollande spoke out against Dieudonné, the Dibranis, a Roma family deported from France in October 2013, saw their demand for visas revisited by a court in Besancon, France. (Their deportation elicited a broad furor, and large youth solidarity movement, after reports emerged that 15-year old Leonarda Dibrani was pulled off her school bus and told to leave the country in front of her classmates.) After a year of presidential inconsistencies, the case of young Leonarda emblemizes Hollande’s tendency to waffle, i.e. swinging a hard right on immigration after his election, only to backtrack on Leonarda when the national uproar reached a fever pitch. The president’s misguided solution: an offer to Leonarda to return to France — as long as she left her family behind in Kosovo. (She declined.)
The Dibrani verdict is expected in two to three weeks. Though the visa request is likely to be denied, the resurfacing of Leonarda’s tale will bode ill for Hollande by reminding French voters of their president’s prevarications on a hot-button issue. Making the only winner here Valls. Even if the interior minister has at times demonstrated overzealousness, he has, at the least, stuck to his guns — maintaining a hardline on both Roma immigrants and Dieudonné, helping to cement his ranking as France’s most popular politician. Troubling numbers for Hollande as he enters his second year of office as the most unpopular president in modern French history.
