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I am not a human right, ethics, or philosophy expert, so I don't want to address this from any of those perspectives. But what I do want to do is talk about this from the standpoint of what I do know; political parties and elections. 1/n https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55001167
To think about this, we have to tackle the concept of issue ownership. Issue ownership supposes that a party can establish itself as being associated with an issue in the minds of the public (Walgrave et al. 2015). 2/n
This matters because in France, the former Front National, the now Rassemblement National is usually viewed as the owner of the issue of immigration, being opposed to multiculturalism and viewed as the protector of the French way of life. 3/n
Within issue ownership theory, when the salience, that is importance, of the issue owned by a party increases, that party will benefit on at the polls. That is, the Rassemblement National, would benefit from an increase in the issue of cultural protection and nationalism. 4/n
Importantly, it has been theorized that mainstream parties shifting towards the positions of radical right parties (a process known as accommodation) leads to increasing salience of the radical right issue. 5/n
But this is not just theoretical. I have a working paper with @SophiaHunger that shows that when mainstream parties accommodate the radical right on multiculturalism and national way of life, the salience of those issues increases substantially. 6/n
Thinking about the the idea that increasing salience of an owned issue helps the issue owner (Petrocik 1996), we have to think about what this means for French politics. 7/n
A piece I recently published with @MauritsMeijers (2019), shows that when mainstream center-right parties accommodate the radical right on Euroscepticism (related to multiculturalism) voters move away from the mainstream center-right parties. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13501763.2019.1668044?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=rjpp20
A great working paper by @krause_we, @denis_cohen and @tabouchadi shows that accommodation by mainstream parties on immigration actually benefits the radical right party because of rising salience. 8/n https://www.dropbox.com/s/1g5wicx6peae2gs/Krause_Cohen_Abouchadi_2019.pdf?dl=0
Let's apply these lesson to this case in France. 9/n
Macron is taking a hard right turn on immigration, multiculturalism, etc. He is drawing massive attention to the issue of Islam in France. 10/n
This leads to an even greater spike in the salience of the issue among the public. Further, it normalizes anti-Islam sentiment among the public. It tells the public that Islam is an out-group. 11/n
As the salience of the issue increases, and there is normalization of the issue, we should see people turning to the issue owner on this, the Rassemblement National. 12/n
In essence, what Macron is doing here, from an electoral standpoint is helping the Rassemblement National. This is particularly concerning given the steady strengthening of the RN in France. 13/n
In 2002 Jacques Chirac defeated the Front National candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen with 82.2% of the vote. This was the first election in which the FN got to the second round of the presidential election. 14/n
In 2017, the second time the FN got to the second round of the presidential election, Marine Le Pen (Jean-Marie's daughter) received nearly 34% of the vote, and increase of about 16 points. 15/n
The polls for 2022 show a head to head matchup between Macron and Le Pen being even closer, with Le Pen sitting at about 42%. 16/n
Accommodation of the radical right by Macron, could well lead to an even greater tightening of the race for the French presidency in 2022. 17/n
A Le Pen presidency would be disastrous. Beyond the issues with nationalism, racism, Islamophobia, etc., it could well spell the end for French membership of the European Union, which would be catastrophic for the EU. 18/n
The point is, this is a very scary development in France, and we should all be very concerned about how this might actually bolster the radical right in France. 19/19
Also, I realize that I messed up my numbering of this thread, but I'm gonna stick with it. 20/19
