(AFP) – US President Donald Trump on Tuesday blamed France’s mass student protests on Islam and migration, pushing his global right-wing narrative ahead of tough midterm elections at home. “What’s happening in France is nothing less than out of control mass migration,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social network. “This isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country!”
French students have blocked the entrances to hundreds of high schools across the country since late September to demand better conditions, in protests that have descended into sporadic clashes with security forces. A quarter of a million demonstrators took to the streets across France on Tuesday. Trump did not elaborate on his claims or provide any evidence. In France, no link has yet been established between the student movement and any religious or identity-based demands.
But leading voices in Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement have been using the French protests to ram home points about immigration ahead of the US midterm elections next month. MAGA commentators repeatedly posted videos of the French unrest in the days leading up to Trump’s post. “The riots in France are a clear warning to the rest of the West,” Trump ally Glenn Beck said on X on Monday. “What is happening in France today is all part of an international network of socialists working to dismantle the West.”
“This will come to America if the Democrats take power again,” posted right-wing commentator Dave Rubin to his 1.6 million followers, along with footage filmed in a French train station.
– ‘Civilizational erasure’ –
Trump, 80, has ramped up his rhetoric on core issues like migration and transgender people ahead of the midterms, as the Iran war and the cost of living look set to cost Republicans control of Congress. At the same time, Europe has been a target for Trump ever since his first term in the White House. And his second administration has been keener than ever to warn of what it calls the decline of Western culture on the other side of the Atlantic.
The US national security strategy released in December said Europe faced “civilizational erasure” — and in extraordinary language towards close allies, said it would be “cultivating resistance” to current political trends. Vice President JD Vance has also been a vocal critic of Europe on the same issue. Even Trump’s handshake-heavy “bromance” with outgoing French President Emmanuel Macron has failed to keep the US leader from criticizing a key ally.
But France responded to Trump’s reaction by comparing it to that of Iran, which earlier summoned the French envoy over what it called Paris’s “violent response” to the school protests. “You’ll get the Iranians’ version, perhaps the version from some Israelis, perhaps the version from some Americans,” France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot told a parliamentary committee on Tuesday. Barrot said French diplomatic missions were trying to put across the French case “so that we have our own narratives to disseminate, rather than being subjected to those of others.”
burs-dk/md – Danny KEMP
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