Today's blog post was written by Runnymede's deputy director Sarah Isal

Any general election or presidential campaign is interesting for many reasons, not least the fact that this is the time when different parties and candidates lay out their plans, vision and aspirations and put forward their case for being elected. The upcoming French presidential election campaign is particularly important to keep an eye on from the perspective of race equality and immigrants’ rights. 

This is partly because ever since 2002, when Jean Marie Le Pen, then leader of the extreme right party Front National made it into the second round of the election at the expense of socialist Lionel Jospin, French politicians, especially on the right, know all too well that they need to capture his electorate to win the election. In order to do so, they have to make sure that certain themes are central to the campaign, namely immigration, law and order and of course more recently Islam and Muslims.

This year, things are even more complicated by the prospect of Marine Le Pen (the new and current Front National leader) being unable to even get in the race amid rumours that she might not manage to gain the mandatory 500 signatures from mayors needed to run for the election. With less than 80 days to go before the first round of the presidential elections, Sarkozy has realised he needs to show the Front National electorate that he is the obvious choice for them, should Marine Le Pen be unable to stand, thus increasing his chances of making it to the second round, at a time when he is still trailing in the polls behind Socialist Francois Hollande. And it seems the current French President has found a perfect messenger for sending these signals in the person of Claude Guéant, current Interior Minister (the French equivalent of the British home secretary). 

Guéant is no stranger to controversy on topics around immigration, racism and Islam and seems the obvious person to carry Sarkozy’s “hard right” message. In the past he has made a number of comments which have infuriated anti-racist and migrants rights groups. In the last few months and in no particular order, he repeatedly linked immigrants to crime (without any evidence to back his claims), stated that uncontrolled immigration made French people feel they “are not at home” in France anymore and referred to the intervention by Sarkozy in Libya as a “crusade” (an unfortunate, yet probably deliberate, choice of terms.)

This weekend, Guéant came up with his latest inflammatory statement, clearly aimed at Muslim communities, when he stated that all civilizations were not “worth the same” (“toutes les civilisations ne se valent pas”). When asked to develop this further he gave the examples of the full face veil and Muslims praying in the street, two topics of great debate in France in the last few months. This statement was made on the same day as a new poll shows that with Marine Le Pen out of the race, both Sarkozy and Holland stand at 33% of voting intentions in the first round. Coincidence? Somehow, it sounds hard to believe. How many more phrases or statements of this type will be pronounced by Guéant between now and 22 April? The bets are on.