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      In New Law, Indonesia Criminalizes Sex Outside of Marriage

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      Parliament also approved a law that criminalizes criticism of the government, delivering a blow to the country’s progressive reputation.Indonesia has long been known as a widely tolerant nation at the forefront of establishing democratic reforms throughout Southeast Asia. That progressive reputation took a hit on Tuesday when Parliament cleared a sweeping overhaul of the country’s criminal code.According to the new rules, sex outside of marriage is now illegal in Indonesia, as is defamation of the president. The overhaul also sharply expanded laws against blasphemy in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. Opponents said the rules posed significant risks to religious minorities by outlawing extramarital sex and tacitly targeting critics of Islam. Extramarital sex criminalization also targets the L.G.B.T. community, as gay marriage is illegal in Indonesia. The new laws could also curtail freedom of expression and assembly.The new laws are almost certain to revive a debate around democratic backsliding in the nation of 276 million. After the fall of the Indonesian dictator Suharto in 1998, the country had prided itself as a thriving democracy. Most Indonesians held fairly relaxed views about homosexuality, which was never officially banned.But in recent years, conservative Islam has gained ground in the country, and now some fear its influence is growing, even as its ranks remain a minority in Parliament. In the lead-up to the next presidential election in 2024, few officials appear willing to upset the religious right, which helped paved the way for Tuesday’s overhaul of the criminal code.“It is a very significant encroachment on rights and liberties in Indonesia,” said Tim Lindsey, director of the Center for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society at the University of Melbourne. Critics warned that the new rules, which also apply to foreigners, will make Indonesia less appealing to investors, tourists and students.Muhamad Isnur, chairman of the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation, said the laws run “contrary to international human rights norms. We are in a new paradigm,” he said.The bill was approved unanimously in Parliament on Tuesday. The government has tried for decades to overhaul the law but has never succeeded. In 2019, it tried to pass a similar draft law, but President Joko Widodo shelved it after tens of thousands of young people protested in the streets, arguing that the law threatened their civil liberties. This time, activists said they were blindsided when lawmakers suddenly announced on Nov. 30 that they were handing a draft to Parliament to ratify, giving the activists very little time to organize demonstrations.Indonesia officials said they had engaged in monthslong conversations with several human rights groups before submitting the new draft. The lawmakers said they added revisions based on feedback, such as stating that blasphemy does not only apply to religion but all belief systems. Edward Omar Sharif Hiariej, Indonesia’s deputy minister of law and human rights, said that the government tried to accommodate as many parties as possible, but acknowledged that the overhaul “won’t satisfy everyone.”“If there are citizens who feel that their constitutional rights have been violated, the door of the constitutional court is wide open for that,” Mr. Edward told reporters last month. The laws, which are set to take effect after three years, will likely be challenged in the country’s Constitutional Court. On Tuesday, there were calls for protests outside Parliament. (The new rules state that people who demonstrate without a permit can also be penalized.)Officials say upgrading the existing criminal code, which dates back to 1918 when Indonesia was a Dutch colony, was long overdue. Among the raft of new laws, penalties around consensual sex outside marriage have drawn the most criticism. According to the revisions, unmarried couples who live together could be jailed for six months or face a maximum fine of 10 million rupiah ($710)..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.Though the penalties apply to foreigners, the new law states that the police can only make an arrest after a report is filed by a close family member, such as a parent, spouse or child, making it extremely unlikely that foreigners would be prosecuted, Mr. Lindsey said. “But gay and lesbian Indonesians, who, of course, are couples and they can’t be married, they are completely exposed.”Police have previously arrested dozens of gay men for violating an anti-pornography law, but now, all gay couples who live together are subject to possible arrest.The push for the overhaul was backed by Vice President Ma’ruf Amin, an Islamic cleric and the former chair of the Indonesian Ulema Council, the country’s top body for Islamic scholars, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the details of private conversations. Mr. Ma’ruf had previously called for “stern regulations” on the sexual activities of homosexuals.In a reversal, lawmakers on Tuesday reinstated a provision making it illegal to attack “the honor or dignity” of both Indonesia’s president and vice president, a rule that was struck down by the Constitutional Court in 2006. In recent years, however, tolerance for such criticism has waned. Last year, the authorities arrested an artist who created a mural criticizing Mr. Joko, and activists say they have been harassed and charged with defamation for speaking up on rights abuses.Mr. Joko — known as a moderate, secular leader — has spoken out repeatedly against intolerant views in his country. In an interview with The New York Times last month, he said Indonesia has a vibrant democracy with frequent peaceful protests outside the presidential palace. “Even today, everyone can criticize the president and the government,” Mr. Joko said, speaking before the Group of 20 summit in Bali last month. “I believe that Indonesia’s democracy is moving on the right track.”Andreas Harsono, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, said that the laws would give the police greater opportunities to extort bribes, and lead to more corruption. Politicians would also have more excuses to target political opponents, he added. “The danger of oppressive laws is not that they will be broadly applied — no, they won’t be — it is that they provide an avenue for selective enforcement,” Mr. Harsono said.The new penal code expands the country’s blasphemy law from one to six provisions, stating for the first time that apostasy — anyone who “persuades someone to be a nonbeliever” — can be charged as a criminal offense.Religious minorities are most at risk of running afoul of this law. Roughly 87 percent of Indonesians are Muslim, while the rest are Christian, Catholic, Hindu and Buddhist. According to Mr. Harsono, the use of the blasphemy law has been most commonly used against people who have criticized Islam.In 2017, former Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a Christian and an ally of Mr. Joko, was sentenced to two years in prison on blasphemy charges after he was accused of insulting Islam by jokingly referring to a verse in the Quran in a campaign speech.Willy Aditya, a lawmaker from the left-leaning NasDem party, rejected claims that Indonesia was “turning into an Islamic country” but said that the new law was written based on emotion, not research. The law shows that the officials have failed to distinguish the difference between public and private affairs, he said, “which is the most elementary thing in democracy.”Muktita Suhartono More

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      Why Is Rahul Gandhi Walking 2,000 Miles Across India?

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      Rahul Gandhi is hoping to pull his once-mighty party out of the political wilderness. The future of India as a multiparty democracy may be on the line.On the 76th day of his long march north through the entire length of India, Rahul Gandhi, scion of a once-mighty political dynasty, walked into a textile-making town in the middle of this vast country, his face and hair covered in dust.Gone were the luxury trappings that his adversaries in India’s Hindu nationalist governing party had used to caricature him as entitled and aloof. Now, Mr. Gandhi was speaking of blistered feet and the struggle of the common man. He was shaking hands with children, hugging older men and women who caressed his hair and kissed his forehead, on what he hoped was a 2,000-mile journey out of the political wilderness for his once-dominant Congress party.“Every democratic institution was shut for us by the government: Parliament, media, elections,” Mr. Gandhi, 52, told supporters late last month in Burhanpur, in the state of Madhya Pradesh. “There was no other way but to hit the streets to listen and connect with people.”With a national election less than 16 months away, Mr. Gandhi’s march could determine whether India’s fractured political opposition can do anything to halt the era-defining ambitions of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.The future of India as a multiparty democracy hangs in the balance. Mr. Modi, one of the most powerful leaders in India’s history, has remade its secular political foundation to privilege the Hindu majority and sideline Muslims and other minorities.His imprint is so deep, and his successes so complete, that his lieutenants say the B.J.P. will remain in control of the country for decades to come.As the party has tightened its grip across the country and its institutions, opposition politicians complain that they have been pushed out of platforms where they can reach the masses in the cycle of democratic politics.Parliament, once a thriving debate chamber, is now largely confined to ministerial speeches, with the governing party avoiding debates on key policy issues. The B.J.P., through a mix of pressure and the threat of withholding government advertising money, has largely cowed the traditional media.Prime Minister Narendra Modi has remade India’s secular political foundation to privilege the Hindu majority and sideline Muslims and other minorities.Ajit Solanki/Associated PressAfter Mr. Gandhi reached Burhanpur, where a large crowd greeted him, with some watching from rooftops and others from the lean branches of trees, there was barely a mention of it on nightly television programs.That Mr. Gandhi has found it necessary to walk the length of India, fighting to steal a ray of the spotlight and project a new profile, is the culmination of a once-unimaginable reversal of fortune for his family and party. More

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      In Quebec, the Independence Movement Gives Way to a New Nationalism

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      In Monday’s election, residents of a town that was once a stronghold of the independence movement are expected to back the province’s popular premier, who has embraced a nationalism based on French Québécois identity.L’ASSOMPTION, Quebec — Residents in the small city of L’Assomption, Quebec, once overwhelmingly backed the province’s bid to break away from Canada in order to establish a French-speaking, independent nation.On Monday, though, they and much of the rest of the province are expected to strongly back the re-election of their popular premier, who has abandoned calls for independence — and instead has embraced a nationalism based on French Québécois identity.“It’s a conservative nationalism that recalls the themes of culture, history and memory,” said Jacques Beauchemin, a sociologist and a leading intellectual behind this shift. “It’s a return to the meaning of identity.”But to critics, this nationalism threatens the cohesion of the increasingly diverse province by taking aim at immigrants, English speakers and other minorities.In its four years in office, the government of the premier, Francois Legault, has banned the wearing of religious symbols like the Muslim veil in some public areas and has further restricted the use of English. In his campaign for the election, Mr. Legault has doubled down on the issue of immigration, describing it as a threat to Quebec society — a stance at odds with that of the federal government, which is planning to increase immigration sharply over the next few years.The position is also at odds with the stance of Montreal, the multicultural city where the premier’s popularity is comparatively weak.“With this electoral strategy, Mr. Legault is deepening the divide between Montreal and the rest of Quebec,’’ said Gérard Bouchard, a historian and sociologist who is a leading intellectual in the province. “The result of this strategy is to marginalize immigrants and ethnic minorities who are concentrated in Montreal.”A spokesman for Mr. Legault declined a request for an interview.Quebec’s premier, François Legault, is expected to easily win a second mandate.Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York TimesMr. Legault’s brand of nationalism departs sharply from the ideology behind the left-leaning secessionist movement, which sought autonomy for the French Québécois majority that felt historically oppressed by an English-speaking minority. That movement identified with progressive liberation movements throughout the world and was backed by young, urban voters in Quebec.A onetime businessman who co-founded a successful budget airline, Mr. Legault started his political career in the separatist, social democratic Parti Québécois, a group ideologically opposed to the federalist, pro-business Liberal Party. But a decade ago, Mr. Legault altered the political landscape when he founded a new party, Coalition Avenir Québec, which offered a third way. Rejecting secession from Canada, his party blends an identity-based nationalist agenda with pro-business policies.In places like L’Assomption, and among older French Québécois voters, his ideas have especially caught on.“He has spoken about the notion of being Québécois, about our pride and culture,’’ said Sébastien Nadeau, the mayor of L’Assomption.Mr. Legault — who represents the electoral district that includes L’Assomption — also partly owes his popularity to his economic policies, to the paternal figure he assumed during the pandemic and to a divided opposition, said Lisa Maureen Birch, a political scientist at Laval University and an editor of a book on the premier’s first term.Sébastien Nadeau, the mayor of L’Assomption, said that the recent arrival of immigrants was both a source of inspiration and fear.Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York TimesIn his campaign, Mr. Legault has had to backpedal several times after making comments that, his critics say, reveal the divisiveness of his nationalism. When Mr. Legault was questioned at a campaign stop about racism and the case of an Indigenous woman who died after filming herself being abused by hospital staff, he accused members of her Atikamekw First Nations community of not wanting to fix problems on the ground but of seeking to revive a pointless debate on systemic racism, which the premier denies exists in Quebec’s institutions.He later apologized to the woman’s family.Mr. Legault, who wants Quebec to gain more control from Ottawa over immigration policies, also apologized during the campaign after linking immigration to violence and extremism. And he apologized last week, after his immigration minister falsely said that “80 percent of immigrants go to Montreal, don’t work, don’t speak French and don’t adhere to the values of Quebec society.’’L’Assomption is a city of 24,000 people, nearly all of French Québécois origin. A river of the same name snakes around the city center, winding its way across a suburban and rural region with towns and roads with names pointing to Quebec’s Roman Catholic heritage.In the 1995 referendum on independence from Canada, 64 percent of the voters in L’Assomption’s electoral district said yes. In 2018, 57 percent voted for Mr. Legault, with the candidate of the pro-independence Parti Québécois finishing third.Located about 30 miles northeast of downtown Montreal, L’Assomption has only recently experienced the demographic changes that have affected Montreal for decades, said Mr. Nadeau, the mayor. Immigrants who used to rent in Montreal have started buying houses in the area as they seek more space, he said, adding that L’Assomption’s first ethnic restaurants opened just in recent years.Ralph Lorquet, 39, arrived in Quebec from Haiti when he was 16 and grew up close to L’Assomption, in Repentigny. Six months ago, his family took over this space from a defunct Portuguese restaurant and opened Lou Lou’s Casse Croûte, serving homemade Haitian fare. Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times“Here, 10 years ago, we didn’t have a Haitian cafe or a Portuguese restaurant,” Mr. Nadeau said, adding that the immigrants’ arrival was both a source of inspiration and fear.On L’Assomption’s main commercial strip — which is called the Boulevard of the Guardian Angel and is lined with shops that give it a village-like feel — Normand Parisien, 68, a retired city employee, said he believed that L’Assomption was representative of a traditional Quebec and its psyche.“We feel threatened by multiethnicity because we’re a pretty homogeneous society,” said Mr. Parisien, who went to Montreal once a week to attend plays and modern dance performances before the pandemic. “It doesn’t frighten me that much personally. But all of this goes with language and religion; it’s all related. It’s who we are.’’The Legault government’s passing of the law banning the wearing of religious symbols was a response to this fear, especially of Muslim immigrants, Mr. Parisien said.“They don’t resemble us,” he said. “It’s a fear of the stranger.”In places like L’Assomption, and among older French Québécois voters, the premier’s ideas have especially caught on. Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York TimesOthers, like Nicole Robillard, 60, a retired hospital worker, said Mr. Legault was protecting French Québécois against immigrants who are trying to impose their values.“Why do people come here and try to change our culture? Why do they want to take away our crucifixes?” Ms. Robillard said, referring to the removal of the cross from the provincial legislature in 2019.Mr. Legault initially argued to keep the crucifix, saying it was not a religious symbol, but changed his position after the passage of the law on religious symbols.Critics say the law targets Muslims and fuels the debate over the place of veiled Muslim women in Quebec society. It embodies the transformation of Quebec nationalism, which saw itself as linked to other global liberation movements, into a reactionary force, said Jean-Pierre Couture, a political scientist at the University of Ottawa.“It has triggered — in the public debate, on the streets and in the metro — abuses against people who wear religious symbols, and that’s been transformed into votes at the ballot box,” Mr. Couture said. He added that the enemy of Quebec nationalism — American imperialism or an English-speaking Canada in the past — was now the veiled Muslim woman.Mr. Bouchard, the historian, traces the shift in Quebec nationalism to the separatists’ razor-thin loss in the 1995 referendum. The premier at the time, Jacques Parizeau — who also represented the electoral district of L’Assomption — blamed “money and ethnic votes” for the loss.Quebec’s changing nationalism is reflected in L’Assomption, a city of 24,000 people, nearly all of French Québécois origin.Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York TimesMr. Legault has described increasing immigration as “suicidal” for Quebec’s French identity — rejecting appeals by business leaders worried about the effects of a labor shortage and the province’s low birthrate.At Assomption-de-la-Sainte-Vierge Church — a Roman Catholic Church attended by aging French Québécois and younger immigrants from South America and the Democratic Republic of Congo — the Rev. Greg Ciszek worried about the effects of this anti-immigrant nationalism on the future of Quebec. It was a change from the Quebec he had come to as a 9-year-old immigrant from Poland, said Father Ciszek, now 41.“Now immigrants arrive and experience a rejection in part, a devaluation of their dignity,” Father Ciszek said.“If Quebec society wanted to perpetuate its French Canadian identity,” he said, “all it needed to do was have more children.”The Rev. Greg Ciszek said he was worried about the effects of anti-immigrant nationalism on the future of Quebec.Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times More

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      Emmanuel Macron Defeats Marine Le Pen for Second Term as French President

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      The result was a relief to allies in Europe and Washington wary of a far-right challenger who was hostile to the European Union and NATO.PARIS — Emmanuel Macron won a second term as president of France, triumphing on Sunday over Marine Le Pen, his far-right challenger, after a campaign where his promise of stability prevailed over the temptation of an extremist lurch.Projections at the close of voting, which are generally reliable, showed Mr. Macron, a centrist, gaining 58.5 percent of the vote to Ms. Le Pen’s 41.5 percent. His victory was much narrower than in 2017, when the margin was 66.1 percent to 33.9 percent for Ms. Le Pen, but wider than appeared likely two weeks ago.Speaking to a crowd massed on the Champ de Mars in front of a twinkling Eiffel Tower, a solemn Mr. Macron said his was a victory for “a more independent France and a stronger Europe.” He added: “Our country is riddled with so many doubts, so many divisions. We will have to be strong, but nobody will be left by the side of the road.”Ms. Le Pen conceded defeat in her third attempt to become president, but bitterly criticized the “brutal and violent methods” of Mr. Macron, without explaining what she meant. She vowed to fight on to secure a large number of representatives in legislative elections in June, declaring that “French people have this evening shown their desire for a strong counter power to Emmanuel Macron.”Mr. Macron addressed supporters in front of the Eiffel Tower after his victory.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesAt a critical moment in Europe, with fighting raging in Ukraine after the Russian invasion, France rejected a candidate hostile to NATO, to the European Union, to the United States, and to its fundamental values that hold that no French citizens should be discriminated against because they are Muslim.Jean-Yves Le Drian, the foreign minister, said the result reflected “the mobilization of French people for the maintenance of their values and against a narrow vision of France.”The French do not generally love their presidents, and none had succeeded in being re-elected since 2002, let alone by a 17-point margin. Mr. Macron’s unusual achievement in securing five more years in power reflects his effective stewardship over the Covid-19 crisis, his rekindling of the economy, and his political agility in occupying the entire center of the political spectrum.Ms. Le Pen, softening her image if not her anti-immigrant nationalist program, rode a wave of alienation and disenchantment to bring the extreme right closer to power than at any time since 1944. Her National Rally party has joined the mainstream, even if at the last minute many French people clearly voted for Mr. Macron to ensure that France not succumb to the xenophobic vitriol of the darker passages of its history.Ms. Le Pen is a longtime sympathizer with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whom she visited at the Kremlin during her last campaign in 2017. She would almost certainly have pursued policies that weakened the united allied front to save Ukraine from Russia’s assault; offered Mr. Putin a breach to exploit in Europe; and undermined the European Union, whose engine has always been a joint Franco-German commitment to it.Marine Le Pen conceded to Mr. Macron, but bitterly criticized his “brutal and violent methods” without explaining what she meant.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesIf Brexit was a blow to unity, a French nationalist quasi-exit, as set out in Ms. Le Pen’s proposals, would have left the European Union on life support. That, in turn, would have crippled an essential guarantor of peace on the continent in a volatile moment.Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, declared that Mr. Macron’s win was “a vote of confidence in Europe.” Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, congratulated the French leader and called France “one of our closest and most important allies.”Mr. Scholz and two other European leaders had taken the unusual step last week of making clear the importance of a vote against Ms. Le Pen in an opinion article in the daily newspaper Le Monde. The letter was a reflection of the anxiety in European capitals and Washington that preceded the vote.“It is the choice between a democratic candidate, who believes that France is stronger in a powerful and autonomous European Union, and a far-right candidate, who openly sides with those who attack our freedom and our democracy,” they wrote.Mr. Macron’s second victory felt different from his first. Five years ago, he was a 39-year-old wunderkind bursting on the French political scene with a promise to bury sterile left-right divisions and build a more just, equal, open and dynamic society. He organized a massive celebration in the main courtyard of the Louvre to mark the dawn of a new political era in France.Sunday night, given the war in Europe, he asked for sobriety from his supporters. As Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” the European hymn, played (but much more softly than in 2017), he walked onto the Champ de Mars holding the hand of his wife, Brigitte. Children surrounded the couple; the choreography conveyed simplicity and humility.Supporters of Mr. Macron celebrated on the Champ de Mars.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesMr. Macron has often been criticized for an aloofness bordering on arrogance during his first term.“We avoided a certain form of violence. I am relieved,” said Eric Maus, 64, a Macron supporter. “But I feel like I am handing my daughter an uncertain world where the extreme right scores so high.”Mr. Macron succeeded in spurring growth, slashing unemployment and instilling a start-up tech culture, but was unable to address growing inequality or simmering anger among the alienated and the struggling in areas of urban blight and rural remoteness. Societal divisions sharpened as incomes stagnated, prices rose and factories moved abroad.As a result, Mr. Macron’s political capital is more limited, even if his clear victory has saved France from a dangerous tilt toward xenophobic nationalism and given him momentum ahead of the June legislative elections.Still, many of the 7.7 million voters who had supported the left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round of the presidential election on April 10 voted only reluctantly for Mr. Macron to keep Ms. Le Pen from power. Assina Channa, a Muslim of Algerian descent voting in the suburb of Saint-Denis north of Paris, said, “Nothing is going to change but I had no choice.”Ms. Le Pen had proposed a ban on the Muslim head scarf and has regularly equated Islam with violence in the country with the largest Muslim community in western Europe. “At least he doesn’t threaten us like she does,” Ms. Channa said.A polling station in Saint-Denis.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesMr. Macron acknowledged that “many of our compatriots voted for me today not to support my ideas but to form a dam against the extreme right.” He thanked them and said “I am now entrusted with their sense of duty, their attachment to the Republic and their respect for the differences expressed these past weeks.”Some 28 percent of the electorate abstained, three percentage points higher than in 2017, and it appeared that more than 13 million people had voted for Ms. Le Pen and the extreme right. “The anger and the disagreements that led my compatriots to vote for this project must also find an answer,” Mr. Macron said.It was a speech not of soaring rhetoric but of sober realism, almost at times contrition, reflecting his recognition of a starkly divided France and perhaps also his inattention to those for whom life has been hardest.The dreams of radical change of 2017 have been supplanted by fears of political confrontation over the summer, in part because the dislike of Mr. Macron among his opponents is strong, and in part because the legislative elections in June could result in a National Assembly less pliant to his will.Constantly adjusting his positions, extending the circle of his allies and refining his ideas, Mr. Macron has proved himself a consummate politician, suffocating any would-be moderate challengers. He engineered the near total demise of the center-left Socialist Party and the center-right Republicans, the two political forces at the heart of postwar French politics. It was a remarkable feat.Supporters of Mr. Macron celebrating in Paris on Sunday.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesBut there was a price to pay for all this. The old structure of French politics has collapsed, and it is less clear how the violent conflicts of society can be mediated.Those conflicts have become more acute as anger has grown in the parts of France that have felt neglected, even forgotten, by the elites in major cities. By addressing these concerns, and promising a series of tax cuts to help people cope with rising prices for gas and electricity, Ms. Le Pen built an effective campaign.Her message, for some voters, was that she would care for and protect them while their president seemed to have other concerns. But her nationalist message also resonated among people angered by undocumented immigrants entering the country and seeking scapegoats for the country’s problems.The president’s problems have reflected both his personality and political choices. His highly personalized top-down style of government owed more to Bonaparte than to the democratic opening he had said he would bring to the French presidential system. His attempts to force march Europe toward a vision of “strategic autonomy” backed by its own integrated military has met resistance in the countries like Poland that are most attached to America as a European power.Emerging from the moderate left of the political system, and supported by many Socialists five years ago, Mr. Macron veered to the right both in his initial economic policy and in a much-criticized decision to confront what he called “Islamist separatism” by shutting down several mosques and Islamic associations — often on flimsy legal grounds.He judged that he had more to gain on the right than to fear on the fragmented left of the political spectrum in a country whose psyche has been deeply marked by several Islamist terrorist attacks since 2015. In a sense, his victory proved him correct, the master of a broad web of adjustable allegiances that left his opponents floundering.Aida Alami More

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      Inside Le Pen Territory as France Votes in a Runoff Election

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      Whatever happens in the runoff election on Sunday, France has changed, and the winner may face a turbulent season.ST. RÉMY-SUR-AVRE, France — Eternal France, its villages gathered around church spires, its fields etched in a bright patchwork of green and rapeseed yellow, unfolds as if to offer reassurance in troubled times that some things do not change. But the presidential election on Sunday, an earthquake whatever its outcome, suggests otherwise.France has changed. It has eviscerated the center-left and center-right parties that were the chief vehicles of its postwar politics. It has split into three blocs: the hard left, an amorphous center gathered around President Emmanuel Macron, and the extreme right of Marine Le Pen.Above all, with Ms. Le Pen likely to get some 45 percent of the vote, it has buried a tenacious taboo. In a country that for four wartime years lived under the racist Nazi-puppet Vichy government, no xenophobic, nationalist leader would be allowed into the political mainstream, let alone be able to claim the highest office in the land.Unlikely to win, but well within the zone of a potential surprise, Ms. Le Pen has shattered all of that. She is no outlier. She is the new French normal. If Mr. Macron does edge to victory, as polls suggest, he will face a restive, fractured country, where hatred of him is not uncommon. The old nostrum that France is ungovernable may be tested again.In St. Rémy-sur-Avre, Ms. Le Pen took 37.2 percent of the vote in the first round of the election, pushing Mr. Macron into a distant second with 23.6 percent.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesSt. Rémy-sur-Avre, a small town of some 4,000 inhabitants about 60 miles west of Paris, is Le Pen territory. In the Maryland cafe, named for a cigarette brand that is no more, the prevailing view is that something has to give in a France that has lost its way under a president too privileged and remote to know anything of the burden of struggle.Customers buy lottery tickets, or bet on the harness racing on television, in the hope of unlikely relief from hardship. A kir, white wine with a little black current liqueur, is a popular morning drink. The streets are deserted; most stores have disappeared, crushed by the hypermarkets out on the highway. In this town, Ms. Le Pen took 37.2 percent of the vote in the first round of the election on April 10, pushing Mr. Macron into a distant second with 23.6 percent.Jean-Michel Gérard, 66, one of the kir drinkers, worked in the meat business from age 15, as a butcher, in slaughterhouses, or as a trucker hauling beef carcasses. But he had to stop at 60, when his knees gave out from regularly carrying several tons of meat a day on his back, the record being a single 465-pound rear of a bull.“Now we have a generation of slackers,” he said. “When I was young, if you did not work, you did not eat.”The old France of solidarity and fraternity had disappeared, he lamented, gone like the horse butchers where he started work and replaced by a new France of individualism, jealousy and indulgence.The old France of solidarity and fraternity has disappeared and been replaced by a new France of individualism, jealousy and indulgence, said Jean-Michel Gérard, who worked in the meat industry until a few years ago.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York TimesHe voted for the left until François Mitterrand, the former Socialist president, imposed limits on work hours, and then switched his allegiance to the far-right National Front party, now Ms. Le Pen’s National Rally. What infuriated him, he said, was foreigners collecting social benefits and handouts without working.“We didn’t want to work less, we wanted to work more to earn more. What’s the use of free time without money?” he asked. “If foreigners work, they have their place. If not, no.”Mr. Gérard gazed out at the church. That jogged a memory. The other day, he said, he saw a young man from the Maghreb urinating on the church wall. He shouted at the man, who looked about 17. “What would you do if I urinated on a mosque?”The fraught relationship between France and Islam — in the country with the largest Muslim population in Western Europe and a recent history of terrorist attacks — has been one of the themes of the election campaign. Mr. Macron has called Ms. Le Pen’s program racist for wanting to make head scarves illegal on the grounds that they constitute a threatening “Islamist uniform” — on the face of it, an extraordinary claim, given that an overwhelming majority of Muslims in France just want to live peacefully.Muslims attending Friday Prayer this week at a mosque in an eastern suburb of Paris. The fraught relationship between France and Islam has been one of the themes of the election campaign.Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times“If women are wearing them just for their religion, OK,” Mr. Gérard said, “but I think in general it’s a provocation.”Maryvonne Duché, another firm supporter of Ms. Le Pen, was seated at a table close by. She started work at 14 as a sales clerk, before spending 34 years on the production line at a nearby Philips electronics factory, which closed 12 years ago.“Apart from two pregnancies, I worked nonstop from age 14 to 60, and now I have a pension of 1,160 euros a month,” she said — or about $1,250. “It’s pathetic, with almost half going in rent, but Macron doesn’t care.”And Ms. Le Pen? “I don’t love her, but I will vote for her to get rid of Macron.”The view of Mr. Macron in this town was of near-universal disdain: a man with no respect for French people, removed from reality, so cerebral he has no idea of “real life,” insensitive to the everyday problems of many people, from a class that has “never changed a kid’s diaper,” in Mr. Gérard’s words.Ms. Le Pen, by contrast, is seen as someone who will protect people from the disruptive onslaught of the modern world.What to Know About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 4Heading to a runoff. More

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      Who Will France’s Muslims Choose for President?

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      In Sunday’s decisive runoff election, they have a distasteful choice between Macron and Le Pen. They won’t necessarily back Macron.BONDY, France — Abdelkrim Bouadla voted enthusiastically for Emmanuel Macron five years ago, drawn by his youth and his message of transforming France. But after a presidency that he believes harmed French Muslims like himself, Mr. Bouadla, a community leader who has long worked with troubled young people, was torn.He likened the choice confronting him in France’s presidential runoff on Sunday — featuring Mr. Macron and Marine Le Pen, whose far-right party has a long history of anti-Muslim positions, racism and xenophobia — as “breaking your ribs or breaking your legs.’’Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen are now fighting over the 7.7 million voters who backed Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist leader who earned a strong third-place finish in the first round of the election. Were they to break strongly for one of the candidates, it could prove decisive.Nearly 70 percent of Muslims voted for Mr. Mélenchon, the only major candidate to have consistently condemned discrimination against Muslims, according to the polling firm, Ifop.By contrast, Mr. Macron garnered only 14 percent of Muslim voters’ support this year, compared to 24 percent in 2017. Ms. Le Pen got 7 percent in the first round this year. Nationwide, according to Ifop, the turnout of Muslim voters was a couple of percentage points higher than the average.As the two candidates battle it out in the closing days of a tight race, Mr. Macron’s prospects may rest partly on whether he can persuade Muslim voters like Mr. Bouadla that he is their best option — and that staying home risks installing a chilling new anti-Muslim leadership.In Mr. Bouadla’s telling, however, that will take some doing.“If I vote for Macron, I’d be participating in all the bad things he’s done against Muslims,’’ Mr. Bouadla, 50, said over the course of a long walk in Bondy, a city just northeast of Paris. He vacillated between abstaining for the first time in his life or reluctantly casting a ballot for Mr. Macron simply to fend off someone he considered “worse and more dangerous.’’Most polls show that Mr. Macron’s lead, about 10 percentage points, provides a comfortable path to re-election, but it is far narrower than his 32 percentage point margin of victory over Ms. Le Pen in 2017.But as Éric Coquerel, a national lawmaker and a close ally of Mr. Mélenchon said, the turnout by Muslim voters could tip the balance if the race “becomes extremely tight.’’Much of Muslim voters’ anger toward Mr. Macron centers on his pushing a widely condemned 2021 law and the subsequent closing of more than 700 Muslim institutions that the authorities say encouraged radicalization, a charge that many Muslims and some human rights groups dispute. But it remains unclear how this resentment might be transformed into a political force.Mr. Bouadla, third from the left, chatting with local residents in northern Bondy in the Seine-Saint-Denis region outside of Paris.James Hill for The New York TimesFrance’s estimated 6 million Muslims account for 10 percent of the population, but their political influence has long been undermined by high abstention rates and divisions based on class and ancestry. Given that history, Mr. Mélenchon’s strong Muslim backing may have signaled a shift, analysts say.Julien Talpin, a sociologist at the National Center for Scientific Research, said that the mobilization by Muslims behind a single candidate was “something entirely new.’’“In the past, there were only vague calls to vote for candidates favorable to Islam,’’ he said.France’s 6 million Muslims, like these praying at a mosque in Angers last year, have felt under attack my both Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen, who are now courting their votes.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesMr. Mélenchon scored his biggest victories nationwide in Bondy and in the rest of Seine-Saint-Denis, the department just north of Paris that has strong concentrations of the capital region’s poor, immigrant and Muslim populations.The source of much of the service workforce of the capital, the department also inspires fear and anxiety especially among older French people, whose feelings about immigration and crime are fanned by the right-wing news media and politicians. Éric Zemmour, the far-right TV pundit who came in fourth in the first round, following a campaign focused on attacking Islam, described the department as a “foreign enclave’’ suffering from “religious colonization.’’In Bondy, a strong turnout was reported in the first round in neighborhoods with historically low voting levels.“The number of young people, families and especially the people waiting in line — something was happening,’’ said Mehmet Ozguner, 22, a local organizer for Mr. Mélenchon’s party.Campaign posters for Mr. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the strong preference of Muslim voters, in Bondy in the Seine-Saint-Denis department. How that vote splits could influence Sunday’s election. James Hill for The New York TimesMany imams, social media influencers and other community leaders called on Muslim voters to unite their ballots in favor of Mr. Mélenchon.“There was no formal organization, but many ad hoc alliances, mobilization by union activists and antiracism activists,’’ said Taha Bouhafs, 24, a journalist with a large online following and an ally of Mr. Mélenchon’s party, who is planning to run in the election for Parliament in June.In 2017, Mr. Macron had reassured many Muslims that he would be more open on issues of French secularism, known as “laïcité, diversity and multiculturalism,’’ said Vincent Tiberj, a sociologist at Sciences Po Bordeaux university who has studied the voting patterns of French Muslims. Mr. Macron even called colonization a “crime against humanity’’ during a visit to Algeria.In a major speech on what Mr. Macron described as an Islamist-driven separatist movement in French society, Mr. Macron acknowledged that successive governments had encouraged the trend by settling immigrants in areas of “abject poverty and difficulties,” like Seine-Saint-Denis.But Mr. Tiberj said that there was a gap “between what he said as president and what his government did in his name.”Mr. Macron hardened his positions after the beheading of a middle-school teacher, Samuel Paty, by an Islamist fanatic angry that the teacher had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class on blasphemy.A memorial to Samuel Paty, who was beheaded by a militant Islamist, at the middle school where he taught. Mr. Macron hardened his position on Islamist separatism after the killing.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesIn response, Mr. Macron pushed forward his anti-separatism law despite widespread criticism from international and national human rights organizations, including the government’s National Human Rights Commission. The law gave the government greater power over religious establishments, schools and other associations.What to Know About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 4Heading to a runoff. More

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      France’s Marine Le Pen Is as Dangerous as Ever

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      TOULOUSE, France — In 2017, we thought we’d seen the worst French politics could offer.Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, had made it through to the second round of the country’s presidential elections. For the first time since 2002, a far-right figure was in the runoff to become president — and with considerably more support. When Ms. Le Pen lost to Emmanuel Macron, albeit with a worrying 34 percent share of the vote, we breathed a collective sigh of relief. Many hoped Ms. Le Pen, after falling at the final hurdle, would fade into obscurity.It was not to be. Ms. Le Pen never went away, instead biding her time and preparing for the next tilt at power. She now has more chance of winning it than ever: After taking 23 percent in the first round, she’s within eight points of Mr. Macron in the second, on April 24. She’s benefited from the presence of the even more hard-line Éric Zemmour, whose lurid reactionary persona made Ms. Le Pen seem, by contrast, more reasonable. Yet she’s also embarked on a comprehensive effort to soften her image, renaming her party, downplaying the harsher elements of her platform and presenting herself as a warm, even folksy woman who loves her cats.But no one should be fooled. At the head of a party that long housed Nazi collaborators, Ms. Le Pen is an authoritarian whose deeply racist and Islamophobic politics threaten to turn France into an outright illiberal state. She may pretend to be a regular politician, but she remains as dangerous as ever. For the good of minorities and France itself, she must not prevail.If Ms. Le Pen looks more mainstream now, it’s because the mainstream looks more like her. In the years running up to the last election, she ran on a hard-right platform, stoking antagonism toward immigrants and French Muslims under the guise of protecting public order. She especially targeted minorities, “to whom,” she said bitterly, “everything is due and to whom we give everything.” In response to her success in 2017, nearly every party on the political spectrum — centrist, traditional right wing and even socialist — used the talking points of her party, now named National Rally (formerly National Front).The tenor of political discussion, as a result, has shifted substantially to the right. There is now barely any space in French politics to advocate for French citizens who don’t look, behave, pray or eat the way “traditional” French people are supposed to — let alone to champion the rights of immigrants and refugees. In this environment, Ms. Le Pen can turn her attention to more everyday issues, such as rising energy bills and the cost of living, safe in the knowledge that on immigration, citizenship and “national identity,” she’s already won the argument.That success didn’t happen overnight. For more than 30 years now, French political debate has centered itself around issues of identity at the expense of more pressing topics such as health care, climate change, unemployment and poverty. The far right has led the way. Exploiting feelings of decline at the end of the 1960s — as France shed its colonial empire, lost the war in Algeria and submitted to American domination of Western Europe — the far right became a potent political force. It used its influence to defend its conception of French identity, evoking a thousand-year-old European Christian civilization threatened by North African Muslim immigration.This was the foundation upon which the National Front was created in 1972 by Ms. Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. As people from France’s former colonies migrated to the metropole, the party focused obsessively on the supposed dangers of immigration. Mr. Le Pen’s tone was often apocalyptic: “Tomorrow,” he infamously said in 1984, “immigrants will stay with you, eat your soup and sleep with your wife, your daughter or your son.” Such rancorous resentment found some sympathy in certain quarters of French society, where the homogenizing effects of globalization and the increased visibility of Islam among French-born citizens were held to be stripping France of its essential character.This antipathy took in many targets, among them French Jews. Mr. Le Pen was notorious for his antisemitic remarks — for which he was condemned by the courts multiple times — and the party created in his image trafficked in antisemitic ideas, tropes and images. Though Ms. Le Pen claimed to be moving past her father’s fixation on Jews, she continued to fan the flames — refusing in 2017 to accept France’s culpability for the Vichy regime’s role in the Holocaust and even, in a campaign poster this April, appearing to make a gesture associated with neo-Nazis. Capped by Mr. Zemmour’s open embrace of the Vichy regime, antisemitism has re-entered the political mainstream.Muslims have similarly borne the brunt of bigotry. Initially considered a threat from elsewhere — supposedly coming to France to deprive the native-born of jobs — Muslims have in recent decades been viewed as an internal threat. With the rise of Islamist terrorism, Muslims were seen to be practicing an inherently violent religion that required containment by public authorities. To be a Muslim was to be guilty until proved innocent.The past decade has taken this equation to a new level. The widespread fear now is not that a handful of people among nearly six million Muslims might pose a danger to public safety, but that all French Muslims by their very existence threaten the cultural identity of “traditional France.” It is, for some voters, an existential fear. In response, politicians have pushed measures to curb Islam’s purported infringement on French life, such as banning religious attire in public schools, full-face coverings in public spaces and burkinis on public beaches, and passing a bill that gives the state power to monitor Muslim religious observance and organizations.To justify such moves, politicians weaponized the liberal concept of laïcité — effectively state-backed secularism — to restrict freedom of religion and conscience in the interests of an anti-Muslim agenda. This process, crucially, has made it possible for Ms. Le Pen to turn from radical firebrand to reasonable truth-teller. But underneath the sheen of normalcy, the brutally racist ideology her party pioneered over the past 30 years is very much intact.Her manifesto, for example, promises to amend the Constitution to prohibit the settlement of a “a number of foreigners so large that it would change the composition and identity of the French people” — a rewording of the white-supremacist “Great Replacement” theory. She also plans to legally distinguish between “native-born French” and “others” for access to housing, employment and benefits, and allow citizenship only to people who have “earned it and assimilated.” Completing the picture, Ms. Le Pen has said she would ban the wearing of the head scarf in public spaces.In these promises as well as the company she keeps — she has associated with Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad and Viktor Orban — Ms. Le Pen has made clear her intention to reshape France at home and abroad. Her administration would echo those in Brazil, India and other countries where a similar rightward slide has taken hold. For minorities, immigrants, dissidents and democracy itself, it would be a disaster. Though her momentum appears to have stalled in recent days, Ms. Le Pen is not going away, no matter what happens on Sunday. As a French Muslim citizen born and raised here, I fear for my country.And it is my country, as much as it is Ms. Le Pen’s or Mr. Macron’s. At a time when politicians and pundits are demanding Muslims “abide by republican values” if they want to be part of the country, it’s instructive that voters may elect a politician whose core ideology violates the values of liberty, equality and fraternity that France has long championed. In that irony lies the gap between what France could be and what it is.Rim-Sarah Alouane (@RimSarah) is a Ph.D. candidate and a researcher in comparative law at Toulouse 1 Capitole University in France. Her research focuses on civil liberties, constitutional law and human rights in Europe and North America.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Marine Le Pen Proposes Ban on Muslim Women Wearing Head Scarves

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      Marine Le Pen, the far-right contender, has proposed a ban on Muslim women wearing head scarves in public.PARIS — A Muslim woman in a blue and white hijab confronted Marine Le Pen, the far-right presidential candidate, as she made her way through a crowd in the southern town of Pertuis last week. “What is the head scarf doing in politics?” the woman demanded.Ms. Le Pen, a nationalist with an anti-immigrant agenda, has vowed to ban the wearing of the head scarf in public if she is elected in the second round of voting next Sunday. She says that it is “an Islamist uniform,” or a sign of adherence to an extremist, anti-Western interpretation of the Muslim faith.The woman who argued with Ms. Le Pen was having none of this. Her choice to wear a head scarf was made, she said, “when I was an older woman,” as a sign of “being a grandmother.” Ms. Le Pen insisted that in many French neighborhoods women who do not wear a veil are “separated, isolated and judged.” In the country with the largest Muslim population in western Europe, what a woman wears on her head matters. France has a troubled relationship with Islam because of its colonial history in Algeria and several jihadist terror attacks in recent years. As Ms. Le Pen and President Emmanuel Macron confront each other in a tight race, religious freedom, particularly for the Muslims who make up about 8 percent of the population, has emerged as a pivotal issue.Mr. Macron, who has called Ms. Le Pen’s plan “an extremist project,” has nevertheless angered some members of the Muslim community, mainly through legislation designed to combat what he calls “Islamist separatism.” That law, passed last year, has been used to close some mosques and Islamic associations accused of fostering radicalism. It was designed in part to draw right-wing voters to his centrist camp.Mr. Macron, whose lead in polls has widened slightly over the past week to 53.5 percent against Ms. Le Pen’s 46.5 percent, had his own confrontation with a young French woman wearing a hijab during a campaign stop in Strasbourg last week.“Are you a feminist?” he asked. “Are you for the equality of women and men?”President Emmanuel Macron of France at a rally in Marseille on Saturday.Afp Contributor#Afp/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen the woman answered yes to both questions, and said her head scarf was chosen, not imposed, Mr. Macron, clearly alluding to Ms. Le Pen, said this was “the best answer to all the stupidity I keep hearing.”It was another example of Mr. Macron, who scarcely campaigned before the first round of voting on April 10, adjusting his message to appeal to blocs of voters who have felt betrayed by him over the past five years — the Muslim community and the left.In the first round, about 70 percent of French Muslims voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left candidate who was narrowly eliminated, according to a study by the Ifop polling institute. Where those votes now go matters.France is a secular republic and in theory a nondiscriminatory society where people are free to believe, or not, in any god they wish. But it finds itself in a fracturing debate over Islam. A growing Muslim presence is seen by the extreme-right as a mortal threat to French identity, and this view has gained a foothold in the political mainstream.Intensely attached to its model of a secular society, known as laïcité, which is supposed to subsume all men and women into the rights and responsibilities of French citizenship, France has been reluctant to acknowledge failures that have left many Muslim immigrants and their descendants in dismal housing projects on the periphery of big cities, feeling no viable French identity or future.Since 2011 it has been illegal to wear a face-covering niqab, or a burqa covering the entire body, in public. But there is no ban on the head scarf.French laws prohibit wearing ostentatious religious symbols — the head scarf is considered one — in schools. Civil servants are also barred from doing so on the job. Debate has raged over whether parents accompanying school trips should be allowed to wear head scarves, but attempts to stop them have failed.A woman in a head scarf in Marseille on Saturday ahead of a campaign appearance by Mr. Macron.Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesStrongly held French feelings about the equality of men and women, about secularism, and about its supposedly colorblind society lie behind the virulence of the discussion of these issues. So does unacknowledged or overt prejudice.Mr. Macron has accused Ms. Le Pen of undermining the principles of laïcité and the Constitution itself with the proposed head scarf ban. In an interview with Franceinfo radio last week, he said she would also have to ban the use of the “kippa, the cross and other religious symbols” in public or she would be discriminating among believers.Not so, Ms. Le Pen retorted in an interview with France Inter radio. “The head scarf is in reality an Islamist uniform, it is not a Muslim uniform, and that makes all the difference. It is the uniform of an ideology, not of a religion.”She continued: “This ban is not based on the concept of laïcité. It is based on the battle against Islamist ideologies.”However, Ms. Le Pen appeared to hedge a little on Sunday, saying that the issue is a “complex problem” and that her proposed ban would be debated in the National Assembly.Whether the ban would also apply to women choosing head scarves as fashion statements à la Audrey Hepburn is unclear.What to Know About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 4Heading to a runoff. More