SOHRAB AHMARI INTERVIEWS FRENCH PRIME MINISTER MANUEL VALLS ****
http://www.wsj.com/articles/sohrab-ahmari-frances-anti-terror-free-market-socialist-1425080405?mod=hp_opinion
France’s Anti-Terror, Free-Market Socialist Prime Minister Valls talks about ‘Islamofascism,’ his personal experience with rising anti-Semitism, and the necessity of economic reform.
Paris
‘France has been struck very much at its heart by terrorism—jihadist terrorism and radical Islamism, because let us call things like they are.”
So begins French Prime Minister Manuel Valls as we sit down Tuesday in his office at the Hotel Matignon, the prime minister’s elegant compound in the French capital’s 7th arrondissement, on the left bank of the Seine. Mr. Valls speaks English, but in the interest of precision he uses an interpreter for this meeting. A portrait of President François Hollande, Mr. Valls’s boss, looks down from a corner.
When Mr. Valls says “let us call things as they are”—this is his first interview with an American publication since the terrorist atrocities in Paris last month—the contrast with the U.S. president is hard to miss. But when I later ask why other world leaders seem reluctant to acknowledge the Islamist nature of the terror threat, the prime minister says with a sly smile: “It’s up to you to draw the analysis.”
Dressed in a slim-fitting white shirt, and with his deep, firm voice, Mr. Valls exudes an intense confidence. You might say the 52-year-old Socialist embodies energy in the executive, a quality his compatriots have come to admire in an age that calls on leaders to “always start with the real situation, not an imaginary world,” as Mr. Valls puts it.
The “real situation” in France is perilous. When Mr. Valls was appointed interior minister in spring 2012, authorities were monitoring 30 possible jihadist cases, he says. “Now we have more than 1,400 people identified as a potential risk in terms of jihadism. And we have 90 French citizens or people who resided in France who died in Iraq or even more so in Syria. And the intelligence services now have to monitor some 3,000 individuals in relation to jihadist networks, which is huge and unprecedented in the history of counterterrorism.”
Mr. Valls views the Islamist threat as twofold. First “there are the terror organizations, like Islamic State and al Qaeda in all its forms,” he says. “This is what I would call an outside enemy.” The second threat is the jihadist network spread across Europe, or the “internal enemy.” The interplay of the two produced the Charlie Hebdo attack in January. The perpetrators were homegrown Islamists radicalized by al Qaeda’s Yemeni franchise. The terrorist who massacred four Jews at a kosher supermarket, meanwhile, claimed in a video released after his death to have been inspired by Islamic State.
In response to the attacks, Messrs. Hollande and Valls have set out to strengthen France’s counterterror capabilities. Using a law enacted in November, authorities on Monday confiscated the passports of six suspected jihadists before they could travel to the Mideast. The government is developing France’s first comprehensive legal framework for intelligence, boosting funding and staffing at agencies and granting them broader authority to identify and monitor terror suspects online.
“Given this exceptional situation we wanted some exceptional answers,” says Mr. Valls. “We want to act very fiercely and with a lot of determination and coherence,” but without “challenging the rule of law.”
About 10,000 security personnel are posted at potential terror targets, including synagogues, Jewish schools and mosques. Prison authorities are isolating jihadists to prevent them from radicalizing other inmates. And the French government is pushing the European Parliament to adopt a passenger-name record system similar to the one used by the U.S. government to collect data on air travelers.
Yet such steps won’t suffice, Mr. Valls suggests, if leaders fail to confront the fundamental question at the root of the jihadist scourge: “Where does Islam stand in our European society?” More questions: “Why would a 20-year-old make it his life project to go and die in Syria? Or even worse, to take up arms against his own society?” And how come the homegrown Islamist problem persists “no matter the social or integration model” adopted by a host country, whether that means multiculturalist Britain or secularist France?
Answering these questions requires an honest public conversation that will be especially fraught in France. “There are four to six million French citizens who are Muslims,” Mr. Valls says. “How can Islam prove that it is compatible with our values? With equality of women? With the separation of church and state? Therefore you have to put a name on things. . . . If you only say Islam has nothing to do with that, people won’t believe you.”
The failure to name the threat doesn’t help the multitudes of peaceful Muslims, who, Mr. Valls points out, are radical Islam’s “first victims,” alongside minority communities in the Middle East like Copts and Yazidis. “We need to name this Islamofascism,” he says, “because Islamic State is a form of totalitarianism, in their territory, in their ideology.”
Born in Barcelona to a Spanish father and Swiss mother, Manuel Valls immigrated to France as a child, but as he told a Spanish audience last year, he identifies as “fully French, passionately French.” He joined the Socialist Party at age 18, two years before taking French citizenship in 1982. Elected mayor of Évry, a southern suburb of Paris in 2001 and as a deputy to the National Assembly in 2002, the Sorbonne graduate rose quickly through party ranks.
He also developed a keen awareness of the French malaise, particularly in the ghettos, or banlieues, on the outskirts of major cities. One symptom of that malaise was an alarming rise in anti-Semitism, both in its thuggish street manifestation and the more high-minded variant popular among the French political and media class.
“The Jews have been here for 2,000 years,” he says. The French Jewish community “is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, in Europe. The community is really at the heart of building modern France.” The French Republic recognized Jews as full citizens in 1791, and Napoleon revived the Sanhedrin, the ancient Jewish religious court. Modern French liberalism grew as a reaction to the country’s most shameful anti-Semitic episodes, above all the Nazi-collaborationist regime of Marshal Petain.
But in the 1970s, a new type of Jew-hatred emerged among elites, one that expressed itself primarily as hostility to Zionism and Israel. This new bigotry, the prime minister says, has “all the components of anti-Semitism, the old ones,” including a “plot”-based view of imagined Jewish conspiracies. “Step by step,” the elites’ anti-Semitism “followed a migration and impacted young people in the poor neighborhoods,” Mr. Valls says.
“There will always be a couple of idiots who desecrate Jewish cemeteries—the petit Nazis,” Mr. Valls says. “But unfortunately I think that the anti-Semitism that struck French society is much deeper than that. In 2013 or 2014, you have people in the streets of Paris chanting ‘Death to the Jews!’ And in all the attacks in Paris or the attacks in Copenhagen, targeting the Jews is really at the heart of their motivation.”
The prime minister himself had a recent run-in with elite French anti-Semitism. Former Socialist Foreign Minister Roland Dumas speculated in a television interview that Mr. Valls “has personal alliances that mean he has prejudices. Everyone knows he is married to someone really good but who has an influence on him.” That would be the renowned violinist Anne Gravoin, who is a French Jew.
“At a personal level it didn’t affect me,” Mr. Valls says, “except that I felt that I was dirtied all over. But I immediately understood that when a former minister, a president of the Constitutional Council, says something, his words have a lot of influence for young people. It gives justification for how they think.” The day Mr. Dumas made his remarks, an Islamic State publication put out an image of the prime minister wearing a yarmulke. The caption, he recalls, read “Prime Minister Valls, Judaized by his wife.”
Though Mr. Valls is careful not to reduce one to the other, France’s social crisis is owed in part to the country’s economic failure. Growth is nonexistent. Unemployment remains above 10%. A quarter of French youth are unemployed. The most talented young French men and women are more likely to be working in Silicon Valley or London than in Paris. Foreign direct investment in France fell 94% over the past decade, thanks to the country’s high taxes, labyrinthine regulations and rigid labor-market rules.
With the old left incapable of addressing the economic problems that are largely its creation, Mr. Valls has emerged as a leader of the reform wing of the Socialists, emphasizing law and order, personal responsibility and free markets. “For 30 years France got used to massive unemployment, to too-high public spending and to not undertaking courageous reforms,” the prime minister says. “France must prove to itself and to the world that it is capable of reforming itself.”
Departing from traditional socialism, Mr. Valls says, “I very much believe in the role of the individual, the responsibility of each individual and individual accomplishment. I don’t believe in egalitarianism. You have to support, including at school, each individual according to his potential. We have unemployment benefits that somehow sponsor unemployment.” Instead, he wants to “sponsor going back to work.”
He has already made significant progress, though at a high political cost. Mr. Valls’s government is cutting public spending by €50 billion ($56 billion) and social taxes and fees on businesses by €40 billion ($45 billion) over the next three years. The government last year introduced a law to privatize some public assets, open 37 highly regulated professions to greater competition and allow shops to stay open 12 Sundays a year, from five currently, among other measures.
Sensing the law would face tough opposition from hard-left Socialists, Messrs. Hollande and Valls last week invoked a rarely used constitutional loophole that allows bills to bypass the National Assembly and go directly to the Senate for approval. The government survived a subsequent no-confidence vote.
Mr. Valls took the risk, he says, “because the French people were expecting it.” The government “never properly explained” why reforms were needed, he adds, which led to some resistance—but in any case “the French people are much more in favor of reforms than the elite.”
France’s combination of economic and security challenges makes leading the country an unenviable task. But Mr. Valls is optimistic—about France’s prospects and Europe’s generally. The European Union, he says, is “an unbelievable project.” From a historical perspective, he explains, the cooperation of so many disparate countries after centuries marked by antagonism together is “outstanding.”
True, “the U.S. still has the economic leadership. And China, and the major Asian countries and Africa” are all rising, Mr. Valls says. “Against all that the only question for Europe is: how not to step out of history. And the terrorist attacks are a reminder of why Europe can’t be selfish and inward looking,” why it must “face up to its responsibilities on the world stage.”
The future of liberal civilization depends on it.
Mr. Ahmari is a Journal editorial-page writer based in London.
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