Paris (AFP)

Should the "communitarian lists" be prohibited? At six months of municipal, the question was raised by at least two politicians. But researchers call for caution in the face of a term according to some of the "microphenomene".

The president of the region Hauts-de-France Xavier Bertrand (ex-LR) put the issue on the table mid-September, asking the government to take steps to prohibit "that there will be in the next municipal elections lists + communitarian + ".

"Political Islam is in the process of becoming established," he warned, while the migratory subjects shake the political class, with a debate in the National Assembly on Monday.

The spokeswoman LREM Aurore Bergé has also said recently "very favorable to the idea that they are prohibited.These are lists that are dangerous for the Republic".

Which lists do the two officials refer to? Contacted by AFP, Xavier Bertrand quotes the Union of French Muslim Democrats (UDMF) which he says "claims to be anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, anticolonialist"

Created in 2012, the UDMF claims 900 members. It has collected less than 29,000 votes in the European, with peaks in some municipalities: 7.43% in Garges-lès-Gonesse (Val-d'Oise), 6.77% in Mantes-la-Jolie (Yvelines) .. In Poissy (Yvelines), an office had collected 29.81% of the votes. But 1.57% on the whole commune.

For the municipal elections of 2020, the UDMF has "about fifty lists in preparation," assures AFP its president and founder Nagib Azergui, who vigorously refutes the "sneaky amalgams" with communitarianism.

The party presents itself on its site as "non-denominational, secular and deeply republican". But "the Muslim is a scarecrow that one resorts at the approach of each election," he sighs.

Because the semantic field is undermined. "No one claims to have a + communitarian list +, the term is only used to discredit other people," says sociologist Fabrice Dhume-Sonzogni, author of "Communautarisme.Investigation on a chimera of French nationalism.

- "Microphenomena" -

Another party, coming from the Franco-Turkish community, the Justice Equality Party (PEJ) gives "rendez-vous in 2020 for the municipal!" on its website. But the party created in 2015, which calls for "a moratorium on secularism" and fights "the teaching of gender theory", had capped at 10,000 votes in the legislative elections of 2017.

For Vincent Tiberj, professor at Sciences-Po Bordeaux, one should not overestimate a "microphenomenon".

"Since the 2004 European elections such lists have been trying to exist, the results are very weak, when they manage to get candidates and present themselves," he notes, recalling that the UDMF "made 0.13 % of European votes for a population of 4 million Muslims in France ".

We are far from the scenario of "Soumission", the 2015 novel where Michel Houellebecq imagined the election of a Muslim president in France.

For Mr. Tiberj, "the notion of Muslim vote is to be relativised". They "vote mostly on the left" because for them "the religious agenda is not first," he says to AFP.

It is also difficult, according to him, to estimate the total number of lists on the ranks in municipal.

Remain that in this pre-municipal period, immigration is in the limelight, with recently a violent anti-Muslim speech of polemicist Eric Zemmour.

In May already, before the European, the validation by the Interior of the list of the UDMF had been criticized by several figures LR. The deputy of Alpes-Maritimes Eric Ciotti was worried about "the rise of Islamist communitarianism which gangrene our society", and the Minister of Public Accounts Gérald Darmanin (ex-LR) had considered that it was necessary "that the Republic defends "against these lists.

"If there had been the slightest comma, we would have been, rightly, banned," said Mr. Azergui.

The law makes it possible to dissolve a group inciting racial discrimination.

But manifesting a membership of a religion "is not an element likely to deprive a person of the possibility of being a candidate", which is related to "the right of suffrage, to the freedom of expression", analysis Romain Rambaud, Professor of Public Law at the University of Grenoble.

© 2019 AFP