You’ve probably never heard of Hayange. It’s a town in France’s northeastern steel belt that has fallen on hard times. The Tata steel plant is still a big employer but the ArcelorMittal blast furnace shut down a few years ago.
Thanks to Fabien Engelmann, its new far-right mayor, though, Hayange is gaining lively fame, with journalists flocking there as if “on a visit to the zoo”. That’s how Mr Engelmann, who has a passion for animals and a keen admiration for the activism of Brigitte Bardot, describes the media attention.
I followed the herd to Hayange, because it’s a sort of laboratory of National Front management in a European political landscape where populist and far-right parties are causing great anxiety.
Mr Engelmann is one of more than a dozen National Front mayors elected six months ago. These mayors are supposed to demonstrate a more respectable and mainstream version of the front’s old xenophobic self.
Sadly for party leader Marine Le Pen, Mr Engelmann – a 34-year-old plumber and one-time leftist union activist before he turned far-right official – is doing a poor job at that.
Mr Engelmann comes across at first as a serious type, even when dressed in jeans and green vest. He rattles off a list of achievements: better security for a town with 15 per cent unemployment, more flowers on the streets, more festivities and no more drunken youth or aggressive beggars.
But then there is the more colourful stuff: the pig festival he staged in town, the battle with the halal butcher, the row over oriental dance and an investigation into his campaign finances. And not to forget the repainting in blue (colour of his party) of an egg-shaped sculpture that he considered “a hideous piece of art that needed refreshing”.
As you would expect, Mr Engelmann has strong views about immigration and the supposedly menacing Islamisation of French society.
His problem is the Kosovar and Albanian migrants housed in the town and living on benefits. They are, he says, a “new immigration”, families that produce five to seven children, feed off the French state and want to impose a “middle ages dogma and a religion that is not ours”. He likes the good immigrants, however: Italians and Portuguese, Serbs and Armenians who, he says, have fewer children and find jobs and housing on their own.
Mr Engelmann reassures me nonetheless that he has nothing against Muslims. In fact, the September “fête du cochon” was not meant, as I had imagined, as an affront to the Muslim refugees in town, he says. It was simply a revival of a traditional festival in Hayange, which also celebrates a national day of the sheep. Some 2,000 locals showed up to dance, listen to music and eat pork.
Mr Engelmann is a vegetarian so therefore has no preference for a specific type of meat. But he stopped a plan to serve halal meat in schools and says students will have to do with the vegetarian alternative.
Unrelated to his sentiment towards halal meat or Islam, however, is his decision to force the halal butcher in town to close on Sundays. “The halal butcher is going to lose,” declares Mr Engelmann, because he’s not a grocer and therefore is breaching the law.
After meeting Mr Engelmann, I stopped to see Abdelkader Kharchach, the halal butcher. He sells a lot of groceries in addition to meat and he has a lawyer to fend off the pressure from the mayor. He says the National Front won because people in Hayange have lost faith in politics. Many migrants have left the town since Mr Engelmann took over.
“The mayor can buy me out if he wants,” says Mr Kharchach, but he is neither closing on Sundays nor leaving Hayange.
Surely Mr Engelmann has more important things to do than pick a fight with the halal butcher.
His campaign finances are being investigated after a former deputy’s claims of irregularity. He denies any wrongdoing and professes not to be worried. This controversy is about score settling, he tells me, by a former colleague who was cast aside. And that’s because she was “a loose cannon” who alienated her colleagues.
Among her many offences, apparently, was that she would rush into his office without knocking.
Roula Khalaf
Fonte: FT
