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French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has become one of the main leaders in a recent crackdown on Muslim individuals and organizations that the state suspects of being involved in “terrorism”, following two recent deadly attacks.
Darmanin, 38, was born into a working-class family in the northern French town of Valenciennes, and is of Algerian and Maltese descent.
In 2014, he told the French publication Bondy Blog that he “feels deeply Catholic, culturally” and that his grandfather was Muslim.
Darmanin attended university at Sciences Po in the French city of Lille.
After a stint as chief of staff to the Minister for Sports, he was elected to the French parliament in 2012 as part of the center-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) party.
In early 2014, Darmanin was elected mayor of Tourcoing, a northern city. He also worked closely with the right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy, and is often described as his “protégé.”
In 2016, Darmanin led Sarkozy’s failed conservative primary election campaign under the banner of Les Républicains, which had been renamed the UMP.
However, when François Fillon, who won the Conservative nomination, became involved in a series of scandals, Darmanin withdrew his support for Les Républicains.
He soon came out in support of Emmanuel Macron, who is often described as a centrist.
When Macron became president in 2017, Darmanin was appointed budget minister and became a member of Macron’s La République En Marche. match.
In July 2020, Darmanin climbed higher, succeeding Christophe Castaner as Interior Minister.
Allegations of sexual misconduct and rape
In early 2018, charges were brought against Darmanin on allegations that, as mayor, he had demanded sexual favors from a constituent in exchange for access to social housing and a job. The case was later dismissed.
In June, a separate case dating from 2018 against Darmanin was reopened when a Paris appeals court declared that a previous investigation into allegations that he raped a woman had been inadequate.
Sophie Patterson-Spatz says that in 2009, when she sought Darmanin’s help to expunge her criminal record, he raped her. He claims his contact was consensual and has accused Patterson-Spatz of defamation.
When Darmanin was appointed Minister of the Interior, a position that is also headed by the police in France, hundreds took to the streets in protest in light of these accusations.
But President Macron defended Darmanin.
Response to attacks
In late September, when two people were injured in a knife attack in front of the former Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, Darmanin declared the event an “act of Islamist terrorism.”
On October 2, Macron delivered a speech that pitted France’s “secular values” against what he described as “Islamic radicalism,” promising a bill in December that would strengthen divisions between church and state. The “law of separatism” aims to punish those who deviate from the secular values deeply ingrained in France.
On October 16, an 18-year-old Chechen beheaded Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old teacher who had shown students caricatures of the prophet Muhammad from Charlie Hebdo, near Paris.
In the following days, Darmanin announced his plan to dissolve dozens of organizations, including a non-profit organization known as the Collective Against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) and the charity BarakaCity.
In the CCIF case, Darmanin falsely claimed that the organization had been associated with Paty’s murder, a claim that his staff later appeared to back down slightly.
Human rights organizations have expressed concern that Muslims are a collective target.
After the deadly 2015 attacks in Paris, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International said that thousands of raids yielded little results and made Muslims feel like second-class citizens.
Farid Hafez, a political scientist at the University of Salzburg and the Georgetown University Bridge Initiative, told Al Jazeera: “Darmanin has clearly sent a message that the rule of law does not apply to Muslims living in France,” and He added that his actions also communicated that “even if you want to defend yourself in the midst of this more than dubious repression of Muslim civil society, you could also be considered an ‘enemy of the Republic.’
Dozens of police raids were carried out across the country, and Darmanin declared that “the enemies of the Republic” cannot wait a minute’s respite.
Darmanin also ordered the closure of a mosque on the outskirts of Paris because he had shared a viral video criticizing Paty before her murder on his Facebook page.
In an October 20 interview with BFM TV, Darmanin suggested that certain food aisles, including kosher food and halal food, should be withdrawn from supermarkets as he spoke out against “separatism” – comments that were instantly ridiculed on social networks.
On October 29, an attacker killed three people in a church in the French city of Nice and a counter-terrorism investigation was opened into the incident.
“We need to understand that there have been and will be other events like these terrible attacks,” Darmanin said of the attacks. “We are at war against an ideology, the Islamist ideology.”
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