Presidential campaigns offer an abundance of catch phrases, whether slogans finessed by a candidate's team to deliver maximum impact or coined spontaneously on the trail. The proclamations – and gaffes – of presidential hopefuls bring texture to an election race and come to define a campaign, whether for a news cycle or forever in the history books. FRANCE 24 breaks through the language barrier to bring you the buzzwords of the 2022 French presidential race. In the spotlight: "Créolisation".
With two far-right challengers polling high in the French presidential election race and a mainstream conservative tacking right to keep pace, it is hardly surprising that immigration and national identity are hot topics on the campaign trail in France.
Hardline pundit-turned-politician Éric Zemmour, a proponent of "great replacement" theory – a conspiracy theory claiming that elites are trying to replace White people across Europe with African and Middle Eastern immigrants – is giving far-right stalwart Marine Le Pen a run for her money on the right. But conservative Valérie Pécresse is fighting for hardline votes, too. During her first major rally in Paris on Sunday, Pécresse assured the crowd that she was “not resigned to the great replacement”. She also appeared to question the loyalty of naturalised French citizens, touting the virtues of "assimilation" because, as she put it, "I want people who are French in their hearts and not just on paper."
Jingoism versus jambalaya
Not content to let Zemmour dominate the debate on what constitutes French identity, candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the far-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party has been counterpunching with the idea of "créolisation" – a concept with roots in the Americas that suggests the meeting of cultures creates something greater, or at least new and different, than the sum of their parts, a synergistic blend, like the diverse origins of a Creole language.
"Assimilation doesn't exist; what exists is créolisation. And it comes in stages: first, there is the integration of those who arrive. If that works, créolisation will happen faster," Mélenchon told Zemmour during a televised debate in September.
Mélenchon had used the term before the current campaign. But in making his third bid for the presidency he has come to rely on it regularly amid the glut of presidential candidates playing on fears over immigration. The far-left candidate says that viewpoint simply doesn't live up to reality.
"The process of créolisation is neither a platform nor an idea that I am proposing; it's a fact," Mélenchon told Zemmour during another televised face-to-face clash in January. "Every place where human societies have brought their cultures together, they have been créolised. I'm talking about culture, about music ... "
Where does the term come from?
Mélenchon is quick to credit Younous Omarjee, a far-left MEP from the French overseas region of La Réunion, for giving him the idea. Credit for the term goes to Édouard Glissant, a poet from Martinique in the French Antilles, who coined it in the 1980s. "Créolisation", as Glissant defines it, is "a blend of cultures that creates something new", something unexpected, that "belongs to none of the cultures that comprise it".
During a December campaign rally, Mélenchon offered his own take on the idea. "Whatever one's gender, colour or religion, we are called upon to love one another, and so we pool together our tastes and our cultures. That's créolisation. Créolisation is the future of humanity," he told a crowd of 5,000 at a venue west of Paris.
Rivals unswayed
Unsurprisingly, Mélenchon's tolerant take on immigration hasn't persuaded the irascible Zemmour.
"When Mélenchon talks about the créolisation of society, in 2050, what is he saying? He is taking a pleasant-sounding word – one thinks of pretty Martinique women and punch – but that isn't what's lying in wait for us," Zemmour has retorted. "What is lying in wait for us is hijabs and halal kebabs. That's what it is. That's not créolisation, that's islamisation," he insisted.
But Mélenchon's distinctive spin on the hot topic of immigration hasn't persuaded more like-minded rivals, either. Before throwing in the towel in January, leftist Arnaud Montebourg – who, like Mélenchon, quit the Socialist Party to strike out on his own – was similarly hostile to Mélenchon’s characterisation of the term.
"I think Mélenchon has a problem in his vision of the French Republic and I don't relate to his idea of 'créolisation'," Montebourg, who earned the nickname Monsieur Made in France as minister of industrial renewal under Socialist president François Hollande, said in December.
French Communist Party contender Fabien Roussel, meanwhile, also rejects the term espoused by his fellow leftist and said as much in a pre-campaign book he entitled, "My France".
As it stands, the race for the Élysée Palace itself remains a jumble of competing visions for France, far from coalescing into something greater than the sum of its parts.
To explore FRANCE 24's other campaign buzzwords, click here.
