Rise of the far right puts French pop star in crosshairs of Olympics culture war

It began as little more than a gossip item, when French magazine L’Express reported an intriguing tidbit about a meeting between President Emmanuel Macron and La Republique’s queen of pop, Aya Nakamura, at the Elysee Palace.

According to the magazine’s report of the meeting, Macron learned that Nakamura had been asked by Games organisers to perform at the opening ceremony of the Olympics and wanted to know about her taste in French music. “I really like Edith Piaf,” the recording star responded. “Well,” said Macron. “On the big day, you have to sing what you like.”

Inconvenient success: Aya Nakamura is the world’s most listened to French-speaking pop artist.Credit: Taylor Hill/Getty Images

In the three months since that conversation was first reported – an account neither confirmed nor denied by Macron, Nakamura or Paris 2024 organisers – the question of whether Nakamura, a sassy and wildly successful Malian-born R&B artist from Paris’ poor, post-industrial north, should be included in the July 26 opening ceremony has bubbled beneath the surface of the Games preparations.

Confirmation of the rise of France’s far right at last weekend’s European election, and Macron’s decision to call a snap national election just weeks before the Games, ensure that Nakamura and the challenge she represents to traditional notions of French identity will assume centre stage in a full-blown culture war.

Two of Nakamura’s most outspoken critics are the leading duumvirate of Rassemblement National, a hard-right, anti-immigration party which, according to exit polls, secured 31.5 per cent of the vote – more than double the support for Macron’s Renaissance or any other French political party – in the European elections

Marine Le Pen, the leader of RN’s parliamentary group and the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, a neo-fascist race-baiter who founded RN’s forerunner, the Front National, has described Nakamura’s act as vulgar and her mooted inclusion in the opening ceremony as a political provocation.

Marine Le Pen at a European election campaign rally for the far-right party, Rassemblement National.Credit: Nathan Laine/Bloomberg

“I’m going to talk to you about her outfit, her vulgarity, the fact that she doesn’t sing French,” Le Pen told France’s national radio. “She doesn’t sing foreign either. She sings – we don’t know what.”

Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s baby-faced dauphin who took over as RN president at the age of 28, led the party to a historically high-water mark in the European elections, has taken aim at Nakamura on different grounds.

Citing an altercation two years ago between Nakamura and her former partner in the basement studio of their home which ended before a Paris court, Bardella declared that Nakamura’s part in the fracas – she slapped her partner to the ground – should preclude her from singing at the Games.

Nakamura was fined €10,000 ($16,340) and her former partner €5000 over the altercation.

“That’s my personal belief,” Bardella said. “I think that when we have been convicted of domestic violence, we cannot represent France.”

Rassemblement National president Jordan Bardella says Nakamura is not fit to represent France at the Olympic opening ceremony.Credit: Lewis Joly/AP

Both of these attacks obscure the primary reason why Le Pen, Bardella and their supporters don’t want Nakamura, a black, Muslim woman, singing Non, je ne regrette rien beneath the Eiffel Tower before a gathering of world leaders and an expected global television audience of more than 1 billion people.

Nakamura, born Aya Daniolo, immigrated to France as a child and spent her teenage years in foster homes. Through her unique patois of French, English, Arabic and Bambara, she speaks to young, multi-ethnic France in a way that has made her the most streamed French language artist in the world and the face of Lancome, a leading brand within the L’Oreal empire.

Her success, although celebrated across the Seine-Saint-Denis local government area which takes in the Olympic athletes’ village, media village and venues for the athletics and swimming, is politically inconvenient to a movement that holds mass immigration, particularly Muslim immigration, as the root cause of France’s ills.

Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2017.Credit: AP

Le Pen, due to her family ties to the far-right movement and her previous failed tilts at two presidential election campaigns, is better known than Bardella, a political protege groomed, in part, to help separate her party’s public image from the overt racism of her father.

But Bardella, like Le Pen, does not eschew the anti-Islamic sentiment that underpinned the Front National.

French President Emmanuel Macron hugs Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Paris.Credit: Yoan Valat/Pool via AP

Like Nakamura, Bardella grew up in Seine-Saint-Denis, a collection of working-class banlieues or suburbs on Paris’ northern fringe which, depending on your political perspective, are emblematic of the vibrant multiculturalism of modern France or what Bardella describes as the “relentless rise of Islamic ideology”. He joined the Front National at the age of 16.

In announcing the dissolution of parliament ahead of an election later this month, Macron lamented the rise of “demagogues and nationalists on the right” at a time when he has just returned from D-Day celebrations, and is preparing to welcome an expected 15 million visitors to Paris for the Games.

“The far right is bad for the French people and the French nation,” he declared. “There is a feverish tone in the political debate in our country recently.”

Bardella said the European vote demonstrated the attachment French people still had to French identity, security, sovereignty and prosperity. “The French people tonight have said they want to take control of immigration policy,” he said. “They want the French state to control every square inch of France.”

If the European results are reflected in France’s national elections, the resultant shift to the right should not alter how the Olympics are staged. Two years ago, when political opposition to Macron’s pension reforms prompted a short-lived boycott movement against the Games, the president reminded everyone where power over Olympic decision-making ultimately resided.

“The Elysee is the boss of the Games,” he said.

However, the European election and a national poll in France will further heighten security concerns surrounding the Games, which due to Macron’s outspoken support of Ukraine and the war raging in Gaza are already facing possible Kremlin-sponsored cyberattacks and an increased risk of terrorism. The Vigipirate, France’s national security alert system, has been set to its highest level since March.

Nakamura and Bardella are the same age, grew up in similar neighbourhoods in Paris, and in their respective ways are precocious talents. The six weeks between now and opening ceremony will decide which of these faces France wants to show to the world.

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