Pablo Iglesias calls France's system 'apartheid'

Iglesias and French 'apartheid': assimilation or ghetto

As highlighted in the debate, France has no law that distinguishes one citizen from another based on skin colour. And yet, for former Deputy Prime Minister of Spain Pablo Iglesias, the neighbouring country operates 'an apartheid system, an internal colonialism against French citizens who do not have white skin'. The remark, posted on social media, reignites a debate Europe has been dragging on for years: is it structural racism or a lack of integration? Depending on how you answer, the entire diagnosis changes.

What 'internal colonialism' actually means

The concept itself raises suspicion within the debate. The textbook definition of colonialism refers to 'a political and economic regime in which a state controls and exploits a territory that is not its own'. The objection is obvious: a peripheral neighbourhood of Lyon or Marseille is not foreign territory, it is French soil with residents holding French ID cards.

The defence of the term takes a different path. Some side with Iglesias and argue that white French people foster marginalisation and push the Black population into peripheral ghettos, albeit with an income and French nationality. What is criticised is the choice of word, so loaded that everyone interprets it as they please.

The assimilation argument: the case of Spanish emigrants

If skin colour were the key, why do the children of Spanish emigrants in Switzerland feel Swiss? That is the comparison raised by one of the participants. Concrete cases are cited of families who moved to Switzerland, Germany or France, whose children speak the local language and identify with their adopted country more than with Spain.

The reasoning is simple and, for that very reason, uncomfortable for the apartheid thesis: integration would depend less on pigment than on other variables.

Ghettos, crime and the flight of residents

Some outright deny the premise. They essentially argue that the neighbourhoods now called ghettos began as workers' areas, and that what came afterwards was a gradual drain: as crime and insecurity rose, the long-standing residents left and those arriving filled the gap. Under that reading, there is no state segregation policy, but thousands of chained individual decisions.

A legal argument is added to this: French law, it is argued, makes no distinction based on sens, race or religion when it comes to setting up a business, working, paying taxes or studying. If there is no legal obstacle, the question they pose is where, then, is the apartheid.

Religion, ethnicity and the mistake of confusing them

Among the internal criticisms one stands out: the habit of conflating Muslim with Arab, as if religion were a race. It is not. There are Jovenlandeses of every origin and Arabs of every faith, and treating them as a homogeneous bloc distorts any diagnosis made afterwards.

The detail matters because much of the argumentation, on both sides, uses 'Muslim' and 'immigrant' as interchangeable synonyms. When such a basic concept is confused from the start, the entire structure built on top of it wobbles.

The personal criticism and the question that remains open

Iglesias is also criticised for the gap between his rhetoric and his biography. The man who warned about the multiculturalism of neighbourhoods ended up moving to a villa in Galapagar, and had police protection at the door of his home, his critics recall. It is the classic 'do as I say, not as I do' that is never missing on social media.

There are also those who call for tough solutions, including expulsions, for those who do not feel part of the country.

All in all, the underlying question remains unanswered. If the French system has no racial laws, where does the segregation that some denounce and others deny come from? Is it structural racism, a failure of integration, or simply a coincidence of geography and income? Nobody has closed the debate.