“Hearing French people reject me is hurtful,” he confides.
During its campaign for the legislative elections, the National Rally (RN), at the top of the voting intentions, said it wanted to “prevent” dual nationals from occupying “extremely sensitive jobs”, for example Russian dual nationals for “positions of strategic direction in defense.
In January, the RN had already tabled a bill providing for the possibility of prohibiting access to jobs in public administrations and companies to French people with another nationality.
Thus, 3.3 million French people could tomorrow find themselves denied access to employment, according to estimates by the CFDT union.
During a televised debate on Tuesday, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal accused RN President Jordan Bardella of hypocrisy and of having a Franco-Russian representative, Tamara Volokhova, in a sensitive position in the European Parliament, in contradiction with the proposal of the RN.
In France, dual nationality does not prevent access to public sector jobs.
“There are nationality reserves in quite a few areas,” Patrick Simon, a demographer at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED), explained to AFP. “Non-EU nationals have limitations; there are additional restrictions for jobs in sovereign areas such as security and defense” in particular.
“However, dual nationals are not among the people subject to these restrictions because they are nominally and fully French,” he underlines. “What the RN intends to extend is to consider that dual nationals are not full nationals; this is obviously dangerous.”
We have to go back to the 1930s to find the establishment of restrictions for naturalized persons. By the Liberation, these laws had mostly disappeared.
In a column on Tuesday in the newspaper Le Monde, Mohamed Bouabdallah, a career diplomat and dual national, said he experiences “the fact that the loyalty of dual nationals can be questioned in this way” is “a great pain.”
“There are thousands of us with dual nationality (…) who occupy leading positions in the state apparatus, including so-called ‘sensitive’ positions,” he emphasizes.
According to him, “the RN is in line with the racist Vichy regime (…) In 2024, it will no longer be the Jews (their turn will come), but the Arabs and the Muslims.”
The dual nationals interviewed – who also say they are deeply attached to their other nationality – admit at the very least a feeling of discomfort and incomprehension, even injustice, in the face of this RN proposal.
“It’s an insult to all dual nationals,” reacts Amayas Allam, 24, a Franco-Algerian and student at a major business school, who is alarmed by the fact that a certain number of French people support this type of measure.
“What scares me is the precedent of discrimination between French people that this would create”, which could “open the door” to other measures targeting dual nationals on “access to healthcare, public services, etc.”
“I don’t understand this approach by the RN,” says Nadjet Aviles, 58, a secondary school teacher, who says she is “worried as a Franco-Algerian”. “It’s completely stigmatizing for dual nationals; I asked myself the question of whether I was starting to pack my bags, even though I’ve been living in France for 34 years, my children were born here…”, cries -she.
Rodrigo Arenas, Franco-Chilean LFI-Nupes (radical left) deputy, who arrived in France in 1978 at the age of 4 with his parents who were fleeing the Pinochet dictatorship, does not lose his temper either. This proposal is “pragmatic, political, strategic stupidity, which does not meet any need and is, on the contrary, contrary to the interests of France”, he told AFP.
“The National Assembly, the Senate and even the ministries are sometimes occupied by political figures who are of different nationalities. That’s the history of this country!” he insists.
An emotion shared by younger dual nationals.
Emily, a 17-year-old Franco-British woman living in Brittany (west), says she feels “fear”. “I’ve already had comments from people who weren’t very nice about my British nationality, but that’s just at school, whereas if it’s people who were potentially at the head of state and putting laws in place, it’s much more serious…”.
Franco-Malian singer Manda Sira, 30, is moved by a “lunar” proposal. “It’s a way of always creating differences and inequalities where on the contrary we fight to move forward and to move forward and to erase them…”, criticizes the artist, who is “alarmed” by the idea of a “classification of French people who would have more value or rights”.
These dual nationals hope that the French Constitutional Council will oppose such a proposal, or refuse “to believe it”.
Olga Prokopieva, a Franco-Russian who arrived in France in 1995, president of the Russia-Libertés association, feels “today much more French than Russian”. “I did all my studies and my life here, my daughter is binational too.”
She considers it “unthinkable” to be deprived of “some of (her) rights and possibilities”. “It’s a very worrying step backwards,” she says. “Perhaps the shock will be terrible after the legislative elections, but for the moment I prefer not to believe it.”
