How the National Assembly and the Senate talk (and do not talk) about Islamism

Summary

The analysis of 184 parliamentary questions on Islamism put to the National Assembly and the Senate between October 8, 2024 and May 5, 2026 reveals a deeply asymmetric debate, both in volume and in the words used. Three terms structure the divide: « Islamism » (driven by the right, 60 occurrences), « Islamophobia » (driven by the left, 9 occurrences) and « frérisme » (used by almost no one, 2 occurrences across the entire corpus). The most precise term for the ideological object is also the one parliamentarians use least.

Four ways of approaching the subject coexist: the RN (84 questions) characterizes and calls for measures; the presidential bloc and the Droite Républicaine follow the issues without taking a head-on stance; LFI-NFP (27 questions) concentrates 56% of its corpus on defending individuals, mainly around the wearing of the calot by female healthcare workers at the Pitié-Salpêtrière; Socialists and Ecologists deploy an institutional vocabulary of laïcité. The divide is confirmed by the vote of January 22, 2026: the resolution brought by the Droite Républicaine calling for the Muslim Brotherhood to be placed on the European list of terrorist organizations was adopted by 157 votes to 101, along a strict right-left line.

The ministers' silence is as telling as the questions themselves: 30% of the questions remain unanswered, 37 of them past the legal deadline, on the most structural topics - banning the Muslim Brotherhood, closing the IESH, Qatari funding, the appointment of imams by Algeria. Frérisme, the main contemporary political-religious challenge for the Republic, is treated in Parliament as an object of partisan branding rather than as a matter of general interest.

Key points

• Period studied: from October 8, 2024 to May 5, 2026, i.e. 19 months.
• On what: 184 parliamentary questions put to the National Assembly and the Senate on Islamism, recorded by the CERIF.
• How: two complementary readings - which words recur together in the questions, and with what tone those words are used.
• For whom: parliamentarians, journalists, researchers, and citizens interested in the public debate on Islamism.
• Date: May 10, 2026.

1. About CERIF's parliamentary watch

The CERIF maintains a parliamentary watch: it records the questions put by parliamentarians to the government when they concern Islamism.

For this analytical report, we retained the 184 French questions (National Assembly and Senate) put between October 8, 2024 and May 5, 2026, i.e. 19 months covering the end of the first year of Macron's second term, the July 2024 dissolution and the new 17th legislature, up to spring 2026. For each question, we have the title, the summary written by CERIF's analysts, and the identity of the author (political group, chamber).

We start by identifying, for each question, which words appear together. We then count all the pairings in the corpus and look at which recur most often; we set apart the pairings that recur everywhere (for example « question » and « minister », which appear in almost all parliamentary questions) from the pairings that recur more often than one would expect by chance - those are truly significant.

A parliamentarian does not merely raise a topic: they take a position - they accuse, or call for a measure, or defend someone, or ask to be informed, or remain neutral. We detect it by looking for marker words: for example, « denounce », « scandal », « drift » are accusation markers; « monitor », « ban », « sanction » are markers of a call for action; « discrimination », « stigmatization » are protection markers.

We identified 5 postures/positions:

• Accusation: the member denounces a situation, flags a drift, alerts the government (« I am concerned », « I denounce »).
• Call for action: the member asks the government to take a concrete measure: to monitor, sanction, close, ban, dissolve, regulate.
• Protection: the member defends a category of people they consider threatened by public policies (in practice, in this corpus, Muslims or people perceived as such).
• Information: the member asks the government for figures, a status report, an assessment, an evaluation.
• Procedural / neutral: the question is posed neutrally, without taking a position either way. Typical form: « the member asks the minister about… ». This is parliamentary scrutiny in its barest form.

Frérisme, radicalization, jihadism: the words for Islamism in this report

Islamism, in the scholarly literature, refers to a political-religious project that draws on Islam as a mobilizing resource.

It covers several distinct but analytically linked phenomena: legalist frérisme (a project of gradual Islamization through culture, school, the economy and the law), non-violent and productive of a cognitive breeding ground (a separate worldview, justification of violence); radicalization (an individual or collective process of ideological hardening, notably in prisons, schools or universities); and jihadism (the shift to violent action - attacks, designated terrorist organizations).

In its data collection, the CERIF does not separate frérisme, radicalization and jihadism a priori. This choice is deliberate and consistent with the analytical hypothesis: the boundary between these phenomena is porous, and separating them would amount to positing an impermeability that the facts contradict.

One can say the corpus questions break down as follows: ~110 on Islam and pure legalist frérisme (doctrine, actors, the CRPR law, places of worship, halal, universities, mosques), ~30 on radicalization as a process, ~10 to 15 on acts carried out (Mulhouse, Arc de Triomphe, Puget-sur-Argens, Aboubakar Cissé).

2. Recurring topics

Which topics recur most, and which are marginal?

The analysis of the 184 questions put between October 2024 and April 2026 brings out five major topics that structure the bulk of the parliamentary debate:

• Muslim Brotherhood - 33 questions explicitly devoted to the brotherhood. The pairing is associated with « Ministry of the Interior », « report », « entryism »: the government is asked to characterize and track the movement.
• CRPR law / home schooling / prior authorization - 16 to 18 word pairs around the home-education issue, the main area of application of the 2021 anti-separatism law.
• calot / discrimination / healthcare workers / Pitié-Salpêtrière - a cluster specific to a single issue (the wearing of the calot by female healthcare workers in public hospitals), on which LFI-NFP has filed a long series of almost identical questions.
• higher education / university / antisemitism - a post-October 7, 2023 cluster, driven by the presidential bloc and the Droite Républicaine.
• halal / ritual slaughter - a very specific pairing signaling an « economic regulation » approach to the halal industry.

3. The postures adopted

On the same topic, two members can say entirely different things: one denounces, another asks to be informed, a third defends the people targeted. How can one measure, beyond the topic addressed, the way each political group talks about it? That is the role of the posture indicator.

The chart below shows, for each French political group with at least four questions over the study period (October 2024 - May 2026), the share of each posture in its corpus. The wider the red block, the more the group accuses; the wider the blue, the more it calls for measures; the wider the purple, the more it defends a category of people; and so on.

The parliamentary debate on Islamism is asymmetric not only in volume but also in tone. The grid of themes is not enough to see it; posture tells how it is talked about. And the right / left divide is very pronounced.

The five profiles, in detail

RN (84 questions)
A mixed but clearly action-oriented profile. A third of the questions call for a concrete measure (oversight, dissolution, withdrawal of accreditation); one question in six explicitly accuses; one in six asks for figures or an assessment; a third stays neutral in tone, without taking a stance. Reading: a party that questions forcefully and proposes, and whose parliamentary agenda weighs heavily on the debate as a whole.

UDR (4 questions)
A very small number but a very clear-cut profile: half of the questions are in an accusatory posture. The group plays the role of a polemical irritant, in the RN's wake.

DR - Droite Républicaine (12 questions)
Mostly in neutral mode (58%), with a touch of accusation (17%). A classic governing-right style, following the issues without taking a strong stance.

EPR - Presidential bloc (18 questions)
The most neutral profile in the corpus: 61% of questions framed without taking a stance, 22% calling for concrete action, 11% seeking information. This is the way of a majority group, which follows the government's action more than it holds it to account.

LFI-NFP (27 questions)
A profile unique in the corpus: 56% of questions in a protection posture. The vast majority of these questions concern a single issue - the calot affair at the Pitié-Salpêtrière - where the group denounces an alleged discrimination against Muslim female healthcare workers. Outside this issue, the group's presence on the other facets of Islamism is very weak.

SOC - Socialists (7 questions)
A mixed profile: 43% neutral, 29% protection, 14% action, 14% information. The Socialist group holds an intermediate position, halfway between LFI-NFP (protection of individuals) and EPR (neutral questions).

ECOS - Ecologists (6 questions)
A profile split between calling for action (50%) and protection (33%). No accusatory posture. The Ecologists mostly ask about mosques: both about their funding and about closures they consider a form of stigmatization.

NI / UC (4 questions each)
An almost entirely neutral profile, with no particular stance. Numbers too small to draw conclusions.

4. Topics and vocabulary specific to each political group

The problem. Beyond posture, does each political group have its own vocabulary on Islamism? Are there words or phrases that some groups use massively and others barely use at all? If so, which ones - and what do they say about how each political family views the subject?

The results. Over the October 2024 - May 2026 period, we identify for each group the most typical word pairings: those that appear often within that group and little or not at all elsewhere. The chart below summarizes, for the four main groups, their most typical pairings (measured statistically), and the sections that follow illustrate this vocabulary with real excerpts from the corpus.

The following sections detail, group by group, the vocabulary observed and set it against real excerpts from the corpus.

4.1 RN - the « Islamist » signature

The RN is the only group to explicitly deploy the words « Islamist », « Muslim Brotherhood » and « entryism » in very specific pairings. The triad Islamist / laïcité / Muslim Brotherhood appears 9 times in its corpus and 0 times elsewhere. It is, statistically, the most distinctive signature in the entire French parliamentary corpus studied.

4.2 LFI-NFP - a single issue, multiplied

LFI-NFP presents the most single-issue-focused signature in the corpus. Its ten most typical pairings all revolve around the same issue: the wearing of the calot by female healthcare workers at the Pitié-Salpêtrière teaching hospital. The pairings calot / discrimination, calot / healthcare workers, Muslim / healthcare workers each appear 14 times in the group's corpus and 0 times elsewhere. Of LFI-NFP's 27 questions, more than half concern this single issue. Outside this issue, the group's semantic presence on the other aspects of Islamism (doctrine, actors, funding, universities) is marginal.

4.3 EPR - antisemitism at universities

The presidential bloc concentrates its specific pairings around a coherent set: antisemitism / university / higher education. It is one of the group's clearest focuses, in a context marked by pro-Palestinian movements at universities after October 7, 2023. The pairings « antisemitism / higher education » and « antisemitism / university » have a typicality score above 100 - on this theme, the group speaks almost alone.

4.4 DR - pinning responsibility on LFI

The Droite Républicaine stands out for a highly political pairing: CCIF / Hamas, CCIF / LFI, CCIF / National Assembly. These pairings point to questions denouncing the alleged links between La France insoumise elected officials and the Comité contre l'islamophobie en Europe (heir to the CCIF, dissolved in 2020). In other words: the DR uses part of its questions to shift frérisme onto another parliamentary group's responsibility - a political use of the debate. The DR also shares with the EPR a focus on antisemitism at universities.

4.5 Socialists and Ecologists - institutional laïcité and mosques

The Socialist group deploys a classic laïque-republican vocabulary: laïcité / politics, breaches / laïcité, CRPR / laïcité. Laïcité is treated as a principle to be defended through institutional tools (an interministerial committee, a Defender of laïcité, training of officials). The mode is regulatory and institutional, distinct from LFI-NFP's protective posture.

The Ecologists have a signature very much focused on the mosque: the pairings interior / mosque, denounces / mosque, challenges / mosque indicate a particular investment in the closures and searches of places of worship contested by the group.

4.6 The special case of the word « Islamophobia »

The problem. One word - a single one - sums up on its own the asymmetry of the French parliamentary debate on Islamism: Islamophobia. It is not neutral. Depending on whether one uses it, rejects it, or sidesteps it, one adopts a radically different analytical framework. How is its use distributed among the political groups?

The results. Of the 184 French parliamentary questions in the period, the word « Islamophobia » (or its derivatives: Islamophobic) appears in only 9 questions, almost all from the left:

Source: CERIF parliamentary watch, corpus of 184 questions (October 2024 - May 2026).

Conversely, none of the RN's 84 questions use the word « Islamophobia ». None of the 18 questions of the presidential bloc (EPR), none of the 12 questions of the Droite Républicaine apart from the case cited, none of the UDR's 4 questions. The word is thus used almost exclusively by the left, and more precisely 70% by the LFI-NFP group alone.

The mirror image is just as telling. The word « Islamist » (and its derivatives Islamism, Islamists) appears in 60 questions of the French corpus, 43 of them from the RN, 5 from the Droite Républicaine and 4 from the UDR. The left barely uses it (2 SOC questions, none from LFI-NFP). We thus observe a clear lexical split: the right (of all shades) talks about Islamism; the left, when it addresses these topics, talks about Islamophobia.

And the word « frérisme »?

Of the 184 French parliamentary questions in the period, the word « frérisme » (or « frériste / fréristes ») appears only twice: in a question by RN member Daniel Grenon on the situation at the CNRS, which mentions « the work on Islamism and frériste networks » (November 2024), and in a question by RN member Yoann Gillet on the election of a representative of the Étudiants musulmans de France to the CNOUS, an organization « described as frériste by the intelligence services » (May 2026).

The expression « Muslim Brotherhood », for its part, appears 33 times in the same corpus, and its distribution is also highly politically oriented - but along a different logic from that of « Islamophobia ». Here is who uses it:

Source: CERIF parliamentary watch, corpus of 184 questions (October 2024 - May 2026).

Ten political groups do not use the label « Muslim Brotherhood » during the period studied: ECOS, SOC, HOR, DEM, UDR, UDDPLR, GDR, RDPI, RDSE, CRCE-K. In other words, neither the Ecologists, nor the Socialists, nor the centrists, nor the radical-right UDR, nor any of the small Senate groups refer to the frériste current by its historic name. The object is left essentially to the RN, which makes it a political theme, and marginally to the EPR and a few centrist senators.

To name its object, the French parliamentary debate is thus distributed around three words that do not carry the same weight:

• « Islamism » - driven by the right (RN, DR, UDR), 60 occurrences.
• « Islamophobia » - driven by the left (LFI-NFP, ECOS, SOC), 9 occurrences.
• « frérisme » - used by almost no one, 2 occurrences out of 184 questions.

The most precise term for the ideological object - « frérisme », which distinguishes the political project from the historic brotherhood and separates it from insurrectional jihadism - is also the one parliamentarians use least.

They prefer more accessible but less exact metonyms: « Muslim Brotherhood » (which refers to the original brotherhood and not its contemporary European variant) or « Islamism » (which conflates legalist frérisme and insurrectional jihadism). The terminological work of establishing the word « frérisme » in public language has not yet found its parliamentary relay.

Why it matters. The choice between « Islamism », « Islamophobia » and « frérisme » is not a matter of vocabulary detail, insofar as it shapes the posture (accusation vs protection vs analysis), determines which actors are implicated (militant movements vs public administrations vs specifically identified frériste networks), and calls for opposing policies (regulation vs combating discrimination vs doctrinal characterization). This is why a parliamentary debate on Islamism that did not make this lexical split explicit would remain largely a dialogue of the deaf.

5. Four ways of addressing Islamism in the National Assembly and the Senate

By cross-referencing posture (chapter 3) with each group's vocabulary (chapter 4), across all 184 questions from the October 2024 - May 2026 period, we obtain four broad ways of approaching the subject:

Source: CERIF synthesis (posture × vocabulary cross-analysis, corpus of 184 questions).

6. The ministers' silence: who gets answers, and who does not?

The problem. A parliamentary question is not only an act of expression: it is an act of scrutiny. The rules require the government to answer written questions within two months (article 135 of the Rules of the National Assembly), extendable by one further month if additional information is requested - i.e. three to four months maximum. Beyond that, the absence of a reply becomes meaningful.

When a minister lets a question go past the deadline without answering, they signal, through their very silence, the importance they attach to the question. Examining who gets answers, at what pace, and who is left without a reply thus makes it possible to gauge the degree of political consideration given to the problem.

The results. Of the 184 French parliamentary questions in the period, 128 received an answer (70%) and 56 are still pending (30%). But not all waits carry the same weight: one must distinguish those still within the legal deadline from the rest.

The breakdown by political family reveals very sharp contrasts:

Source: CERIF parliamentary watch, export of May 10, 2026.

Reading. The overall response rate ranges from 93% for the Droite Républicaine to 52% for the left. The Macronist center obtains 81% of answers, the national right 74%. But this raw rate masks the diversity of situations. Once broken down by age, the waits take on a very different meaning:

• Droite Républicaine and non-attached members: almost all of their questions have been answered, and the few still pending are within the normal legal deadline. No silence to report.
• Macronist center (EPR): 3 questions pending out of 18, 2 of them overdue by more than 4 months. Discreet but significant - the oldest has been waiting for 523 days (on Qatar).
• Left (LFI-NFP): 19 questions pending out of 27 (70%). All are beyond two months, and 18 of 19 are beyond four months (past the legal deadline). This is the combined effect of the calendar (14 questions on the calots were filed on December 23, 2025) and of elapsed time: as of May 10, 2026, these questions have been waiting for more than four months and have crossed the legal threshold. The silence is no longer merely a recent delay; it effectively becomes structural.
• National right (RN + UDR): 27 questions pending out of 92. 14 of them are overdue (> 4 months), and 10 have been waiting for more than 6 months. Five questions from the national right have awaited an answer for more than a year - on structural frérisme topics: banning the Muslim Brotherhood, closing the IESH, the appointment of imams by Algeria, and infiltration of child-protection services. There, the silence is plainly structural.

The Ministry of the Interior is by far the most silent

Of the 56 pending questions, 19 are addressed to the Ministry of the Interior - about a third of the silences. Next come Health (10 questions, mainly the calot issue) and Education (5). As the Interior is also the most solicited ministry, it is the one that concentrates the silences.

Five structural questions unanswered for more than a year

Here are five of the oldest questions still pending, all linked to frérisme and all unanswered for more than a year:

• [LFI-NFP, Oct. 8, 2024] « Question on the commission of inquiry into islamo-leftist drift » - addressed to the Ministry of Higher Education - 579 days without a reply.
• [LFI-NFP, Oct. 22, 2024] « Question on the recent France 2 revelations » (about the Lycée Stanislas) - Ministry of Education - 565 days.
• [RN, Nov. 26, 2024] « Worrying situation within the National Center for Scientific Research » - Higher Education - 530 days.
• [EPR, Dec. 3, 2024] « Tax provisions granted to Qatar » - Economy and Finance - 523 days.
• [RN, Mar. 4, 2025] « Appointment of imams by Algeria in France » - Ministry of the Interior - 432 days.

These questions cut across political divides (LFI, RN, EPR are all represented) but point to unanimously structural topics: entryism at universities, faith schools, foreign funding, the training of imams. The government's prolonged silence on these matters - whoever the minister in office - raises questions.

Why it matters. Ministerial silence is not neutral. When structural questions on frérisme - banning the brotherhood, closing key institutions (IESH), controlling the recruitment of imams, Qatari funding - remain unanswered for more than a year, it is a sign that the executive does not wish to take a public position on these matters, for reasons that may be diplomatic (relations with Algeria, Qatar), legal (the difficulty of grounding a ban on the Muslim Brotherhood in French law) or political (fear of polarization). Conversely, questions on identifiable, bounded matters (an individual dismissal, a specific event) more easily receive a circumstantial reply. The map of ministerial silences is thus a map of the areas where the political consideration of frérisme stalls - whether it is deemed premature, or disturbs external balances.

7. A key event: the January 22, 2026 vote on the Muslim Brotherhood

Despite the absence of precise use of the word frérisme (ideology) / Muslim Brotherhood (secret network), a major vote took place on precisely this object - the request to place the Muslim Brotherhood on the European list of terrorist organizations.

On January 22, 2026, the National Assembly adopted, by 157 votes to 101 (public ballot no. 5106), a proposed European resolution calling on the European Commission to « place the Muslim Brotherhood movement and its leaders on the European list of terrorist organizations » and to « carry out a legal and factual assessment of the transnational Muslim Brotherhood network ». The text was brought by the Droite Républicaine group (LR in the National Assembly, DR in our nomenclature) in its parliamentary niche, after more than five hours of heated debate.

How did the political groups vote?

Source: National Assembly, public ballot no. 5106 of January 22, 2026; CERIF nomenclature.

This vote confirms the reading of the previous analyses:

The left-right divide is confirmed. The vote exactly reproduces the dividing line observed in the corpus of questions: the right (RN, DR, UDR) plus the center (EPR) vote in favor; the entire left (LFI-NFP, ECOS, SOC, GDR) votes against. No cross-cutting fracture appears. Frérisme remains an operator of political division, not a consensual question. The national representation turns it into a political, even a partisan, object.

The Droite Républicaine steps out of the shadows. In the corpus of parliamentary questions, DR accounted for only 12 questions out of 180, and its use of the terms « Muslim Brotherhood » and « Islamist » was marginal. Yet it is DR that brought the most structural resolution of the period. Using the term is delicate, notably because it is preempted by the RN and the UDR, but that does not mean the DR pays it no attention.

The RN, which accounts for 88 questions on the subject - nearly half the corpus - is not the author of the resolution. It was an « LR niche » that enabled its adoption. The RN supported it but did not initiate it, which suggests it may not have had the institutional capacity or the will to carry the text itself.

The presidential bloc steps out of its procedural neutrality. The neutral profile observed in the corpus (61% of questions « without taking a stance ») is contradicted by this vote: the majority supported the text. This signals that there is a threshold - the terrorist designation - beyond which the Macronist center agrees to take a position, whereas it avoids doing so in the routine work of written questions.

The government remains cautious. The avis de sagesse (deferring to the Assembly's judgment) given by Minister Éléonore Caroit signals that the executive shares the political objective but fears the legal scope. As the text is non-binding, the government can vote for it without committing operationally. This echoes the finding in section 7 on the ministers' silence in the face of structural questions: the political signal is accepted, action is not committed to.

Why it matters. The vote of January 22, 2026 is the moment when the topic of frérisme moves, in the French parliamentary debate, from the register of individual questions to that of collective decision. It validates four findings of this note. First, the left-right politicization is total and structural - no left-wing member, no right-wing member (broadly defined) crossed the line. Second, the presidential majority can commit publicly - but only on declaratory texts, without operational implication. Third, the European response remains suspended: the resolution has, to date, had no binding follow-up at EU level. And finally, the ministers' silence in the face of the structural questions raised in the same period (banning the Muslim Brotherhood, closing the IESH) contrasts with the symbolic vote: public designation is accepted, action is not committed to. This is exactly the diagnosis set out in section 9: a subject politically used, little addressed operationally.

9. In conclusion: a problem still captured by partisan politics

This analysis yields three lessons:

• Political groups do not speak the same language about Islamism - even when they address the same topic. This largely explains the misunderstandings of public debate and the feeling, sometimes voiced, that « no one is talking about the same thing ».
• The question of words is not trivial. Choosing « radicalization » over « entryism », « discrimination » over « regulation », « veil » over « hijab » is not the same mental world - and each choice commits to a different public policy.
• The French parliamentary debate on Islamism is asymmetric: one group (RN) carries it massively and head-on; another (LFI-NFP) reduces it almost entirely to a matter of discrimination; another (EPR, the presidential bloc) follows these topics neutrally, neither accusing nor defending - it does its scrutiny work but does not drive the debate; the other groups share what remains. A balanced deliberation requires that each of these voices be heard, but also that each accept to look at what it leaves aside by speaking as it does.

The analysis of these 184 parliamentary questions reveals a paradox: frérisme, which is nonetheless the main contemporary political-religious challenge for the French Republic, is treated in Parliament as an object of partisan branding rather than as a matter of general interest. Each political family makes instrumental use of it, rather than treating it as a problem to be understood and solved collectively.

The political effect: a problem used rather than addressed

This asymmetry produces a precise political effect. Each family finds in frérisme an object usable against its opponents rather than a problem to be understood and solved collectively:

• The RN uses it to characterize the left as « complicit in Islamism » and to cement its own centrality in the debate on national identity.
• LFI-NFP uses it to characterize the right as « Islamophobic » and to mobilize an electorate that sees itself as stigmatized.
• The presidential bloc uses it to demonstrate its balance and its managerial capacity, without committing to clear-cut positions that might destabilize it.
• The executive uses it as a diplomatic adjustment variable - leaving questions on Algeria, Qatar or the Muslim Brotherhood unanswered avoids offending external partners.

The analytical tools a democracy would have to confront a political project of deep transformation - precise doctrinal characterization, mapping of actors, traceability of financial flows, an articulated legal response, European cooperation - remain largely unactivated. The parliamentary debate, captured by partisan positioning, does not produce the shared knowledge that would make action possible.

Frérisme as a democratic challenge

Frérisme, in recent scholarly literature, is identified as a structured, transnational and patient project, whose strategy consists precisely of exploiting the divisions of democratic societies in order to settle there durably, through culture, school, the economy, the law and associations. It is a non-violent project but one that aims at a deep transformation of the social contract: the gradual substitution of a communal religious reference for the shared republican one.

Faced with such a project, the partisan capture of the debate plays into the hands of the very phenomenon it claims to combat. It prevents the production of quality public knowledge (frérisme remains a word before being a characterized object); it prevents cooperation between political families (each sees in the other's position a threat to be neutralized); above all, it prevents the establishment of a coherent public response, which presupposes a shared identification of the problem.

Escaping this impasse requires a work of re-problematization that transcends immediate divides and restores frérisme's nature as a distinct political object: neither conflated with public security and jihadism, nor conflated with anti-Muslim racism, nor a symbolic object of electoral positioning. It is a work that calls for the cooperation of researchers, magistrates, public officials and parliamentarians of all leanings - precisely what is lacking today.

What is at stake goes beyond the religious question alone. It is a democracy's capacity to collectively identify a major political problem without diluting it in rivalries of use.

Failing that, the Republic leaves the ground to a theocratic project that has thrived, for fifty years, on the blindness created by the divisions and blind spots of the societies that host it.

Source: CERIF parliamentary watch, export of May 10, 2026.

Dr Florence Bergeaud-Blackler
Anthropologist, Research Fellow at the CNRS (HDR)
Founding President of CERIF - European Center for Research and Information on the Muslim Brotherhood
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