A senior adviser in the far-left French party La France Insoumise (LFI) has spoken bluntly about the party’s desire to create a “New France,” a society reflecting the country’s demographic and cultural realities—a vision that the French right has described as a push for population replacement.
Imane El Hamzaoui, a senior national coordinator within LFI who oversees the party’s anti-racism campaign and youth mobilisation, delivered the speech to party members on Sunday, July 5th as part of a presentation on the concept of a “New France.”
The daughter of Moroccan-Algerian immigrants, El Hamzaoui has become an influential figure within the movement’s identity politics.
In the speech, she rejected the idea of an “Eternal France,” describing it as “a fable” based on “an imagined community defined by a common ancestry that never truly existed.” She argued that “New France” reflects the country’s present-day demographic realities and represents a vision for the future rather than an attachment to an idealised past.
El Hamzaoui said that critics who viewed “New France” as “the death knell of France” were “right to be afraid,” adding that their concerns reflected an awareness that “their hegemony” was fading.
The remarks have been widely shared online, because they seem to be an admission of the LFI’s political vision: to replace France’s historical identity through demographic and cultural change.
The debate comes as LFI remains one of France’s strongest political forces, with its leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon polling in third place ahead of next year’s presidential election.
Earlier this year, Mélenchon celebrated the election of Bally Bagayoko, a politician with African roots, as mayor of Saint-Denis by declaring that “New France is asserting itself.”
As Hélène de Lauzun writes in her commentary for europeanconservative.com:
For him [Mélenchon], the Great Replacement is neither a conspiracy theory nor a myth propagated by ‘neo-Nazis’ such as Renaud Camus, but rather a conscious political programme: the old white blood must give way to new arrivals from Africa and the Maghreb, who embody vitality and the future and are endowed with every virtue.
A recent analysis from the Observatory of Immigration and Demography argues that decades of immigration are reshaping France’s electorate: for example, in several urban areas with a high concentration of non-European immigrants, there has been a significant increase in support for LFI and Mélenchon.
Speeches like the one given by Imane El Hamzaoui could become more frequent if France fails to stop mass immigration.
