France's Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez announced on 3 May 2026 that his government would introduce yet another law targeting what he called "Islamist entrism." It will be the fifth piece of legislation in under a year specifically targeting Muslim life and institutions in France – a legislative acceleration that one senior academic has likened, with deliberate caution, to the political atmosphere Jews faced in France during the interwar period.
Writing in Orient XXI on 20 May 2026, Professor Haouès Seniguer of the University of Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 documents what he calls a "politics of permanent suspicion" that has systematically expanded state repression against visible Muslim presence in French public life under Emmanuel Macron's presidency.
The legislative avalanche
The scale of anti-Muslim legislation in recent years is striking.
A senate inquiry into Islamist radicalisation in 2020 was followed by the loi contre le séparatisme in August 2021. The pace then accelerated sharply: a parliamentary inquiry into links between Islamist networks, terrorism, and political actors; a proposed ban on veiling of minors in public spaces (December 2025); Bruno Retailleau's bill "visant à lutter contre l'entrisme islamiste en France" (March 2026); a proposed ban on religious symbols worn by elected officials in the exercise of their duties (April 2026); and now a further law from Interior Minister Nuñez against "separatism and entrism."
Seniguer says that this acceleration is manifestly timed to the approaching presidential election.
The atmosphere affects institutions as well as individuals. The Muslim association Musulmans de France (MdF) saw its 40th annual congress at Le Bourget nearly banned by Nuñez in April 2026 – the minister initially citing terrorism risk and public order concerns before shifting, when challenged, to objections about books sold on stands. A court overturned the ban at the last moment. The congress proceeded without incident.
Two earlier decisions illustrate the broader pattern: the cancellation in January 2025 of the state contract with the Al-Kindi school group in Lyon, and the dissolution in September 2025 of the Institut européen des sciences humaines in Château-Chinon, officially described as the "principal representation of the Frèrist tendency in France."
The origins of the suspicion
Seniguer identifies two political acts as the catalysts that normalised and accelerated the culture of suspicion. The first was Macron's speech at Les Mureaux on 2 October 2020, which framed political Islam as a separatist threat to the republic. The second was then-higher education minister Frédérique Vidal's accusation in 2021 that French universities were infected by "islamo-gauchisme."
Since those moments, Seniguer argues, suspicion has spread beyond radicals and extremists to encompass "the practising Muslim, engaged in associative life, or too visibly practising," as well as academics who study race, gender, post-colonialism, or Muslim life. Researchers who challenge official narratives on Islam are themselves treated as suspect.
Two academics in particular - Bernard Rougier and Florence Bergeaud-Blackler - are named by Seniguer as having "greatly fuelled the suspicious rhetoric and the repressive advance of the state" by providing expertise and the vocabulary that accompanies it, including the terms "frérisme," "entrisme," and "séparatisme."
The data void
The systematic suppression of data on Islamophobia compounds the problem. France's official human rights body, the Commission nationale consultative des droits de l'homme (CNCDH), stopped publishing figures on anti-Muslim incidents in 2021, citing methodological problems with data collection. The dissolution of the Collectif contre l'islamophobie en France (CCIF) the same year further reduced the visibility of the phenomenon.
The Interior Ministry itself recorded a 75% rise in anti-Muslim acts in 2024, from 83 to 145. But as Seniguer notes, these figures "appear unreadable" in public debate - acknowledged but not acted upon.
The Défenseure des droits, Claire Hédon, published a report on religious discrimination in late 2025 that largely went unnoticed. It found that 34% of people identifying as Muslim, or perceived as Muslim, reported having experienced religious discrimination - compared to 19% of people of other religions, and just 4% of Christians.
Notably, the report avoids the word Islamophobia entirely, preferring terms such as "anti-Muslim behaviour" and "anti-Muslim hatred." Hédon's justification: the term does not appear in the Constitution or the Penal Code, and legal discrimination cases must be grounded in legal text.
The political analogy
Seniguer draws a careful and explicitly cautious historical analogy. In the interwar period, Jews were accused of corrupting the nation. Today, he argues, Muslims are accused - under the cover of republican values and a "debased vision of laïcité" - of threatening French society through demography, places of worship, and the complicity of a section of the left and academia.
The effect, he concludes, is self-defeating even on the government's own terms. By rendering "doubtful or shameful any ostensible manifestation of Muslim identity," the state simultaneously claims to want "an Islam of the Enlightenment" while making the conditions for any such internal theological development impossible. The permanent pressure prevents the very debates within Islam that French authorities say they want to encourage.
Q&A
Sources: Orient XXI / Prof. Haouès Seniguer / Défenseure des droits / Commission nationale consultative des droits de l'homme / Interior Ministry of France