Great Mosque of Paris Urges Muslim Voters to Support Macron in French Election

Between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, the choice was not very difficult for the Great Mosque of Paris which, on Wednesday, April 13, called for voting for the outgoing president in the second round of the presidential election on Sunday, April 24. A decision which, according to rector Chems-Eddine Hafiz, is "the choice of republican values". The GMP is faithful to the choice made in 2017, when it had issued a clear call to vote for Macron against Le Pen, considering that "all French people must imperatively remain united and united in the face of the reality of the threat embodied by xenophobic ideas dangerous for our national cohesion".

In agreement with the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) of which it was still a member, and several Muslim federations, they had strongly called on the Muslim community to rally "to thwart the processes of exclusion and hatred, as well as the tendencies to amalgamation and stigmatization that threaten national cohesion and living together".

For its part, the Catholic Church decided on Wednesday, April 13, to remain neutral by giving no voting instructions for the second round. "It is to the intelligence, conscience and freedom of each one that the bishops address themselves, with the gravity required by the event, the state of our country and the crises that are crossing our world," affirmed the Conference of Bishops of France. The only directive given to Catholic faithful is "the importance of voting and doing so in conscience, in the light of the Gospel and the social doctrine of the Church".

The French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) also decided to remain in the same logic as the Conference of Bishops of France, by calling on the French "to fully exercise their right to vote and their civic duty to express their voice. We trust their collective intelligence to ensure the good of our country and preserve its cohesion," it said.