Valérie Pécresse, the center-right presidential candidate in France, used the phrase ‘great replacement’ in a speech punctuated with attacks on immigrants and Muslims.

"Until a couple of years ago, the “great replacement” — a theory that white Christian populations are being intentionally replaced by nonwhite immigrants — was so toxic in France that even Marine Le Pen, the longtime leader of the country’s far right, pointedly refused to use it.

 

But in a presidential race that has widened the boundaries of political acceptability in France, Valérie Pécresse, the candidate of the mainstream center-right party in the coming election, used the phrase over the weekend in a speech punctuated with coded attacks against immigrants and Muslims.

 

In a 75-minute speech before 7,000 supporters in Paris — intended to introduce Ms. Pécresse, 54, the current leader of the Paris region and a former national minister of the budget and then higher education, to voters nationwide — Ms. Pécresse stated that the election would determine whether France is a “a united nation or a divided nation.”

 

She said that France was not doomed to the “great replacement” and called on her supporters “to rise up.” In the same speech, she drew a distinction between “French of the heart” and “French of papers” — an expression used by the extreme right to point to naturalized citizens. Vowing not to let France be subjugated, she said of the symbol of France, “Marianne is not a veiled woman” — referring to the Muslim veil.

 

The use of a term once limited to the extreme right by Ms. Pécresse — who is the candidate of the Republicans, the party of former Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac — marked a “Rubicon,” said Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist presidential candidate and current mayor of Paris.

 

Nicolas Lebourg, a political scientist specializing in the right and far right, said that her use of the term simply reflected a political calculation: the center right’s traditional middle-class supporters have also shifted rightward in recent years.

 

“Since 2010, there’s been a significant hardening by upper-middle-class voters against immigration and Islam, but we hadn’t seen its political effects yet,” Mr. Lebourg said. “So what we’re experiencing now is a tipping over of part of the middle-class and upper middle-class.”

 

These voters are worried about issues like “wokisme” — the supposed contamination of France by “woke” American ideas on social justice that they see as overwrought political correctness.

 

“It’s middle-class voters who care about ‘wokisme,’ while Le Pen’s working-class supporters are completely uninterested in that,” Mr. Lebourg said.

 

The “great replacement” was conjured up by a French writer named Renaud Camus in 2010."

 

In Lithuania, the "great replacement" is also underway. All over the world, followers of wokisme ideas are looking for ways to compensate for the alleged harm done to some people since the time of Adam and Eve, as if we were to blame for someone once suffering somewhere. That alleged reparation to the aliens of another culture allows the locals to be replaced. Lithuanian Liberal Conservatives also use "wokisme" ideas for this purpose, which repel a large part of Lithuanian voters. Thanks to these voters, the transportation of immigrants for cheaper labor could end earlier than the Liberal Conservatives think. Fortunately for Liberal Conservatives, they can manage to legalize drugs (one of the manifestations of "wokisme"). Then at least there will be something for them to do after the lost elections.