Former French prime minister François Fillon has said that after three years of war, Russia was “an infinitely less threat” than the “pernicious Islamist ideology” now thriving in large parts of his country.
According to Fillon, who served in a right-wing cabinet under then-president Nicolas Sarkozy, there were two main threats to world peace. On one side he named China-US rivalry and on the other the rise of what he called Islamic totalitarianism.
Speaking to the Conservative magazine Valleurs Actuelles on March 4, he noted China and the US were two superpowers whose actions impacted the entire planet and with whom neither France alone nor Europe as a whole could compete.
Fillon said they could find a balance regarding those two but had much less hope in relation to radical Islam.
“The rise of Islamic totalitarianism threatens us much more directly because of our proximity to the Middle East and Africa,” he said.
“Additionally, an increasing number of people in Europe are receptive to this ideology — one that cloaks itself in the guise of Islam to conceal a political agenda as ruthless as the Nazism and Stalinism that scarred the 20th century.”
“Radical Islamism has been advancing for the past thirty years, fuelled by underdevelopment, corrupt regimes, Western military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the unresolved Palestinian issue,” Fillon said.
“The defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant has done little to halt this movement, as its roots run deep. It continues to spread across Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and vast regions of Africa.
“In Europe, it is also gaining ground, with a growing segment of the Muslim population adhering to a radical, authoritarian, and oppressive form of Islam—one that poses a real and immediate threat to our values and way of life,” he added.
“After three years of a stalled war in Ukraine, Russia now represents a far lesser danger than this insidious ideology, which is increasingly taking hold within our own borders.”
A surge of Islamist terrorist attacks is likely in 2024, French intelligence services have warned. https://t.co/Etv92Kldbp
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) October 6, 2023
Continuing on the Russia and Ukraine theme, Fillon said: “This war could have been avoided if Western leaders had sought to understand its causes rather than wrapping themselves in the camp of good.”
He highlighted that, contrary to what had been predicted in the West, the Russian economy had not collapsed, Ukraine was losing ground despite Western support and there was the emergence of an unlikely alliance stretching from China to Iran to North Korea.
“This is obviously not good news. [US] President Trump is now drawing the consequences by resuming dialogue with Russia in an attempt to curb the rise of this bloc hostile to the West. I fear, alas, that it is very late for that.”
“The surreal scene of the meeting between Zelensky and Trump in the Oval Office has the merit of shattering the pretences that characterise Western analyses of the conflict in Ukraine,” Fillon stated.
“Trump is just the brutal version of a reality that has been demonstrated many times: America has no friends.”
He added that, in the past, the US had thrown fuel on the fire by “manipulating the political debate in Ukraine and promising irresponsible NATO membership”.
He noted that the US was apparently abandoning Ukraine as, he claimed, it did Afghanistan.
FIllon went on to say Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “not the blameless hero magnified by Europeans to whom he gives the thrill of a fight for freedom by proxy”.
“He has his share of responsibility in the outbreak of the war and he refuses today to stop a war he cannot win.”
He also noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin had spoken with Trump “whom he considers to be the only interlocutor capable of negotiating peace”.
Fillon added that he believed the Russians no longer expected anything from Europe and that relations would “remain permanently compromised”, something he called “predictable”.
He accused the European elite of “ineffective bluster”, of using an “absurd accumulation of sanctions” and of “uselessly indicting” Putin via the International Court of Justice.
“The question is not whether we like the Russian regime but the question of the strategic relationship we must have with this huge, largely European country, to ensure the security of the continent.”
COMMENT: Those who think that Russia can be defeated are either idiots or war-mongers, writes Kevin Myers. https://t.co/PUGYQSUVqV
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) March 4, 2025
Fillon said European leaders were now in a panic after thinking “they could continue to display their warlike posture without paying the price”.
“Here they are moving from a blissful Atlanticism, which is ultimately illusory in terms of security, to a pathetic call for European defence that they have never ceased to fight,” he claimed.
Fillon accused Europe of submitting to US interests and claimed talks of the European Defence Community and the “Europeanisation” of France’s nuclear deterrent, after Maastricht and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s permanent coup d’état, would be the final nail in the coffin of the French nation.
Despite disliking the tone, the former French PM said he agreed with US Vice President JD Vance regarding the decline of freedom of expression in Europe.
“The messy Russian interference, the consequences of which are infinitely less great than those of the systematic and powerful ones of the Americans, serve as a pretext for a full-scale attack on freedom of expression,” Fillon said.
“The multiplication of laws of historical remembrance the judicialisation of political debate, the ostracism of political parties deemed – by whom and why? – too far-right, the direct intervention of European leaders in electoral processes—such as the condemnation of [Italian Prime Minister] Giorgia Meloni by the President of the European Commission in Italy or more recently the annulment of an election by a judge in Romania — and the closure of [French TV channel] C8 through an administrative decision: All of this constitutes serious violations of democratic principles,” he concluded.
French TV channel C8, known for airing a popular right-wing show, will be taken off air by next year following a ruling from the French broadcasting regulator, Arcom. https://t.co/HDs5sX8O9n
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) July 25, 2024
