9

This might be more a question of political discourse than of politics proper.

Recently, French passed legislation toughening France's immigration policy. Emmanuel Macron's centrist Renaissance party and Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally (RN) backed the bill.

In this Guardian video (linked to the exact spot for your convenience), you see Le Pen making something that appears to be a swimming gesture. Whatever that is, she is sending someone a message but I fail to see how this related to the issue at hand. What does this mean? You are drowning? Is she mocking someone? Immigrants will have to swim now?

Improve this question
10
  • 3
    This is going to be unanswerable unless the media picked up on that gesture and she clarified her meaning. I also don't think a specific gesture without a very clear meaning - say one controversial enough to a career - is that ask-worthy.
    – Italian Philosophers 4 Monica
    Commented Dec 20, 2023 at 18:12
  • 15
    @ItalianPhilosophers4Monica We've had many past good questions and answers about the meaning of obscure political symbols, metaphors, and gestures. This is something that the collective brain trust of Politics.SE has a track record of doing quite well. Usually subtle messages like this have a fairly large intended audience so it is often possible to source their meaning.
    – ohwilleke ♦
    Commented Dec 20, 2023 at 18:25
  • 3
    @ohwilleke Disagree. There is no indication that it's a coded message, like the OK signs associated with white supremacists. It could just be... a gesture.
    – Italian Philosophers 4 Monica
    Commented Dec 20, 2023 at 18:29
  • 2
    I do not believe clarifications by her are relevant No sympathy for her intended, but that puts us straight in the Questions asking for the internal motivations of people bucket for closure then, does it not? We routinely deal with VTC re. questions that ask "why did govt X do Y?" and the magic formula to avoid closure is usually: "what did X say?"
    – Italian Philosophers 4 Monica
    Commented Dec 20, 2023 at 19:26
  • 4
    I have no skill in politics but I'd like to weigh in as a French person: this gesture is often used to mean "we're struggling there", like when you put a lot of work but don't make a lot of progress. We often use it with the verb "ramer" (to row) to mean this. Without any poltical analysis, I think that Le Pen uses it to poke fun at how slow the debate goes.
    – C. Crt
    Commented Dec 21, 2023 at 11:05

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
35

The Guardian video is misleading - Le Pen did not make this gesture as the bill passed, but earlier, during the debate. You can see the moment here. She was responding to the rhetorical question from the minister, Gérald Darmanin, who asked "what do you take us for?".

The official record of the debate suggests that Le Pen mimed "a swimmer in difficulty". In context of the debate, and absent any reporting of her explaining the gesture herself, Le Pen seems to be suggesting that the government is a swimmer struggling to stay afloat:- "What do you take us for?" "A sinking ship". I don't see any link to migrants themselves swimming in her response to the minister.

Improve this answer
6
  • 1
    Wow. A lot that would be considered rather unparliamentary in other countries "Quand Mme Le Pen fait cocorico, elle pense que le soleil se lève" etc.
    – got trolled too much this week
    Commented Dec 21, 2023 at 3:52
  • 4
    Aside: it's a bit crazy [work] that they annotate the official transcript with exact clip moments. I've not seen that done in any other countries.
    – got trolled too much this week
    Commented Dec 21, 2023 at 3:58
  • 7
    "swimming" and "rowing" are both very common metaphors in French to make fun of a speaker who is laboriously struggling to make sense in a discourse, so it's very likely the interpretation in this answer is correct. However given the context of that immigration law, it's hard not to think about swimming migrants in the Mediterranean sea when seeing Marine Le Pen do this gesture.
    – Stef
    Commented Dec 21, 2023 at 11:13
  • 1
    @Fizz - in many countries, just addressing somebody directly who is not the person chairing the meeting would be unparliamentary.
    – Henry
    Commented Dec 21, 2023 at 11:59
  • The correct interpretation of the gesture in this context is "You are grasping at straws", addressed to the speaker at the time, Minister of police Darmanin (or, as we like to call him, Dard Malin).
    – armand
    Commented Dec 22, 2023 at 5:45
10

For the context - I am French. This gesture usually means that someone is saying uninteresting, disconnected or "padding" things. Something like "bulshitting" or "talking nonsense". It gives the idea of someone swimming in their own words, or in the (philosophical) unknown without any idea of where to go.

@CDJB mentioned the official records where "a swimmer in difficulty" is indeed the interpretation of the person taking the notes. Nothing around the discussion suggests immigrants in boats.

The gesture is well-known, so I do not understand why it was interpreted like that.

EDIT: @C.Crt was the first to mention the above, I just discovered their comment under the question)

Note unrelated to my answer: now that I think of it, there is in French another gesture (and expression) that means more or less the same and also refers to water: rowing.

Improve this answer
3
  • gesture is well-known Oui, c'est aussi mon avis! Which is why I found this Q so uninteresting.
    – Italian Philosophers 4 Monica
    Commented Dec 21, 2023 at 17:46
  • @WoJ To me, tu nages has always meant: you're struggling to make a point, you're digging a hole for yourself. Not sure why Le Pen would use it for something else in that context.
    – guillaume31
    Commented Feb 9 at 16:28
  • @guillaume31 this may be a regional thing. I am from the western suburbs of Paris so YMMV
    – WoJ
    Commented Feb 9 at 18:37
7

The context of the swimming gesture (I didn't remark the "difficulty" part in her gesture, even if that went into the official transcript) was not stopping boats, where the swimming gesture might be interpreted differently, but rather it was a discourse by the interior minister where he claimed that the RN voted for the regularization of 10,000 sans papiers. According to the minister that was roughly the same law "minus 15 symbolic measures" that RN had opposed earlier in the Senate. It was those remarks that prompted Le Pen's gesture. Somewhat more liberally, that could be translated the she meant the minister was "grasping at straws", given the context.

She also made a nap-time gesture shortly after that.

The minister launched in quite an acerbic tirade against Le Pen, saying in the end that all she had managed during her political career were "small coups" and that she was not "ready for power", followed by a political comparison with the far right of the 1940s only being willing to "surrender".

Whether that's fair criticism in this context... According to the New Enterprise, the law project did not in fact pass as proposed by the government, which would have granted automatic "papers" in some cases, but rather it was amended to make the granting of those dependent on a case-by-case decision by prefects.

Improve this answer
1
  • 2
    The french expression associated to her gesture is called nager la brasse and it is indeed very similar to the english "grasping at straws".
    – Romain Valeri
    Commented Dec 22, 2023 at 8:06

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .