In Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, a Muslim Brotherhood candidate reaches the French presidency. He does not storm the Élysée. He is invited in, through a bargain struck with established parties desperate to keep the ‘far right’ out. The election is imagined for 2022, but the novel’s unsettling feature is the transaction, not the date. Politicians and institutions accommodate a religious political project because it serves their immediate interests. The machinery of surrender runs on perfectly ordinary ambition. France becomes an Islamic country, and people convert in hordes, not from conviction but because being a Muslim has become the price of getting on in society.
Coercion is unnecessary when incentives will do.
Houellebecq’s device is coalition arithmetic. A disciplined constituency can extract leverage far beyond its numbers when others need its votes. The question grows more urgent when the bargaining takes place against a background of disorder. Who can organize support? Who ca…
