France’s interior minister rejects blanket terror designation for Muslim Brotherhood

PARIS (MNTV) — France will not pursue a blanket terrorist designation of the Muslim Brotherhood, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez has said, describing such a move as legally shaky and practically unworkable. 

Instead, the government will target specific individuals and organisations on a case-by-case basis where it believes they are working against the principles of the French Republic.

The position, laid out in an interview with Le Monde, represents a significant cooling of the political temperature that dominated the National Assembly in January, when lawmakers voted 157 to 101 in favour of a non-binding resolution urging the European Union to add the Brotherhood to the bloc’s terrorism list.

Nuñez pointed out that no Western democracy has taken the step of broadly designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation. 

Even the United States, he noted, has only targeted specific branches operating abroad rather than the movement as a whole — an implicit acknowledgment that the Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, is a vast and ideologically diverse transnational movement encompassing everything from charitable organisations and educational institutions to political parties that have participated in — and won — democratic elections across the Middle East and North Africa.

Heated parliamentary debate

The January vote in the National Assembly was preceded by nearly five hours of acrimonious debate. 

The resolution’s sponsor, Republican lawmaker Éric Pauget, argued that the Brotherhood was a political movement whose objectives were incompatible with secular democratic governance and that addressing it required a coordinated European legal framework.

Opposition came forcefully from the left. The Ecologists’ Dominique Voynet challenged the characterisation of the Brotherhood’s institutional presence as “sprawling,” noting that only 21 Muslim schools in France were affiliated with the movement out of 5,700 private schools nationwide — a scale she said hardly warranted the alarm being generated. 

La France Insoumise deputies accused the resolution’s supporters of conflating an entire faith community with a political current, and the debate repeatedly descended into mutual accusations of racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia.

Nuñez himself had signalled caution well before the vote, calling for “absolute caution” and saying he was personally opposed to a designation — a stance that put him at odds with right-wing and far-right lawmakers driving the resolution.

The influence debate

Much of the French government’s concern centres not on terrorism but on what officials describe as political influence. 

Nuñez accused Brotherhood-linked networks of attempting to place sympathetic candidates on the electoral lists of mainstream parties during this year’s municipal elections. 

He acknowledged, however, that there was no legal basis to prevent such candidacies — raising the question of what, exactly, is being objected to when citizens participate in democratic processes through legal channels.

The narrative draws on a confidential government report presented to France’s National Security Council in May 2025, which warned of a strategy of gradual institutional engagement — described in official language as “entrism” — through schools, civic associations, and local government.

The framing has drawn sharp criticism from researchers who study Muslim political participation in France. Haoues Seniguer, a political scientist with two decades of fieldwork on Islamist activism in France, wrote in Middle East Eye that he found no evidence of any coordinated electoral strategy linked to Brotherhood networks. 

What exists, he argued, is a dispersed landscape of localised civic engagement driven less by religious ideology than by territorial inequality and political marginalisation. 

He contended that the spectre of a covert “Muslim political project” has been constructed largely by right-wing and far-right actors seeking to delegitimise Muslim participation in democratic life ahead of elections.

The broader question is whether civic engagement by religiously observant citizens — running for office, organising community groups, establishing schools — constitutes a threat to the Republic or simply a form of democratic participation that happens to be conducted by Muslims. 

The Brotherhood’s critics in France tend to frame the former; its defenders and many independent researchers point to the latter.

Actions taken — and blocked

The government has nonetheless acted against specific organisations it views as problematic. Last year, it launched a strategy including an asset-freeze mechanism and the dissolution of certain endowment funds. 

In early March, Nuñez attempted to ban the first large-scale gathering in six years of Musulmans de France, an umbrella body with historical ties to the Brotherhood, on the grounds that some invited speakers had previously made statements the government deemed incompatible with republican values. 

An administrative court overturned the ban in April — a ruling that underscored the legal limits of the approach.

The Netherlands has moved in a parallel direction, with a parliamentary majority backing a motion in March calling for a ban on the Brotherhood and affiliated organisations, though critics argued it would be legally unworkable given the movement’s lack of formal structure in the country.

Distinguishing movement from community

The most significant element of Nuñez’s interview may have been his explicit defence of Islam’s place in French life. 

He said he had opposed right-wing proposals to ban girls from wearing the hijab, arguing the measure would unfairly burden France’s Muslim population. 

“I have no problem with Islam in France,” he said. “Religious symbols and fasting are not the issue. The issue is individuals and structures that openly promote an anti-Republican discourse.”

The distinction is critical — and one that France’s political class has struggled to maintain. The Muslim Brotherhood is a specific political and social movement with its own internal debates, national variations, and evolving positions. It is not a synonym for Islam, nor for the millions of French Muslims who have no connection to it. 

Yet the January parliamentary debate demonstrated how easily the line between the two is erased in French public discourse, with sweeping characterisations of the Brotherhood frequently bleeding into broader suspicion of Muslim civic life.

Seniguer warned that the government’s approach risks alienating an entire generation of Muslim citizens from the institutions it claims to be protecting, replacing genuine engagement with surveillance and suspicion. 

The Muslim Brotherhood itself, whatever one makes of its ideology, has in most countries where it operates chosen to work within legal and democratic frameworks — a reality that complicates the terrorism label and explains why Nuñez, despite the political pressure, has concluded that the designation would not survive legal scrutiny.

Whether France’s case-by-case approach amounts to a principled distinction between political activism and genuine security threats, or merely a more sophisticated way of policing Muslim political life, will depend entirely on how it is applied — and whether ordinary civic participation by observant Muslims continues to be treated as inherently suspect.