Claim: A video shows Muslims praying on the streets in France after the left-wing parties won the most seats in the July 2024 elections.
Fact: The video actually shows Muslims praying on the occasion of Eid-ul-Fitr at the Moscow Cathedral Mosque, in May 2022.
On 8 July 2024, Threads user @tweetnewsofficial posted (archived) a video which shows a large congregation of Muslim worshippers praying on the streets, somewhere in France.
“France, which exported Khomeini, has now taken back millions of Khomeini,” said the caption, when translated roughly from Persian.
The post came after the election results in France showed the left-wing coalition, New Popular Front (NFP), won the most seats in the second round of the legislative assembly elections. The caption implies that the prayers were offered to celebrate this result.
Another post (archive) on X by @Salwan_Momika1, which has now been deleted, shared the same video with the claim that: “Today, the #French decided that France would remain under Islamic rule by giving their votes to the leftist communists. What do you think?”
France elections
In June 2024, Emmanuel Macron called for new legislative assembly elections as he dissolved the national assembly after facing defeat in the European Parliament elections. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (NR), a far-right party, led with 30% of the vote, leaving Macron’s Renaissance Party with 14.5% of the vote.
Consequently, France held its Legislative Assembly elections from 30 June to 7 July. In the first round of elections, Marine Le Pen’s NR won “33 percent of the vote” while Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party and his allies stood third. New Popular Front (NFP), a coalition of left-wing parties stood second with 29% of the vote.
While Le Pen’s party was projected to win the second round, the NFP won the most seats in a shocking turn of events. However, the left-wing group still fell short of securing an absolute majority in the parliament. Meanwhile, the Renaissance party secured a second position, pushing Le Pen’s NR to third.
National Rally’s far-right election manifesto
National Rally’s (NR) far-right election manifesto promised to toughen France’s immigration policy, and included their plan to end birth-right citizenship for “children born to two foreign parents in France” which currently allows them to “automatically obtain French citizenship at the age of 18.”
The party has been criticised for what many call racist policies, with one of the points from its election manifesto declaring, “Mettre en place une législation spécifique visant les idéologies islamistes, véritable menace totalitaire des temps modernes.” When translated from French, the point reads: “Implement specific legislation targeting Islamist ideologies, a real totalitarian threat of modern times.”
Le Pen herself is widely known to espouse Islamophobic views. Previously, the far-right head has gone on record to say that “the headscarf could not be viewed as a sign of a person’s religious belief but was an ‘Islamist uniform,’” and has “compared Muslims praying on a street in 2010 to the Nazi occupation” as reported by The Guardian.
On 2 July, the Paris prosecutor’s office opened an investigation into her 2022 campaign, on “allegations of accepting a financial loan, misappropriation of property, fraud and forgery.”
Soon after the results were declared, the NR’s loss in the second round of the 2024 elections inspired a spate of anti-Muslim rhetoric to go viral on social media. Soch Fact Check debunked similar posts here and here.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check conducted a reverse image search of keyframes from the video and found that various fact-checking platforms verified the origins of the viral clip in the claim, and dated it back to 2022.
The Associated Press‘ investigation from May 2022 found that the video had originated in Russia. By comparing scenes from the video with images from news publications, AP’s report established that the video shows moments from the Eid-ul-Fitr prayers that were held at the Moscow Cathedral Mosque, that same year in May.
Boom Live also debunked false claims about the video at the time. This fact-check led us to a post on X from 9 May 2022, by Benjamin Strick, a digital investigator, who geolocated the place shown in the video to the Moscow Cathedral Mosque. The coordinates are 55.77924869132783, 37.62694467012432, confirming the location as Moscow, and not in France.
The viral video also resurfaced in 2023, with the false claim that it shows scenes before riots broke out in Paris over the killing of a teenager by the French police in June of that year. To debunk the claim, AFP Fact Checkshared its archived photos of the Moscow Cathedral Mosque from 2014 and 2017, which corresponded with the scenes from the viral video. The first image shows Muslims praying at the same mosque on the occasion of Eid-ul-Fitr in 2014, whereas the latter shows worshippers prostrating in prayer “outside the central mosque in Moscow on July 28, 2014.”
Fact-checks by Vishvas and Newchecker also verified the origins of the video, concluding that it is from Russia, and dates back to 2022.
Virality
The post on Threads was liked 218 times.
It was shared on X here, here, here, here, and here.
The video previously appeared with the false claim that it shows Paris in 2022, on X, here
On TikTok here.
The same video was shared with the misleading claims that it shows Eid-ul-Adha prayers in Russia from this year, though our fact-check shows it’s from Eid-ul-Fitr, from two years ago.
On X, the misleading claim was shared here, here, here, here, here, and here.
On Instagram here.
Conclusion: The viral video does not show Muslims praying on the streets in France after the the left-wing coalition, New Popular Front (NFP) won the most seats. The video is from May 2022, and shows scenes from Eid-ul-Fitr prayers, held at the Moscow Cathedral Mosque in Russia.
Background image in cover photo: euronews
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