FRANCE: Immigration Creeps Back Into Campaign

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Apr 16 2007 (IPS) - The presidential election campaign has entered its final week with the old issues dominant again – immigration, petty crime attributed to immigrants, and a redefinition of national identity.

The issues have resurfaced following clashes Mar. 27 at the Gare du Nord railway station in Paris between the police and hundreds of people of immigrant origin.

Witnesses spoke of “a typical outburst of unnecessary violence” by the police forces against a man of African origin caught without a ticket on a regional train.

The police are not meant to check passenger tickets, but a police unit stopped the dodger and attacked him brutally, witnesses said. Hundreds of bystanders of immigrant origin rioted at the station in protest, damaging stores and other facilities.

Far right-wing presidential candidate Philippe de Villiers blamed “ethnic barbarian gangs” for rioting. He said they were encouraged by the “generalised laxity of state institutions” towards immigrants.

Neo-fascist candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen attributed the violence to “the politics of massive immigration France has led during the last 30 years.”

Both De Villiers and Le Pen called for mass expulsion of immigrants.

Former minister for the interior Nicolas Sarkozy, contesting from the ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party seized the occasion to repeat a message he has been sending for years.

“We have to establish rules and laws (to be obeyed by immigrants), we have to establish authority and respect towards our institutions,” he said at a campaign meeting immediately after the incidents.

Sarkozy, the favourite to win the first round of elections next Sunday, accused his main rivals, Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal, and the centrist Francois Bayrou of being “on the side of the rebellion, to support delinquency.”

Both Royal and Bayrou have said the incidents at Gare du Nord were symptom of a deeper social unrest.

“There is something that does not work any more in our society, there is a break of confidence between the public at large, the French police, and the citizenry,” Royal said at a campaign meeting.

Royal said if she wins the election, she would “restore the just order…to encourage mutual respect. I do not want to see that there are areas in the country where young people who have nothing to hide are afraid of police forces and of identity controls.”

Bayrou spoke of “a climate of perpetual confrontation” between French police and a large section of society, especially immigrants.

“Our society suffers from extremely strong tensions and resentments, large sectors of society have the feeling of being in confrontation with institutions, specially the police,” he said.

The incidents came as reminder of the riots in the autumn of 2005, after police action led to the accidental death of two innocent immigrant boys in Paris. That led to 13 nights of rioting by youths of immigrant origin.

Sarkozy, minister of the interior at the time, had called the rioting youth “scum”, and said he would clean the outskirts of the country’s largest cities, where most immigrants live, with an industrial cleansing machine.

Sarkozy had put immigration and national identity at the centre of his campaign even before the Gare du Nord incidents. He has pledged to create a new ministry to deal with both matters.

Sarkozy effectively linked national identity with immigration, which now comes mostly from sub-Saharan African countries, the Maghreb countries of North Africa, and South East Asia, especially China.

In response Royal called on all French citizens to learn and sing the national anthem, the war chant Marseillaise, and to place the French national flag in their homes.

These developments have led to some concerns. “Ethnic diversity was always a source of richness for all nations,” immigration expert Nancy Green from the French School for Higher Social Studies told IPS.

“Of course, nations like France have built their particular national identities, but always with contributions by foreigners, by immigrants,” Green, author of several books on the subject said.

“To see immigration as a problem for the definition of national identity, as a problem of assimilation, is to ignore the important role played by immigrants in the French social, economic, and cultural development over the centuries.”

The new concentration of immigration echoes the dominant issues during the 2002 campaign. Then incumbent president Jacques Chirac, who is not running this time, placed immigration and lack of security at the centre of his campaign. This theme is believed widely to have led to the triumph of neo-Fascist candidate Le Pen in the first electoral round along with Chirac, and to the elimination of then Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin.

“It is very depressing to see how history repeats itself, with the exacerbation of xenophobia, and the recurrent resurgence of restrictive policies against immigration,” said Green. “But history also gives reason for optimism, for, in the long term, immigrants come to melt into society, even if they keep their original identity.”

The concentration on the immigration issue has excluded debates on other pressing issues such as climate change, development and international cooperation.

Bertrand Badie, professor at the Institute for Political Sciences in Paris, called the omission of such issues “abusive censorship on the part of the candidates and their apparatuses.”

Badie told IPS that practically all French presidential elections since 1965 have been dominated by domestic themes. “But today’s campaign contradicts the enormous amount of information the citizens have, and the international challenges for which France must have an answer.”

On Apr. 22, 44.5 million French citizens can vote in the first round of the presidential elections. Of 12 candidates, only two can go through to a second round, unless one gets more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round. The second round of voting is set for May 6.