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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy fueled the riots by insulting France's impoverished youth. Is he also their best hope for change?
Nov 15, 2005 | On Oct. 27, at 6:12 p.m., when two boys named Ziad Benna and Bouna Traoré were electrocuted in a power substation as they were fleeing from the police in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, Nicolas Sarkozy, 50, was being driven through the immaculate rolling hills of Lorraine.
He had been on the road since early that morning, and by evening his motorcade of slate-gray limousines was winding its way through one of the year's last summerlike days. Sarkozy had toured a factory near Metz and given a speech at a cultural center in Freyming-Merlebach -- both part of his grand plan to become France's president.
As the French interior minister made his way through the eastern French countryside, there was little indication that violent riots would soon erupt throughout France. This despite the fact that Sarkozy had been quoted in Le Monde only two days earlier as saying that 9,000 police vehicles -- an average of 20 to 40 a night -- had been torched in France since January. The death of an 11-year-old boy caught in the crossfire between warring suburban drug gangs had been on the public's mind for weeks, especially after Sarkozy's insensitive remark, meant for the mourning father of the child, that many of the suburbs needed "to be cleaned up with a pressure washer."
Sarkozy was driven to Pont-à-Mousson. The small town's largest auditorium had been reserved for his appearance -- a thousand-seat facility on the edge of an industrial area and adjacent to discount supermarkets Aldi and Intermarché. The region's dignitaries had assembled on the stage to welcome the honored guest from Paris, some even wearing ceremonial garb complete with sashes in the colors of the French flag.
The event was being sponsored by the UMP, France's conservative ruling party, which had been established three years ago as a platform for the reelection of French President Jacques Chirac. It has, though, since strayed from its original mission. Within a year, Sarkozy became chairman and grabbed control of the party -- or "movement" as the party itself would have it -- and with his charisma has already managed to recruit 60,000 new members since January. His entrance into the auditorium was nothing short of triumphant.
At approximately 8:30 p.m. on Oct. 27 -- just as Sarkozy was giving his speech in faraway Lorraine -- the first car was being set on fire in Clichy-sous-Bois, 350 kilometers away in Paris. The fire began near a concrete housing project called Chêne-Pointu -- and a process began that would soon yield television images depicting street scenes in the country's most impoverished suburbs that could just as easily have transpired in places like Baghdad, Lagos or Port-au-Prince. In his speech, Sarkozy spoke informally and effusively about the values of the French republic. He had no idea how soon these values would be called into question.
"It cannot be, my friends, that the grandchildren of the first generation of immigrants are not as well-integrated as their grandparents," Sarkozy told his audience. "We must bring an end to the division of our country, we must put an end to this talk about real and inauthentic Frenchmen, and we must wake up after 30 years of failed policies. Today, anyone who wants to be French is a Frenchman, no matter how long he has been in the country, and no matter where he came from."
The speech was classic Sarkozy. Indeed, he delivers any one of endless variations on the same speech whenever he appears. He seems to have memorized about a dozen passages, each on a different topic, and has become adept at configuring and reconfiguring these passages to suit his needs and his audiences, constructing a platform that defies all labels.
There are passages in Sarkozy's speeches that could easily have been uttered by a communist, passages in which he demands what he calls a "rupture" and an open, just society, one in which 10 percent of households are no longer permitted to enjoy 40 percent of the country's wealth.
And when he gets agitated over the barriers faced by the children of blue-collar workers and immigrants, over their lack of access to the "social elevator," over their being forced to do their homework in stairwells because their parents' apartments are too small to accommodate a desk, he sounds like a left-leaning socialist.
But then, when justifying his brutal deportation policies -- when he asks why it should be a human rights violation to deport a Senegalese to Senegal, when he urges the police to engage in merciless repression, when he ridicules social work as pointless -- he can sound as if he were speaking to a meeting of the ultra-right-wing National Front led by Jean-Marie Le Pen.
In short, when Sarkozy speaks, it's difficult to tell whether he is politically to the left or the right. This lack of political identification makes each new paragraph in his speeches sound like fresh, fascinating politics, like an adventure and an outrageous yearning for democratic debate.
Anyone who hears Sarkozy speak for the first time is overwhelmed by his talent as a speaker, and those who hear him for the 10th time still want to hear the latest rhetorical trick up his sleeve. Sarkozy's most impressive trick is that the moment he leaves the stage, he seems to have provided the perfect answer for every significant question. But, somehow, all the significant questions remain unanswered.
