The Hindu : French election turns abusive

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Apr 19, 2002

International

International

French election turns abusive

By Vaiju Naravane

An activist spraying tomato ketchup on the French Prime Minister and socialist presidential candidate, Lionel Jospin, at a campaign rally in Rennes on Wednesday. — Reuters

PARIS APRIL 18 . The 90-second ad begins like a thriller: a hand slowly turning a doorknob, opening a door. Arab music blasts out of the room. The camera follows the footsteps of the extreme-right candidate, Bruno Megret, up to the music console. A click of the remote and the station now plays classical music. Mr. Megret slides into an armchair, beatitude writ large on his face, as a solemn voice proclaims: "Let's be master of our own home with Bruno Megret."

In another clip, Mr. Megret, a small, ferret-faced man with rodent teeth, brutally throws out a foreigner trying to jump the queue to the accompanying announcement: "The French come first."

With over a third of France's electorate of 40 million still undecided about their choice of candidate, the presidential campaign is turning increasingly spiteful, malicious, even abusive. The subliminal message delivered by the campaign clips used by both Mr. Megret and his former chief and rival, Jean Marie Le Pen, is that foreigners are uncouth, dirty queue-jumpers who play loud music and have no place in civilised France.

"The single most important issue in this campaign is that of crime and insecurity. From there, it is just one step away to racism. It's like the blacks in America. An unnaturally high percentage of prisoners in France come from the North African Arab community. Why could Mr. Megret's campaign managers not have used Chinese or Indian music? Because they wanted to point fingers at the Arabs whom they see as a threat. I clearly see racism in France growing as a result of this campaign," sociologist Jean Grosjean told The Hindu.

The fact that Arab youths are the prime suspects in a series of attacks against France's Jewish community has further hardened the case. The attacks stem from a sense of solidarity with the Palestinians — a feeling that finds its roots as much in a commonality of origin, religion and language as in the French Arab's sense of isolation from mainstream French life. Many of France's four million-plus North African Arabs live in high-rise ghettos built in the late 1950s and '60s near the industrial sites where Arab immigrants worked. These infamous "cites" have become fertile ground for juvenile delinquency, drug trafficking and Islamic fundamentalism.

The French President, Jacques Chirac, in his electoral advert, also talks about a "system of impunity" that must be broken. Mr. Le Pen's clip paints a catastrophic scenario of "fear over the city", with pensioners "agonising over the safety of their pensions".

Over the past couple of weeks, opinion polls have given the conservative Mr. Chirac a slim lead over his Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin. Political pundits say the two men are really running neck-and-neck, but that their combined score is bound to be less than fifty per cent — perhaps even less than 40 per cent — in next Sunday's first-round election. There are 16 candidates in the fray, the most for any French presidential election since the present Constitution was adopted in 1958.

Mr. Le Pen's extreme right-wing supporters are jubilant.

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