Jim, more on the French, from front page of todays WSJ>
France's Le Pen Gets Major Boost
From Voters Fed Up With Crime
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
MARSEILLE, France -- Richard Hagobian, born to Armenian immigrants in this cosmopolitan Mediterranean port, voted Socialist all his life. But now, as he walks past drug peddlers on the potholed streets of a neighborhood called Le Canet, he says he can't stand it any longer. In France's presidential elections set for a final runoff on May 5, he's backing extreme-right challenger Jean-Marie Le Pen.
"The time for shock treatment has come," says Mr. Hagobian, 51 years old, a soft-spoken printshop worker whose own apartment has been burglarized. "I'm not afraid of Le Pen -- and I'm from an immigrant family myself."
Such anger is widely shared in this troubled suburb on the northern tip of Marseille, where faded 19th-century brownstones are hemmed in by crumbling concrete high-rises peopled mostly by Muslim migrants from North Africa. Assaults, robberies and car thefts are common in Le Canet; even the local cemetery is no longer considered safe to visit.
It is in heavily immigrant, high-crime neighborhoods such as this that Mr. Le Pen gathered the votes that propelled him to the No. 2 spot in the French elections' first round a week ago. A fervent French nationalist, Mr. Le Pen has said that races aren't made equal, that the Holocaust was a "detail" and that many Arab and African immigrants should be expelled. In Marseille, France's second-largest city where one out of four residents is Muslim, he finished first, garnering 23.3% of the vote -- against 18.2% for incumbent President Jacques Chirac. In the district that includes Le Canet, Mr. Le Pen did even better: 28%, compared with 13% for Mr. Chirac.
The upset victory has produced a political earthquake in France, sending shivers about the resurgence of 1930s-style fascism across Europe. But the people here in Mr. Le Pen's electoral heartland -- many of them first- or second-generation immigrants themselves -- say they care little about some aspects of the challenger's program that frighten outsiders, such as the proposed withdrawal from the European Union, a massive increase in military spending and the dismantling of France's alliance with the U.S.
The message that catches the ear here is the one that Mr. Le Pen, 73, a gruff ex-paratrooper, has been broadcasting for years: It's time to get tough on crime. His was until recently a lonely voice as both President Chirac and the failed Socialist candidate, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, had shied away from the issue for fear of offending France's millions of Arab voters. When Messrs. Chirac and Jospin finally woke up to the crime problem, euphemistically called "l'insecurité," it was seen by many voters as too little too late.
"Insecurity is the worry No. 1 of the French people -- and the advantage of Le Pen is that he has been talking about this for 15 years, while the others were saying that the crime problem is a fantasy and that he's paranoid," says Jackie Blanc, the Marseille leader of Mr. Le Pen's party, the National Front.
According to the French ministry of interior, reported crimes surged 7.7% in France to more than four million last year, after climbing 5.7% in 2000. Burglaries alone increased by 12.2%. In an opinion poll by Figaro Magazine just before the election, 60% of French voters indicated war on crime should be the next government's top priority.
Radical Recipes
And here, Mr. Le Pen offers radical recipes. The far-right leader wants to declare a state of emergency, suspending some constitutional rights in high-crime neighborhoods. He also wants to reimpose the death penalty, outlawed across Europe. He would jail juvenile delinquents as young as 10, and deport and strip of nationality French citizens of immigrant background who break the law.
"The other politicians just don't get it -- we've had enough of France turning into a garbage dump," fumes Marseille city employee and Le Pen voter Jules Reynaud, 52, standing by the wreck of a burned-out car in Le Canet. His own car, Mr. Reynaud says, was vandalized twice in 15 days. "Chirac is now talking about the fight against organized crime -- but the big-time criminals don't bother us here," says Mr. Reynaud. "What we need is someone to take care of the local delinquents."
The local delinquents are predominantly North African Muslim youths, police say. In the shadow of Le Canet's housing developments, young men idle by on a weekday afternoon, ducking for cover when a rare police car appears. Some of them have grown long beards and wear the white robes favored by Islamic fundamentalists.
Many of these young "beurs" -- local slang for North African Muslims -- feel out of place in France, even though they were born and raised here. Arabs are visible in French soccer and on the music scene, but are nearly absent from the political and business elite. Although people of non-European ancestry make up about one-fifth of the country's population, all the ministers in Mr. Jospin's left-wing government are white; none of France's big-city mayors is of Arab or African extraction.
This alienation was brought home to many during a televised France-Algeria soccer match last fall, when French-born beur fans booed France's national anthem, La Marseillaise -- providing invaluable propaganda material to the National Front.
Most people here, as in the rest of France, don't think Mr. Le Pen will actually win this time around -- and some of Mr. Le Pen's voters say they wouldn't have voted for him if they thought he had a chance of becoming president. But, Mr. Reynaud warns, if French politicians don't implement some of Mr. Le Pen's tough recipes, "five years down the line, we'll have street battles here, just like in Israel."
The divide between Mr. Le Pen's supporters and opponents doesn't necessarily coincide with the lines of racial and ethnic division. In recent years, the pervasive gang presence in neighborhoods such as Le Canet has prompted even some Marseille Muslims, as well as French Jews and blacks, to vote for Mr. Le Pen.
One reason that his strong showing was such a surprise is that few people were willing to admit to pollsters they planned to back him. In French public discourse, Mr. Le Pen remains a pariah: Many French TV personalities refuse to interview the far-right leader, and Mr. Chirac said he won't demean himself by debating Mr. Le Pen.
"It's true that some of our people voted for Le Pen here -- but saying it openly would mean declaring that they disrespect their own community," says Youssef Ouateli, 28, a French-born son of Moroccan immigrants, as he tried one recent day to explain the values of Islam to a group of teenagers in a Le Canet billiard hall. Despite his distaste for Mr. Le Pen, Mr. Ouateli, dressed in a traditional Arab robe, won't vote on May 5. Like many young people here, he prefers to focus on religion and thinks that all politicians are "sharks."
In addition to fears about common crime, some French Jews were pushed into Mr. Le Pen's arms by a recent wave of anti-Semitic attacks attributed to radical Muslim youths, including one that burned to the ground a synagogue in eastern Marseille on March 31. "Some Jews here voted for Le Pen because they think he'll ship out all the Arabs," explained a yarmulke-wearing Jewish youngster who stood guard by a synagogue on Boulevard Barry in northern Marseilles. "They don't realize that, after kicking out the Arabs, he'll do the same to the Jews next," quickly intervened another.
So far, only one well-known French Jewish personality has come out in favor of Mr. Le Pen. Jo Goldenberg, the elderly founder of a famous Paris kosher restaurant that was attacked by Palestinian gunmen in 1982, said that the far-right leader "defends France." After a wave of protests threatened to destroy his business, Mr. Goldenberg recanted that statement.
Yet many others secretly harbor similar attitudes. "When in doubt, people here would rather have a racist who restores security rather than the other way around," says Benjamin Allouch, a 23-year-old security agent, as he walks on Marseille's Boulevard Barry, a heavily Jewish area adjoining a housing project.
And it goes in further detail... |
