CREEPY:

I will protect you, Sarkozy tells France as his flame burns again on last day of campaigning (Angelique Chrisafis, April 21, 2007, The Guardian)

On a stage facing a sea of tricolour flags stood a small figure in a pinstriped suit hailed as the greatest orator in France. Slicing the air with both hands and jabbing his finger, he waved his arms like an orchestra conductor, whipping the crowd into a frenzy as he promised a France that would no longer hate itself, that would no longer let unchecked immigrants invade its borders and burn its suburbs.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the rightwing frontrunner in France's first-round presidential vote, has spent weeks stressing that he has mellowed. But at his final campaign rally in front of 20,000 people in Marseille, the former interior minister who once suggested wayward suburban youths were scum, sent a clear message: "I'm still myself."

Reclaiming the passion he had recently toned down, he dripped with sweat as he promised to be France's "protector" and restore faith in a country crippled by unemployment, economic stagnation and self-doubt.

"I hate this fashion for repentance that says France hates itself and its history," he roared. He said colonisation might have been an "unfair system" but would not apologise for it and talked of the debt owed to those "decent and hardworking French families" forced out of Africa. Boasting no fear of the "politically correct" lobby, he proudly repeated his codewords for a new moral and patriotic France. "Authority! Authority! Authority!" he shouted to wild cheers.

Only the French need to use German methods to sell the Anglo-American model.

MORE:
Resentment and anger mar slice of paradise (Simon Heffer, 21/04/2007, Daily Telegraph)

The north-west part of Provence is everything the French like to imagine their country to be. It has vineyards, olive groves, fields of artichokes, strawberries and lavender, rolling hills and distant mountains. Even in mid-April, it is hot rather than warm, the sky is an unbroken azure, and little stone-built hilltop villages shimmer in the strong sunlight. Tourists flock here and Parisians buy up charming houses as second homes - the capital is just over two-and-a-half hours from the local TGV station.

Yet this apparent slice of paradise - the Vaucluse - is also a microcosm of all the French feel is wrong with France today. Beneath the gorgeous face it presents to the world, there are tensions, discontents and fears that have bred anger and resentment - emotions that will strongly influence how the locals are likely to vote in tomorrow's first round of France's presidential election.

Rural Vaucluse is still visibly the bucolic France of Marcel Pagnol; but go into even small towns such as Carpentras, 15 miles from Avignon and about 75 minutes by road north of Marseilles, and the social revolution that has disturbed so many of the French, and caused them to want a clean break with the policies that successive governments have followed since the Second World War, is plainly visible. With some 30,000 inhabitants, Carpentras is about the size of Chippenham or Whitstable, and has a similarly rural hinterland. However, quite unlike such English towns, a considerable proportion of its population is of North African origin. The French do not publish official figures of people by ethnic origin: everyone in France is deemed to be French, and the authorities have no truck with ethnic monitoring.

However, the consensus among the indigenous French in Carpentras is that the Muslims in the town now comprise about a quarter of its population. In France as a whole, estimates of the Muslim population range from between 10 and 13 per cent, but the hinterland of Marseilles has a heavy concentration of North Africans. Unemployment is just above the national average of 10 per cent, and seems widespread among the Muslim population - some local businessmen put that community's unemployment at around 60 per cent, including illegal immigrants who do not feature in the official statistics. Throughout the day, the benches in the neat little gardens in the town are packed with men in Maghrebian dress, simply sitting and staring into an indefinite distance. The bourgeois who walk past seem to be making a conscious effort not to notice them, and it is reciprocated.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 20, 2007 7:57 PM