Is France's government already backing off the debate on national identity, asks RUADHÁN MAC CORMAICin Paris
ANNOUNCED WITH great solemnity by Éric Besson, the minister for immigration and national identity, as a three-month exercise to establish what unifying values underlay modern France, le grand débathas given rise to fierce recrimination – most of it over the government's motivation in broaching the idea in the first place.
Besson said there was a need to redefine notions of citizenship and belonging after decades of tumultuous social change, and that that task should fall not to government but to the people of France.
Debates are taking place at locally organised town-hall meetings across the country, and members of the public are also being invited to expound on what it means to be French by submitting their comments on a new website hosted by Besson’s office. These views will then be collated and synthesised in a report to be published at a conference next February.
But the project has been mired in rancour from the beginning. The left insists the debate is self-evidently not about national identity but about immigration, and dismiss it as a strategic move by President Nicolas Sarkozy aimed at countering the threat of the National Front at a time when his popularity is waning.
Among the topics up for discussion at the local meetings are the Muslim head scarf, whether France should adopt "integration contracts" and whether schoolchildren should sing La Marseillaiseonce a year. Left-wing opponents of the initiative say that by framing the debate in such terms, it will further alienate many immigrants while providing a platform for racism and prejudice to thrive. To the president's critics, it's no coincidence that the final report on the debate will be published just weeks before French voters go to the polls in regional elections next March.
Until now, the government has brushed off such criticism and resolutely defended the project. “It’s not dangerous, it’s necessary,” Sarkozy said in a speech last month. “What would be dangerous would be not to talk about it, to act as if everything were fine.”
But has the government's ardour dimmed in recent days? Sarkozy pulled out of an event yesterday where he was due to speak on the theme "What it means to be French", a decision his office said was due to a timetable clash but which Le Mondereported was made out of concern over the way the issue was being perceived.
Three right-wing former prime ministers – Alain Juppé, Jean-Pierre Raffarin and Dominique de Villepin – have expressed reservations about the project, while others in the president's political family will have found little reassurance in the polls. An Ifop survey for Le Journal du Dimanchefound that three-quarters of French people thought the national identity debate was a strategy aimed at winning the regional elections.
More importantly, the decision of Swiss voters to ban the construction of minarets has added to the unease among those politicians on both sides who fear the debate risks raising tensions at a delicate moment.
And if a reminder were needed of the socio-economic inequality between predominantly immigrant city suburbs ( banlieues) and the rest of society, it came this week in the form of an official report confirming that income and employment gaps have widened since a wave of riots in 2005.
Adding to the government’s discomfort has been the reprinting in the national press of some of the openly racist comments that have appeared alongside the serious and thoughtful contributions to the official website, leaving Besson’s office in a difficult position over how to strike the right balance in moderating users’ comments.
If Sarkozy's government has gone cold on le grand débat, it may have less to do with criticism from the opposition than a feeling within his own political family that it may be more trouble than it's worth.
As former prime minister Alain Juppé remarked succinctly on his blog, “What is the point of relaunching this debate?”