Sunday, January 20, 2008

Suburbs plan disappoints Nicolas Sarkozy

When Fadela Amara, the popular 43-year-old junior urban affairs minister, announces France's much-awaited "Hope for the Suburbs" plan on Tuesday at Vaulx-en-Velin, a working-class suburb of Lyons, she will be flanked by several members of the Cabinet.

But not by President Nicolas Sarkozy, as was initially intended.

This is because the plan is known to have deeply disappointed the president, to the extent that he last week quietly commissioned a trans-cabinet task force to come up with more radical and wide-ranging reforms for his own presentation of "the details of the suburbs plan", scheduled for 8 February.

A famously forceful interior minister under Jacques Chirac, Mr Sarkozy was branded an authoritarian (and worse) by the opposition because of his often-misquoted remark on ridding dangerous neighbourhoods of "scum".

In fact, the word was never meant to refer to all young inhabitants of the troubled areas, only the rioters, and was indeed first used by local residents themselves during a Sarkozy walkabout at Argenteuil in October 2005.

Mr Sarkozy was elected on a platform which included finding solutions to the ethnic and unemployment problems which led to France's month-long 2005 race riots. His first move was to assemble France's first multi-cultural cabinet, with several representatives of what are known here as "visible minorities", instead of the lily-white governments, both Left and Right, which had until then ruled the country.

Ms Amara is a French-Algerian socialist alderwoman from the Auvergne capital, Clermont-Ferrand, and a vigorous feminist activist who founded the Ni Putes, Ni Soumises (Neither Whores, Nor Submissives) movement in response to forced marriages, violence and gang rapes of women in France's worst areas.

She is also perhaps the most visible representative of "the new France" in the cabinet and has retained the colourful accent and expressions of the banlieues, breaking into Arabic on occasion when visiting sink estates.

Unlike Rachida Dati, the glamorous and well-spoken justice minister who is the first woman of North African background to hold a key ministerial position, Ms Amara has never set foot in a Dior shop, cuts her hair in her own bathroom, and still lives in a council flat in a working-class part of Paris rather than use her ministry's official residence near the Eiffel Tower.

She is regularly rated as one of the three most popular ministers in the cabinet and a television profile of her screened in prime time last Thursday garnered some of the evening's best ratings.

She, therefore, cannot be allowed to fail, and will stand next to the Mr Sarkozy when he finally details "her" plan's measures in three weeks' time.

Tuesday's exercise in Vaulx-en-Velin will essentially be yet another of those symbolic numbers so beloved of French politicians, in which a number of piecemeal, if well-meaning, measures will be thrown at the assembled media to show that Something Is Being Done.

Almost all of the initiatives announced in Ms Amara's Madame Figaro interview yesterday are already in operation, some for several years. Her ministry doesn't have much of a budget of its own, and is dependent on the co-operation of other, more powerful administrations, such as education, transport and health, to effect any kind of significant change.

Until the Elysée stepped in last week, Ms Amara's abrasive personality and the relative inexperience of her chief aides had not earned her much goodwill among other mandarins.

Contrary to public perception, a great deal of money has always been thrown at France's most disenfranchised areas - though not always judiciously. Even more is regularly spent on infrastructure - transport, communications, public conveniences and post offices - in a country where long-term state investment is tantamount to a lay religion. (One politically incorrect testimony to the excellence of French public transport is the sudden drop in petty crime in city centres whenever the transport unions have called a strike.)

Meanwhile, a bevy of France's supercilious but competent technocrats are now slaving away at finding radical ways of facing the stark reality that between 15 and 20 per cent of France's population live in semi-ghettoes where a de facto apartheid already exists, especially when it comes to housing and schools.

Solutions, they feel, should be radical. For instance, ending social housing policies to replace them with personalised grants so that poorer citizens can actually look for homes on the open market. This, however, would mean dismantling a entire bureaucracy which can be confidently expected to be obstructive.

If anyone can do the job - and half a dozen similar ones - it's Nicolas Sarkozy himself.

© Copyright Telegraph Media Group & Anne-Elisabeth Moutet 2008