Sarkozy's pivotal battle

In Villiers-le-Bel, just 10 miles north of the Elysee Palace, the gutters stink and the tower blocks sweat graffiti.

Even local mayor Didier Vaillant, a mustachioed Socialist who recently put on his tricoloured sash to tour the aftermath of three nights of rioting, wonders what happened to the place he used to know.

What happened, say the town's old hands, is that, over the years, “half the Third World arrived'', and the newcomers' expectations of a better life in the Paris suburbs could not be realised.

Between 1960 and 1980 the population rose from 5,000 to 25,000, mostly as a result of immigration from North Africa.

The first generation found work in car factories and at the nearby Roissy — now Charles de Gaulle — airport, but today jobs are harder to come by and a new wave of even poorer arrivals, many from Mali and Senegal, has complicated the ethnic mix and made competition for what employment there is harder.

To walk around Villiers, with its burnt-out cars, its clusters of mouthy, teenagers, its once-spiffy but now vandalised civic amenities, is to have the sense of a community that has drifted beyond repair.

The grottiness of the surroundings, the dreariness of the architecture, extends into the inhabitants' lives. Work is a novelty, drugs and crime routine.

There are many places dotted around France's larger cities that are in a comparable mess, but when Villiers-le-Bel went up in flames recently — the first major urban riot since the election of President Nicolas Sarkozy in May — the significance was inescapable.

Here, in one multi-flavoured bombe de bouche, was a taste of everything that Sarkozy had come to power promising to fix: economic paralysis, social disorder, lax immigration policy, establishment apathy and the enfeebling of the state.

The President went on television to depict the rioters as “a thugocracy'', undeserving of sympathy — but, angry as he unquestionably was, the wily Sarko understood the perverse degree to which he and the rioters were on the same side.

“Sarkozy came to power thanks to the crisis in the ghettos,'' says French historian Emmanuel Todd.

“Now it is not just the rioters he feels able to take on but the civil servants, the legal profession, the transport workers. Everybody who he thinks needs reforming.''

Ugly graffiti

It is a lengthy list and a potentially perilous one for, as the conservative daily Le Figaro said in an editorial recently, the President, with his once sky-high approval ratings slipping, now faces “everything the forces of French backwardness can throw at him''.

The graffiti in Villiers-le-Bel is almost as ugly as the buildings it defaces.

Many of the messages are colourful, obscene and directed personally at Sarkozy, who, as Interior Minister during the mass disorder that hit France's poor districts in 2005, called for such places to be “cleansed'' of what he described as “the rabble''.

In in Villiers-le-Bel, trouble began when a moped carrying 16-year-old Laramy Samoura, and Mouhsin Cehhouli, 15, crashed into a police car, killing both boys. More than 120 police officers were injured — some by gunfire — and the town's new library and nursery school were burnt down.

They had been built, along with much else, in pursuit of the orthodoxy, beloved of the French Left, which holds that throwing money at social problems will make them go away.
Sarkozy sees a much deeper malaise and, although the swaggering youths on the streets of Villiers-le-Bel would hesitate to say so, it is one they essentially share.

Amid all the tough-guy talk of “bringing Sarko down'', the most common complaint of the town's youths was that they simply couldn't get jobs.

“You say you come from the HLM [the public housing complexes],'' I was told, “and nobody wants to know you''.

They say the police harass them and there's nothing in the town to do. Gazing from their tower blocks at the dazzle of Paris just a few kilometres away, these youths see a different world, of glamour and refinement, and conclude that France has it in for them.

In fact, France has it in for everybody who wants to be left alone to run a business.

Consumed by a statist allegiance to what it regards as equality in the workplace, the country has effectively abolished the right of anyone to take a low-paid job.

It not only imposes Europe's highest minimum wage — about £800 a month — but layers it with complicated and costly regulations about who can work where, for how long and in what conditions.

In doing so, it has effectively closed the labour market door in the faces of the poorly educated and mostly ill-qualified youths of places such as Villiers-le-Bel, where the unemployment rate frequently touches 60 per cent.

In his best-selling book, Testimony, published before he was elected, Sarkozy addressed this calamity with a scathing portrayal of France as an “exhausted'' society; arrogant, work-shy and perniciously resistant to change.

In contrast, he holds Britain up as an example to be emulated. “London has become the seventh largest French city,'' he writes.

“It ceaselessly sucks in thousands of young French people — including my own daughter — who find it easier to succeed there than at home.

"How shameful is it that young people wanting to get on are obliged to leave?''

Pleasant as it is to find a backstreet bistro run by lace-hatted crones, where nothing appears to have changed for centuries, the changelessness in France is an expensive illusion.

The crones will typically be paying 50 per cent income tax and 19.6 per cent VAT, plus property tax, business tax, rubbish collection tax, licensed premises tax and a “solidarity'' tax to support the unemployed.

“How,'' asks the President, “can we continue to believe that by taxing more and working fewer hours, we can ever create wealth and jobs?''

This is Sarko's Margaret Thatcher moment. In a televised interview recently, the 52-year-old President declared that he would “fight on all fronts for reform so that we will be more competitive, rehabilitate work and restore its value, have more growth and less unemployment''.

Vested interests

Companies, he said, would be allowed to ditch the 35-hour week, labour market regulations would be simplified and vested interests would no longer be bought off with public money.

“The French people should know I'm not Father Christmas,'' he said. “There is nothing in the coffers.''

Yet there is abundant ammunition in the hands of Sarkozy's well-organised opponents.

A crippling, nine-day transport strike last month was followed by actions involving Air France's cabin crews protesting at new productivity measures, and university students mobilising against the alleged “privatisation'' of the education system.

The strikers were quickly joined by hospital, post office and museum workers and even tobacconists complaining about a new anti-smoking law. All this unfolded to the glee of the President's Socialist Party enemies.

No French government of modern times has stood up to the kind of battle Sarko has coming.

The record has been one of complete, inglorious capitulation to what the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur calls “la France du refus'' — the France that will not change.

The costs of that refusal are many, and one could be seen when the smoke cleared over Villiers-le-Bel.

Patting his sash, the mayor promised that everything that had been destroyed would soon be rebuilt.

But he didn't say where the money would come from, or who would do the work.

The French disconnection

Unemployment

France's jobless rate is 8.1 per cent but can be three times that in the deprived, high-immigrant suburbs.

According to the latest TNS-Sofres poll, 73 per cent of respondents think the government is not doing enough to fight unemployment.

Growth and deficit

French growth this year will struggle to hit 2 per cent of GDP, while the country's overall deficit for 2008 is expected to reach 2.3 per cent of GDP.

The Eurozone's second largest economy is under pressure from its European partners to rein in spending and meet a 2010 target for a balanced budget.

Working hours

The French work a 35-hour week, introduced by the Socialist government in 2000, which critics argue is a barrier to greater prosperity, faster economic growth and fuller employment.

Inflation, spending power and consumer confidence

French people are concerned by their reduced spending power, which is blamed on stagnating wages and hefty price hikes since the introduction of the euro. According to the TNS-Sofres poll, 87 per cent believe the government is failing to tackle rising prices.

Sarkozy's solutions

Sarkozy insists that the only way to boost spending power is to allow people to “work more to earn more'', promising to let firms circumvent the 35-work week if agreed by workers and unions.

He aims to bring generous pension provisions for 500,000 public sector workers into line with those of other workers, before a general pension reform next year, and has promised to replace no more than 66 per cent of public sector workers who retire.