No Escape in France

Maybe you’re sick to death of all the political posturing and finger pointing in the United States as the November mid-term elections approach. Maybe you want to get away from it all. Maybe you want to escape it in France.
 
Maybe you should think twice.
 
French presidential elections are coming up in April or May of next year and for weeks now a multitude of presidential hopefuls have been digging up issues to argue about and saying the most denigrating things you can imagine about their potential rivals inside and outside their own parties.
 
Ho hum. Name your country. That’s politics as usual.
 
Inevitably, however, the debating and positioning process is putting the spotlight on many French social, economic and political problems that often lie dormant, or at least off the front pages, in non-election years. 
 
If you are in France in the coming months you are almost certain to find them dominating much of what you read and hear around you.
 
The list is long.  It tells you a lot about how the country works and what its current concerns are and, interestingly enough, it is dominated by many issues America already has been facing and trying to tackle for years.
 
To mention just a few:
 
–How to bolster peaceful “mixing” of different social and ethnic groups
–How to even up educational opportunities for all
—How to cope with the problems of increasing illegal immigration
–How to address growing domestic and international security concerns
–How to bolster male-female parity in government and the private sector
 
Front and center in the current political debate is the recently arrived policy of “Discrimination Positive”.  If that term doesn’t jar a politically correct American’s ear, nothing will. In essence, however, it is simply what Americans long have termed Affirmative Action.

French politicians prefer Discrimination Positive despite the negative connotations of the word discrimination mostly because they want to avoid the appearance of blindly copying America. Call it what you will; nonetheless it has become the French way of describing a hotly disputed, fresh concept in France’s social and educational system. 
 
Since the revolutionary overthrow of its monarchy in 1789, France as a nation has long been given to proud chest thumping about its national motto, “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” as a sort of proof of the way all its citizens are equal and treated equally.
 
That is a patently erroneous claim. By and large, no official barriers attached to race, color or creed exist in France today. But there’s still a lot of unofficial discrimination and, for years, successive governments have turned a blind eye to it, at least until the resentment it engenders boils over.
 
It explains a lot of the national surprise and dismay last autumn when generally poor and disadvantaged immigrant-origin youth in the suburban outskirts of Paris took to the streets in a riot of car burning and window smashing.
 
Essentially they were convinced that because of their skin color or African or Arab roots, they were not being treated equally when they applied for a job or admission to a good school.
 
Right they were. Unemployment rates in their neighborhoods often approach 25 percent compared to less than 10 percent in France as a whole. Only one generally considered ‘token’ minister in the current government is of Muslim origin, even though Muslims represent more than 12 percent of the nation’s population. The first-ever black primetime news presenter on French television, accompanied by considerable media hype about the breakthrough, made his appearance as a summer fill-in only this year. Happily, he was graded well by TV viewers and one can expect, at last, that others of diverse origins will follow.
 
To be fair, various sorts of anti-discrimination or discrimination positive laws and regulations have been put in place in France little by little for several decades now, mostly in favor of disadvantaged groups—the homeless, the unemployed, the handicapped—but none have been based on race, color or creed. 
 
For instance, in 1987, the country passed a law requiring any company with 20 or more employees to make sure at least 6 percent of those jobs went to handicapped persons. Fine idea, often obeyed but probably more often sidestepped by employers who simply pay a small tax to the government for every handicap post unfilled. 
 
Same scenario for a law requiring towns or cities in the area around Paris with populations of more than 1,500 (or 3,500 in the rest of the country) to allot at least 20 percent of their living space to low-rent public housing.  The goal was to break up rich or moderately well-off enclaves by forcing space for low-income families who, although it was never stressed by the lawmakers, essentially are of immigrant origin.
 
As with the rules for the handicapped, however, an escape route was left open by which towns could simply pay a fine for non-compliance.  Most of the rich areas remain intact and more than 250 of the nearly 750 cities concerned don’t yet meet the requirements.
 
Male-female parity for the candidate lists of various political parties has been enforced and one of the leading presidential hopefuls for the first time is a woman, Ségolène Royal, often described as a Hillary Clinton look-alike and act-alike.  But so far the results of national and local elections themselves still leave a major disparity between elected men and elected women. Currently only 71 of 577 deputies in the French national assembly are women.
 
In the field of education, where France historically has preened itself on the quality and success rate of its Grandes Ecoles—their graduates usually go on to major positions in government—the first attempts began just a few years ago to admit so-called “disadvantaged” students without the super-competitive entry exam required of others.  Initially, they raised a storm of criticism and still are a subject of hot debate.
 
The first to break the barrier was The Institute of Political Studies, on Paris’ trendy left bank of the Seine. Normally called just “Sciences-Po,” it is the accepted French trampoline for eventual jobs in diplomacy, journalism or politics.  In 2001 it agreed to let in, without the traditional competitive exam, a handful of carefully picked students from the same kind of suburban areas that went up in flames last autumn. The expectable objections quickly were raised about the departure from strict equality principles and the spots that would thus have to be denied to more legitimately qualified but not as disadvantaged students.
 
Americans who are old enough may remember that these were the same objections raised in the United States by candidates who felt their job or admission to college had been blocked due to beneficiaries of affirmative action.  They preceded the not too dissimilar debates underway in the U.S. at the moment about the equal opportunity issues involved in university early admission programs.
 
By general agreement, however, the results of the “disadvantaged” students admitted without exam to Sciences-Po have been good, if not exactly sensational, and its principle of favored entries now seems to have been accepted.
 
At an even earlier educational level, a somewhat similar program involving 30 students from so-called “disadvantaged” areas has just been launched for the first time at the ultra-chic Henri IV high school, also on Paris’s left bank.
 
For the moment, the group of 30, all in a preparatory course for eventual admission to a Grande Ecole, is being sectioned off and taught similarly but separately from Henri IV’s competitively admitted students.
 
That will last for an unspecified period of time, nominally to give school officials the chance to judge their capabilities while at the same time guaranteeing the maintenance of the school’s standards and reputation.
 
But it’s a start.
 
There also is enormous electoral focus at the moment on various minority and equal opportunity issues in the wake of last autumn’s disturbances, and concern in France and elsewhere in Europe—as there is in the United States—about how to stem or control unwanted or uncontrolled immigration.
 
The immigration issue pits, often highly vociferously, those usually to the right of the political spectrum, who want to increase expulsions of residents illegally in the country, against those more often on the left, who stress humanitarian concerns and urge blanket legalization of anyone already in France, even clandestinely. 
 
Add to that two other debates, largely spurred by potential presidential candidates seeking an issue to champion. 
 
One was launched by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, a main presidential hopeful who wants to authorize government funding to help build mosques in largely Muslim communities. His thesis: The process would dilute potential terrorist breeding grounds around mosques currently financed essentially by money from Saudi Arabia or other Muslim states. The idea of course inevitably has been much decried by political adversaries of Sarkozy and staunch defenders of France’s official separation of church and state.  
 
The latest debate on the scene concerns what is known as the “carte scolaire,” or school card, which is essentially an identification of where a student lives and the local school to which he or she is assigned.  Assignment to the school in a specific neighborhood is not illogical on the face of it.  The downside, however, without doubt, is the fact that the system, in effect, locks kids in disadvantaged neighborhoods into local and disadvantaged schools. Often that simply increases the difficulties they face in breaking out of their environment. 
 
As with so many other French social problems that pop to the fore in an election year, school cards have survived for years without controversy mostly because parents with money or contacts, mostly teacher parents, know how to beat the system and get special permits to put their children into good schools in good neighborhoods.  One recent study found, for instance, that some 40 percent of the children in one of the better Paris undergraduate schools lived out of area and were there on special authorization.
 
Now, some of the campaigning politicians say they want to open all schools to all comers to give everyone an equal chance, even those from disadvantaged neighborhoods.
 
Others, however, plus the teachers’ unions, are wary. They fear that a totally open system would prove unmanageable and, in the end, so overload demand at the good schools that they would have to restrict entry even more so to just the best of the best, thus shutting out, again, the “disadvantaged.”
 
The problem at the moment is that the politicians in the presidential race keep changing or modifying their stances on most of these questions depending on what their opponents are saying and what the opinion polls are reporting.
 
That won’t change much until after the elections, but it certainly will provide conversation and debate topics galore between now and election day.