Paris

Finally “free to approach the French”. After four years, Nicolas Sarkozy has abandoned the Ministry of the Interior in order to dedicate himself full-time to the final stage of the electoral campaign. Despite having skillfully used the office as a springboard for his conquest of the Gaullist right and for his candidature for the Élysée, the ultimate verdict on the ‘first police officer in France’, and the image he has created for himself in the eyes of the Muslim community, seems more than anything to be contradictory and rather negative. Having begun under the authority of emergency security measures, he then worked for a considerable time towards promoting the recognition of French Islam, only to later alienate a large part of this electorate with his repressive u-turns on immigration and policies towards the banlieues. In reality, the relationship between the former Interior Minister and the Muslim population has always been equivocal, and often linked to an electoral opportunism which brought him first up against the republicans and later against Muslims themselves.

It is true, for example, that Sarkozy was, in 2003, one of the architects of the French Council for Muslim Worship (CFCM). In order to better survey the Islamic community, says he; in to win over the vote of the substantial number of first and second generation immigrants, say his adversaries. The fact remains that, following the criticisms he attracted for having permitted the fundamentalist Union of Islamic Organisations of France (UOIF) to join the CFCM, ‘Sarkò’ stopped attending meetings quite so assiduously. In fact, he went further than that. In the recent abortive court case between the CFCM and the editor of Charlie Hebdo – the weekly satirical journal which last year published satirical cartoons about Mohammed – the candidate of the right took sides against his own creation: the voters favoured freedom of expression, and, as we all know, during an election campaign the sovereign people must be obeyed.

‘Sarkò’ the presidential candidate no longer flatters the Islamic electorate as ‘Sarkò’ the Minister had tried. During this campaign, for example, he no longer mentions that which, in past times, was his forte – his revision of the secularist legislation, passed in 1905, which cleanly divides State and Church and forbids the public financing of places of worship. The Minster had thought of tinkering with the principle of separation in order to permit a government contribution to the construction of mosques. To win votes, say his adversaries; to prevent the money coming from abroad, says Sarkozy. This controversy, along with his stance in favour of ‘positive discrimination’, cost him the label of ‘communitarian’, and in the République the voters are republicans. Not a trace remains today of these past proposals.

Even when Jean Pierre Raffarin’s government passed a law which forbade the wearing of the Islamic veil at school, the Minister wanted to send a clear signal of his indignation to the Muslim community and nominated ‘the first Muslim prefet’. Only later, however, his robust policies towards immigration turned those same immigrants against him. The banlieues are the obvious symbol of this. On the outskirts, where social issues merge with those of religion and migration, ‘Sarkò’ went in heavy handed, to the point of promising to rid the areas of their ‘scum’. This was in autumn 2005, and the Minister’s choice of words was one of the motives which ignited the revolts. Now that he is a presidential candidate, Sarkozy has softened the tone of his discourse on the banlieues and on the young people of the second or third generation that live there, but there is no change in register on immigration.

As part of his agenda as presidential candidate, the former Minister has planned a heavy schedule of visits the length and breadth of the country, but a fear of conflict has prevented him from organising even the tiniest of meetings on the city outskirts, despite such stops having been promised and announced. His challengers in the race to the Élysée, on the other hand, have done everything to make their presence felt in the banlieues in order to distinguish themselves from the former ‘first police officer in France’. Certainly, it is too much to say that no Muslims will vote for the UMP candidate, but it can be confidently stated that his image as former Interior Minister has at least been compromised in their eyes.

Translation by Liz Longden