In French Campaign, Immigrants Find a Voice

MANTES-LA-JOLIE, France -- Fernand Trigano stood beside a rack of $8 jeans and watched French presidential candidate Francois Bayrou work a street market in an immigrant suburb of Paris, shaking hands over baskets of dried fish, stacks of flat bread and mannequins modeling head scarves.

"Salaam alaikum!" shouted a young man in a leather jacket, offering the traditional Muslim greeting "Peace be upon you."

"Salaam alaikum," replied Bayrou, the candidate from the centrist Union for French Democracy party now running third in opinion polls before the April 22 presidential election.

"I'm impressed," said Trigano, a 60-year-old resident of this suburb of high-rise apartments on the Seine River northwest of Paris. "He's bold. Not every candidate would dare to come with hardly any bodyguards. Politicians think it's dangerous here. He came to listen to what suburban people have to say. I think that's great."

Bayrou's campaign stroll through the ethnic mixing bowl of Mantes-la-Jolie represents a dramatic shift in France's stodgy, elitist political system. Sixteen months after immigrant neighborhoods exploded in the country's worst civil unrest in nearly half a century, the suburbs are emerging for the first time as a potent force in the presidential campaign.

Immigrant citizens and their first-generation French children have registered to vote in unprecedented numbers, forcing politicians to address a potential voter pool previously written off as politically insignificant.

Thousands of small, vocal political action groups representing Africans, Arabs and young people have sprung up in suburbs across the country, fledgling challengers to the political monopolies of unions and other establishment organizations.

Grass-roots blogs and Web sites are scrutinizing candidate records, becoming sassy and candid alternatives to the nation's mainstream news media.

"The suburban vote is very important," Bayrou, a three-time presidential contender, said in an interview after surprising commuters when he and his media entourage crammed onto a train for the 25-minute ride from Paris to Mantes-la-Jolie. "I'm not naturally a candidate of the suburbs, my constituency historically is rural -- but I am here."

Addressing Discrimination

The suburban violence that stunned the nation and besmirched France's image across the globe not only fueled greater political activism in the immigrant neighborhoods but also has forced presidential candidates to confront issues previously considered politically taboo: racial, ethnic and religious discrimination.

A recent survey commissioned by a black advocacy group, the Representative Council of Black Associations, and conducted by the TNS-Sofres polling firm, found that 61 percent of blacks polled said they are victimized by discrimination on a daily basis. France has no blacks in its legislative National Assembly other than the 10 representatives from its overseas departments that are predominantly black.

Even Jean-Marie Le Pen, the candidate of the far-right National Front party who shocked France in 2002 by receiving the second-highest number of votes in the presidential election after campaigning with messages considered racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic, is trying to soften his hard-line reputation with campaign posters and advertisements that include an attractive young black woman, in an overt appeal to all racial groups.