Sarkozy on test

The street is a very important part of the French political system. As Fareed Zakaria explained in a column published in this newspaper on Tuesday, it is where the people converse with the highest political authority in the land. Nicolas Sarkozy, who took the French presidency this year with the promise of a new, modern France, will certainly be keenly alert to the rage accruing on the street this month. France’s public transport unions have been trying to bring the country to a standstill, mostly with infuriating success, to protest at the government’s move to reform their absolutely anachronistic benefits. More worrying for Sarkozy, fresh rioting in Paris’s suburbs shows that discontent amongst immigrants, mostly of north African origin, remains as easily combustible as it was two years ago. It is a pointer to the many ways in which Sarkozy must hasten reforms if he is to succeed in putting France at ease with itself and its possibilities.

For Sarkozy, the violence in the suburbs comes as a particularly individual challenge. Rioting began this week after the death of two teenagers of African origin in a crash with a police vehicle. Two years ago, as interior minister at the time, he had controversially referred to the need to “clean up” urban neighbourhoods. Sarkozy has a flair for the outrageous statement, but now that he’s president he will find that once the rioting is brought under control, he has the provocation to seize the third facet of his agenda to modernise France.

He has already begun re-establishing France as a responsible stakeholder in international decision-making. Sarkozy knows the standoff with the transport strikers goes beyond the simple matter of their pension benefits: it will prove whether he has the resolve to energise France’s pampered public sector and reform the labour sector to tackle unemployment. The rioting has brought to him, perhaps earlier in his term than he may have planned, the urge to modernise France’s social contract. He must grab the challenge. Because France can never be a country conducive to Sarkozy’s promises if such large sections of immigrants are kept on edge by a sense of acute alienation.