The Refugee Drama Stirs the French

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/05/opinion/the-refugee-drama-stirs-the-french.html

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PARIS — On a summer day in 1978, my father, a 48-year-old pediatrician in a small French town, was deeply distressed by what he saw on the evening news. Vietnamese families, fleeing the Communists by the tens of thousands, had taken to the sea where they were falling prey to pirates and corrupt Thai border guards. A French doctor, Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, appealed for help.

He wrote down the Paris phone number mentioned on TV. The next day, he called and volunteered to join Dr. Kouchner on a hospital ship he was setting up to rescue the refugees in the South China Sea. Abandoning his private practice, he soon found himself on a flight to Singapore where he boarded the ship, Île de Lumière, and then spent a couple of months treating sick children on board and in refugee camps. Back in France, people were welcoming Vietnamese refugees with open arms, mobilized by left and right-wing intellectuals, politicians and church leaders. In a few years, we absorbed 130,000 “boat people.”

That was France in 1978. The France of 2015 offers a disturbing contrast to this generous image. Today, Angela Merkel and Germany hold the moral high ground — yes, the same Germany that was vilified for its selfishness over the Greek crisis. Meanwhile, French leaders struggle with the issue, intellectuals and church leaders are nowhere to be heard, and opinion polls reflect a new Gallic callousness. The massive exodus that intensified during the summer, the chaos at Europe’s doors, the new “jungle” in Calais, the tears of mothers and children caught in the mayhem — nothing seems to move us anymore. When the body of a Syrian toddler was washed up on a Turkish beach, most European newspapers put the excruciating picture on their front page. In France, the only major national paper to do so was Le Monde. Have we become numb?

Polls actually reveal some uncomfortable truths. The number of people in France opposed to taking in refugees from Syria, for example, has decreased since July, down from 64 percent to 56 percent, but they are still a majority. There is a strong partisan divide: 91 percent of National Front voters and 67 percent of former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s supporters are against taking in more migrants, while 68 percent of Socialist voters and 73 percent of Green supporters are in favor.

There is also a generational and social divide; older and well-off people are more likely to accept migrants. The reason is simple: Older people have left the competition for jobs, and well-off people don’t live in neighborhoods with high immigrant populations. The age category most hostile to new immigrants is people 35 to 49; not surprisingly, it is also the one where the far-right National Front enjoys more support.

Marine Le Pen, the National Front leader, has not been very vocal on the migrant crisis — she doesn’t need to. Her party is the elephant in the room. Its 20 to 25 percent share of the votes over the past year partly explains why French politicians, with the belated exception of the Greens, are so silent about the refugee issue: They are paralyzed by fear, the fear of feeding the xenophobic National Front. Don’t even think of seeing Mr. Sarkozy following in the footsteps of Ms. Merkel; no French politician in his or her right mind would dare to visit a refugee center these days.

Only when Prime Minister Manuel Valls at last started to forcefully address the refugees’ ordeal in a moral tone, in a speech on Aug. 30, and then proceeded to travel to Calais, did Ms. Le Pen raise her voice, warning him not to “sacrifice Calais to the European Union dogmas” and “open the doors of our country to new illegal immigrants.” Mr. Valls’s promise to “treat, shelter and provide medical care to migrants in a dignified way” was music to her ears. So the prime minister tries to keep a delicate balance, building shelter for 1,500 of the migrants in Calais’s “jungle” but not for all 3,000 of them, to avoid being accused of inviting the migrants to come.

Other explanations include this basic one: France is not Germany. Unlike Germany, France, with a good fertility rate, doesn’t have a demographic problem. Unlike Germany, France has a big unemployment problem, particularly among young people. Unlike Germany, France, a former colonial power, has absorbed millions of people from Africa, most of them Muslims. And it has done a poor job of integrating them: This country is still reeling from the divisions that emerged in January between the “Je Suis Charlie” camp and the “Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie” dissenters.

Yet France cannot be deaf to the calls for European leadership on a crisis that Ms. Merkel has rightly described as more serious than the euro crisis, because it challenges Europe’s core values, among them solidarity. President François Hollande prides himself with leading the fight against radical Islam in Europe, with troops committed around the world, tough anti-terrorist laws and powerful intelligence tools. Unlike Ms. Merkel, he was in favor of military intervention in Syria, two years ago. He wants to be seen as a hard-liner, not as a softie. He now must reconcile this strategy with the growing support among his voters for the German chancellor’s principled stand on refugees.

It took the tragic picture of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s body to make him do just that. The day it went viral, on Thursday, Mr. Hollande met with several of his ministers at the Elysée Palace, and announced that he had submitted to the European institutions, with Ms. Merkel, a proposal for a “permanent mandatory mechanism” to take in more refugees and distribute them among the 28 member states. “Europe is a set of principles and values,” he said. “It is time to act.” To be frank, it was time long ago.

Sylvie Kauffmann is the editorial director and a former editor in chief of Le Monde.