Depressed Vote Shows Problems of French Banlieues
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Version 0 of 1. ST.-DENIS, France — Nearly 70 percent of registered voters in this urban enclave north of Paris stayed home during the first round of France’s regional elections on Dec. 6, a fact that didn’t surprise Didier Paillard, the city’s twice-elected Communist mayor. “One reason has to do with the specificity of our city, which is home to people from 130 different countries,” said Mr. Paillard, 61, a former chemical worker, during an interview at a neighborhood market, one day before the second round was held on Sunday. The abstention rate for the second round fell to 62.2 percent after a weeklong get-out-the-vote campaign, but the larger problem remains. Many of the city’s 110,000 inhabitants — one-third by Mr. Paillard’s estimate — are immigrants who cannot vote, and, more significant, he said, their French-born children never picked up the habit. “There is no family tradition of voting,” he explained. “If there is no tradition, then the second generation votes less.” The other reason for the low turnout is not specific to this low-income banlieue, as France’s troubled multicultural suburbs are called. “People are disappointed,” he said. “Abstention is a sign that they feel scorned, neglected. It is a sign of discontent.” Coming in the wake of the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks, which killed 130 people including one here in St.-Denis, outside the Stade de France sports stadium, the disaffection takes on greater meaning. All of the gunmen who have been identified were born in Europe to immigrant parents, members of a tiny minority who have found a cause in the Islamic State’s jihad. St.-Denis was where the attacks began and where the police raided a rented apartment five days later that killed the Belgian-born Abdelhamid Abaaoud, presumed to have been the organizer of the attacks. “The assault was a second shock for the population because it took place where they live,” Mr. Paillard said. After the attacks, he resisted calls to shut down the popular Sunday market in the center of the city, and he kept City Hall open over the weekend. “There was a real need for dialogue,” he said. What concerns Mr. Paillard as much as the low turnout is the total neglect of the problems of France’s immigrant populations in the intense debate that followed the far-right National Front’s success in the first round of the regional elections, in which it captured a party record 28 percent of the vote. The party’s xenophobic rhetoric has, if anything, been amplified by other politicians, with no discussion about how to better integrate French citizens whose parents or grandparents were born abroad. “Frankly, I think there is in France a colonialist attitude toward the banlieues,” Mr. Paillard said. “We are considered a kind of underclass, whether sub-Saharan African or North African. The banlieues are viewed as a kind of fantasy that only speaks of ignorance of all the riches that we have here.” Kamel Dib, a 48-year-old engineer who brought his two children to the market’s holiday fair, said cities like St.-Denis were doubly penalized. “This is a poor city, with lots of problems, and yet we are on the periphery of the politicians’ vision,” he said. Mr. Dib, son of Algerian immigrants, was the first member of his family to vote; the first time he cast a ballot he felt as if he had been “reborn.” Like others, he was disappointed when the Socialist government recently dropped its promise to give resident foreigners the right to vote in local elections. “The politicians are always afraid of a reaction, of the National Front,” Mr. Dib said, “but if you are a leader, then you should have broad shoulders, and the courage to do what you think is right.” In 2006, St.-Denis held a referendum on giving resident foreigners the right to vote on local issues, which was ruled illegal by a local court. The referendum went ahead anyway, with 64 percent voting in favor, but the message went nowhere. In October, Mr. Paillard participated in a colloquium held on the 10th anniversary of the devastating riots that broke out here and in other French cities in October 2005. The conclusion, he said, was that “none of the reasons why the banlieues went up in flames have been resolved.” |