François Hollande vows to build on French unity after Paris attacks

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/05/francois-hollande-france-paris-attacks

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François Hollande has vowed to maintain the spirit of unity demonstrated in mass street rallies after the Paris attacks, promising measures to galvanise France’s disaffected youth, ease segregation on ghetto housing estates and fight the rise of the far right.

The attacks last month prompted soul-searching about how the three gunmen, born and raised in the Paris area, drifted from the social margins of care homes and troubled housing estates, via petty crime and prison, into fanaticism. The prime minister, Manuel Valls, acknowledged that France’s poor people lived under a form of social and racial “apartheid”.

On Thursday Hollande said no one in France “should have the feeling they are segregated, separated, discriminated against, dismissed or set aside because they live in a certain place, neighbourhood, and that their only destiny would be to leave it.”

He announced the expansion of a scheme in which adults under the age of 26 can do eight months of public service paid at €573 a month. Hollande said teachers would be better trained, and resources would be put into fighting school dropout rates and ensuring that children mastered French. The strong secular tradition in the school system would be reinforced, and training for imams would be improved, he said.

Speaking under the chandeliers of the Elysée palace in one of the set-piece press conferences that mark French politics, the president appeared relaxed and confident. This was an important style exercise in which he hoped to present himself as father of the nation and, as one journalist put it, protector-in-chief.

Until last month Hollande’s poll ratings had been stuck at a historic low of 13%, not helped by stubbornly high unemployment and a struggling economy, but also a result of concerns among voters that he wasn’t sufficiently presidential.

Since the Paris attacks and the government’s response, his approval ratings have doubled. “I have changed since the events,” he said, adding that his mission after France’s “terrible ordeal” was to improve equality.

Hollande also aimed several digs at Marine le Pen’s far-right Front National. On Sunday, voters in a small rural industrial constituency on the Swiss border, the Doubs, will vote in the final round of a parliamentary byelection, the first electoral test since the Paris attacks. The Front National candidate, Sophie Montel – whose leaflets warned of “the Islamist peril” – topped the poll in the first round, with the Socialists coming second.

Hollande said the Front National was not a party compatible with the values of the republic, and pointed out that Montel, an MEP, had once made comments about the “obvious inequality of the races”. The Socialist party, which has been routed in every parliamentary byelection since Hollande’s election, hopes to hold on to its seat.

The traditional rightwing UMP, which was knocked out in the first round, is bitterly divided about whether to tell its supporters to vote Socialist to keep the FN at bay. Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president who has resumed his old job as head of the UMP, has failed to quell dissent in the party, and its poor showing in the Doubs was seen as a personal blow after his return to politics.