Posted on 11/09/2005 3:07:34 PM PST by naturalman1975
LIKE a phantom puppet, French President Jacques Chirac sits in his opulent Elysee Palace in central Paris while his country burns.
Despite the desperate need for vision and concrete solutions, he has been virtually absent in the most serious crisis to afflict France since at least 1968, and probably since World War II if the toll and geographic scale of the riots are taken into account.
The President was widely castigated for speaking directly about the fortnight of violence for the first time only last Sunday. On Monday his apparently nuanced and compassionate comments about the frustrations of the offspring of immigrants living in the maligned suburbs seeped out through the visiting Latvian president, who prattled to the media about their private talks.
The French press has become increasingly frustrated with their head of state's bizarre silence, and yesterday the Liberation newspaper condemned his reign as a "tragic farce". It is as if a sickly Soviet-style leader such as Leonid Brezhnev inhabits the highest office in France and is rendered mute despite the surrounding chaos.
As Charles Bremner wrote in The Times yesterday, the riots will be the President's humiliating epitaph.
"Although May 1968 was a true cultural and political revolution, there are parallels with the rampages of 2005. (President Charles) De Gaulle resigned, weary and discredited, a year after the revolt ... Chirac's term ends in 18 months, which he will eke out as the lamest of ducks, humiliated in the referendum on the European Constitution last May, and then battered by this autumn's crise des banlieues."
Few in France will speculate openly on just how sick the head of state is - less than two months since he suffered what was most likely a stroke.
So is he both physically and mentally paralysed? Or simply embarrassed that the social and ethnic divisions he promised to heal in his first campaign for the presidency last decade have so dramatically worsened under his rule?
At least Chirac has something of an excuse. This is more than can be said for France's other leaders such as the aesthete Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who utters elegantly empty platitudes about the egalitarian values of "la republique".
The leadership vacuum is not just at the elite level of national politics - all the French look far too much for guidance and subsistence from the state, no matter what their ethnic background.
The divided and disillusioned community of between 5 million and 7 million French of Arab and African, and largely Muslim, origin is without a charismatic Noel Pearson-like figure preaching zero tolerance from within and self-sufficiency and an end to violence, welfare and drug dependence.
But two weeks into this debacle, popular younger secular voices of modern multi-ethnic France are starting to come forward to condemn the violence and reach out to the rioters.
One of the soundest and most inspiring comments on the crisis came yesterday from the popular young French rapper Disiz "La Peste", a poetic ironist who grew up in the gritty Paris suburb of Evry and whose latest album is titled The extraordinary history of a youth of the suburbs.
"I would like to say to these young people to stop the violence, stop the burning of cars, schools - it is us this hurts," said Disiz, 27, whose father was born in Senegal. While shocked by the imposed curfew, he dismissed the reflex to blame all the troubles on hotheaded Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who referred to suburban gangs as "scum".
"This is a false problem, it is one of semantics. He should give an example, but changing the minister will not resolve our fundamental problems," Disiz said. "I would appeal to everyone to hold peaceful marches between Republique (in central Paris) and the Elysee. Gandhi and Martin Luther King changed things in a spirit of peace."
If only Jacques Chirac could speak with such strength, idealism and sense of leadership.
"The French press has become increasingly frustrated with their head of state's bizarre silence, and yesterday the Liberation newspaper condemned his reign as a "tragic farce"."
Don't tell me..the French press has been reading Free Republic??
Chirac is a wuss, always has been!
Hehe that image describes him perfectly :)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.