For two weeks now, many working class districts in France have been experiencing serious public order problems. Elected representatives, voluntary organisations and citizens in these areas have shown great courage and commitment in their efforts to establish a dialogue which might put an end to this intolerable violence, the principal victims of which are the residents of the districts affected.

Far from building on these efforts, the French Government – whose Minister of the Interior sparked off this explosion of civil unrest with provocative public statements – has chosen to continue down the route of repression. It has declared a state of emergency, reviving legislation dating from 1955 which curtails every basic liberty and which was originally applied during the colonial war in Algeria. It has also decided to expel every foreigner involved in the unrest, even those who are legally resident in France.

Outside France, the situation has in some cases been interpreted as a failure of the French “social model” or of “l’intégration républicaine” – the idea that the integration of immigrant populations into French society must be founded on an acceptance of the values of the Republic. In fact, it is precisely the wish to do away with existing social rights and benefits and to bend French society to the neoliberal order that is at the origin of this crisis.

In use for more than twenty years, but particularly favoured by the right-wing governments in power since 2002, these policies of increasing unemployment and insecurity, scrapping social protection, and dismantling and privatising public services, have had a devastating effect on French society. They have led to a veritable institutionalisation of inequality and discrimination, reflected in today’s social geography of districts or boroughs for the rich, others for the ordinary workers increasingly beset by social insecurity and yet others for the poor. The current explosion is indicative of the exasperation and despair of many French young people. Often the children or grandchildren of immigrants, they can no longer endure the stigmatisation, humiliation and suspicion they experience every day.  In the face of their problems the Government simply shrugs its shoulders, a response that encourages them to turn in on themselves in an ethnic or religious communitarianism entirely foreign to the secular and republican values of France.

The crisis in France is neither a crisis of immigration nor a crisis of the “banlieues” but a crisis brought about by the devastating consequences of an anti-social and anti-democratic neoliberalism. For the European Party of the Left, the situation represents a confirmation of the validity of its commitments and initiatives. It acts alongside all the forces that, in France and in Europe, demand real responses for non-precarious employment and against social exclusion, to eradicate poverty, increase the purchasing power and develop the social protections and the public services to all the levels.  For that, States must commit themselves urgently to reorientate their budgetary policies, in particular by abandoning the stability pact and by reorientating the monetary policies of the Eu.  The Party of the European Left opposes itself to the offensives against civil liberties, to the exception laws that question individual and collective rights and democracy, and to the higher bids of the extreme right notably against the rights of migrants.  It is alongside all those that, in France, fight in this direction against inequalities, the social breaks and discriminations, and for the respect of dignity and citizenship for all.  


Florence, 13th November 2005