The gap might be closing but, on the eve of the first round of France’s presidential elections, Nicolas Sarkozy is still the clear frontrunner. The candidate of ”the France that wakes up early in the morning”, Sarkozy is hailed by the Economist magazine as ”France’s chance”, the man to bring about Thatcherite economic reforms.
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/ 14 November 2005
In late 1991, after riots between youths and police scarred the suburbs of Lyon, Alain Touraine, the French sociologist, predicted: ”It will only be a few years before we face the kind of massive urban explosion the Americans have experienced.” The fortnight of consecutive violence following the deaths of two young Muslim men of African descent in a Paris suburb show that Touraine’s dark vision of a ghettoised, post-colonial France is now upon us.