By Eric Pape and Christopher Dickey
Just how polarizing is Nicolas Sarkozy for kids from France's tough suburbs? Passengers heading into Paris's Gare du Nord international train station got an idea yesterday. The answer came in the form of projectiles -- including pieces of fresh fruit and plastic drink bottles -- that soared toward police. The answer came in hoarse shouts from throats raw with acrid police tear gas. And the answer glared in the eyes of angry young men who engaged in hit-and-run skirmishes with cops around the station for several hours. "Up yours, Sarkozy!" would be a polite translation of an epithet rioters shouted during the melee.
The incident came only a day after Sarkozy, the leading conservative candidate, stepped down as interior minister. He'd held the post of "top cop," and exploited it skillfully for political gain, for most of the last five years. Whether the Gare du Nord incident will hurt Sarko now because he failed to get the law and order he promised, or help him as voters yearn for still tougher measures, is an open question.
The incident echoed back to the urban violence that lit up France for three weeks in late 2005. But those riots were in housing projects on the remote edges of the cities, and this was in the heart of Paris at the station where tourists take the Eurostar to and from London. As in 2005, these confrontations involved fleet-footed young men dressed in hoodies who used cat-and-mouse tactics against the cops. And, as then, police were left struggling to drag suspects into custody -- in this case, up or down escalators. (At least nine people were arrested.)
Even the origin of this latest flare-up -- over rumors that cops had engaged in the particularly aggressive arrest of a subway fare-jumper earlier in the day -- echoed the role of heavy-handed police check points in sparking the 2005 conflagration. But unlike 2005, police appear to have prevented this incident from spiraling out of control. Just after midnight, they used tear gas to smoke rioters -- and other passengers -- out of the labyrinthine subway corridors beneath the train station.
Sarkozy -- or anger at him -- looms large in all these flare-ups.
In 2005, the riots came days after he promised to clear out the "scum" from the tough Parisian suburb of Argenteuil. Ironically, Sarkozy's campaign staff has been seeking some way for him to return to Argenteuil before election day, as he has promised, without sparking a new round of violence. One angry young man at the Gare du Nord told television cameras that the mere memory of Sarkozy's time as minister of the interior was enough to spark this new violence. "If Sarkozy wins [the presidency]," he warned, "Imagine what will happen."
But the rioters get little sympathy from the French electorate, and the Gare du Nord incident could actually take some heat off Sarko. His opponents on the left have been hinting he'd usher in a police state. A photograph of riot cops arrayed in front of Sarkozy's party headquarters with his campaign slogan, "Let's imagine France after," above their heads has had a good run in the French blogosphere since it appeared during labor protests in February. A report on the judicial follow-up to the 2005 riots just issued by the office of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin (an old Sarko rival) appears to put the lie to the former interior minister's insinuations that there were no prosecutions or convictions after those conflagrations, making it look like he was trying to shift blame away from his ministry and onto France's judges.
Law and order, the issue that dominated the first round in the 2002 elections, had not been at the top of the campaign agendas this time around. (One reason: Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal's proposal that young toughs face military-style discipline sounded as hard line as many a right-winger.) But when it comes to tough talk, the bantam-weight Sarko has few rivals, and yesterday's rioters shouting "up yours" may have hoisted him onto just the platform he needs.
Photograph of yesterday's incident at the Gare du Nord by AP
