Fallout to turn presidential campaign on its head

ANALYSIS:NOW FOR the fallout. The suspected killer is dead and normal life can resume in Toulouse after the tension that hung over the city for the past 10 days finally lifted yesterday.

However, the questions raised by the murders of seven people and the state’s handling of events have already transformed France’s presidential election campaign.

The main political parties, fearful of misjudging the public mood or wrongly attributing guilt, all reacted cautiously to the news that the same gunman was responsible for killing three children, a teacher and three soldiers in three attacks. Just four weeks before a bitterly fought election, normal politics was put on hold. Campaigns were suspended and candidates rushed to Toulouse to show solidarity with the bereaved families.

Now that Mohamed Merah is dead and the siege has ended, expect political recriminations to flow quickly. The first issue to look out for is whether the opposition will raise questions about the state’s – and by implication, the government’s – handling of the investigation and the raid on Merah’s apartment.

If the intelligence services believed that Merah, a local man with a criminal record, had travelled twice to Afghanistan and had interviewed him about these trips as recently as last November, why did he not appear on the police radar in relation to the spate of killings until Tuesday?

By that time, seven people had been killed in three attacks over 10 days. The first breakthrough that led to Merah – an IP address traced to his mother’s computer – was gleaned from evidence connected to the first killing.

Could the authorities have acted quicker? Defending investigators yesterday, public prosecutor François Molins said the IP address was one of 570 that had to be checked, in addition to thousands of hours of CCTV footage, 200 interviews and seven million phone-call records.

He pointed out that a lot of people travelled to Afghanistan and said Merah, whose previous offences were relatively minor, had kept out of trouble since his return.

Questions will also be raised about the raid itself. A night-time assault was chosen because the darkness and the element of surprise would confer an advantage on the elite police units, but that advantage was lost because Merah was awake and armed when they arrived at 3am.

Was it the right call to mount a raid in the suspect’s home environment with so many other people in close proximity? Finally, did police take every reasonable step to capture him alive?

Molins was emphatic on this point. Negotiators had given Merah more than 30 hours to give himself up and the commandos who entered his apartment yesterday were under orders to shoot only in self-defence. Merah fired 30 times, Molins said.

The second set of repercussions will be purely political.

With just four weeks to go before voting begins in the election, the campaign will be turned on its head. Issues such as crime, security, religion and national identity, having already been prominent, will now dominate debate. Not surprisingly, one of the first reactions to the news that the chief suspect claimed allegiance to Islamist causes came from Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front.

Le Pen blamed a lax government for underestimating the threat from Islamist extremists and called for a debate on reintroducing the death penalty. Critics accuse her of opportunism, but Le Pen clearly sees an opportunity to press her party’s favourite rhetorical buttons.

Those who expect Le Pen’s ratings to rise will invoke the story of Paul Voise, a pensioner who was attacked and robbed by a gang of youths who then set fire to his home in the city of Orleans on April 18th, 2002. French television gave the Voise story huge coverage the following day, and the incident provoked a massive wave of public anger over crime and public safety.

Two days later, Jean-Marie Le Pen confounded opinion pollsters by finishing second in the first round of the presidential election. There is no way of proving a link to l’affaire Paul Voise, but that hasn’t stopped politicians from drawing one ever since.

And what of the effect of events of recent days on Nicolas Sarkozy?

The national tragedy has cast him in the role of chief mourner, giving him a gravitas and stature that have eluded him so often in domestic politics. He is generally felt to have emerged with credit, having shown dignity and restraint in his public comments and striking the right note – a call for national unity and tolerance – at a sensitive time for a country that is home to Europe’s largest Muslim and Jewish communities.

Sarkozy had been rising in opinion polls recently, although he remained some distance behind the frontrunner François Hollande in a hypothetical run-off.

Sarkozy will expect his momentum to hold, on two conditions. First, that he can contain any rise in Le Pen’s support (much of that support would come at his expense) and that nothing emerges to call into question the police investigation or the political leadership.

Politically speaking, the candidate who may now have the most delicate task is Hollande. He too has shown dignity and sensitivity, suspending his campaign and making no effort to take electoral advantage.

But Sarkozy’s omnipresence in recent days has made him and other candidates almost invisible.

If security, immigration and national identity – issues the Socialist Party has often found awkward – become the dominant topics of debate, then it will leave less time for the topics, namely France’s stagnant economy and income inequality, where Hollande feels he is strongest and Sarkozy most vulnerable.

The real campaign begins now.