FRANCE: On the day Le Point magazine published an opinion poll showing his popularity had shot up 11 points to 63 per cent, the French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, came under fire over his home town of Neuilly-sur-Seine disobeying a housing law. It requires French cities to devote 20 per cent of housing to low-income tenants.
The riots of the past three weeks have revived debate about the December 2000 "Law on Urban Solidarity and Renewal," known as the SRU. The socialists who wrote the law believe that requiring all French towns and cities to devote 20 per cent of their housing to low-income rentals could break the ethnic ghettos.
The four-year-old law is not enforced. Le Parisien newspaper and the Catholic magazine La Vie yesterday named the worst offenders among 727 towns that have failed to build housing for the poor. Across France, one million people are on the waiting list for low-income housing.
When President Jacques Chirac demanded on television this week that the SRU be respected, it cannot have escaped his attention that Neuilly, the power base of Mr Sarkozy, his would-be nemesis, has the worst record in the country.
According to La Vie and the Abbé Pierre Foundation, only 1.34 per cent of housing in Neuilly is reserved for the needy. Some of the towns that saw intense rioting have more than 70 per cent social housing.
Mr Sarkozy was mayor of Neuilly from 1983 until 2002, when he gave the job to a deputy so he could be a government minister. A spokesman for Mr Sarkozy said there is no space left to build in the luxurious Beverly Hills-like suburb. He claimed the town has made progress towards compliance. According to La Vie, Neuilly has built 15 per cent of the 814 low-income housing units the government demanded.
Most of the offending towns are affluent, with right-wing mayors. About one third make an effort, Le Parisien reported. Another third would rather pay the fine of €152 per missing unit. And the last third claim they have no land left and/or that property is too expensive to be bought for social housing.
"It's as if someone who didn't want to be next to a poor person in the cinema bought all the seats," said Jean-Christophe Lagarde, a right-wing deputy and the mayor of Drancy, a poor town north of Paris. "It is immoral and inadmissible." The socialist opposition proposes multiplying tenfold the fines for towns that do not obey the law. Associations such as Emmaüs and the Abbé Pierre Foundation, which campaign for housing rights, suggest tougher measures such as declaring offending mayors ineligible for office, or asking prefects to expropriate land.
With the presidency again within his grasp, Mr Sarkozy is not likely to be worried by the criticism of Neuilly, or that he was caught in a fib yesterday by France-Inter radio station. He had told the National Assembly that 75 to 80 per cent of the young men caught in the riots were already delinquents. Magistrates at Bobigny, where many of the cases were heard, said less than a quarter were repeat offenders.
Police have stopped announcing the number of cars burned every night. French radio estimated "about 100" vehicles were destroyed on Wednesday night, which is considered "normal".