The Right, particularly the French right, always plays on fear.

It’s one of the major reasons why in 2002, Chirac and Le Pen ran their campaigns  on security, which made the distinctly un-authoritarian Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin loook quite far out to sea.

Sarkozy, with a distinctly more right wing agenda than Chirac ever ran, has moved from one enemy to the next.

First, he came for the racaille, which roughly translates as ‘scum’ or perhaps more appropriately the ‘chavs’. Then he went after the burka, a post I’ll write soon enough.

His next target to divert attention from his flailing popularity ratings is to attack… the gypsies!

It follows from this weekend in Loir-et-Cher, where the police shot a gypsy in a road-block related incident. Upset by this, the ‘travallers’ began a rampage of vandalism in the local villages.

This morning in Cabinet, he thus announced a special meeting on the 28th to “tackle the problems posed by ‘travellers’ and their behavior” while also announcing the expulsion of all ‘irregular’  encampments.

Sarko’s “hyperpresidentialism” is well known, but I really do not consider this, though unacceptable, to be an event worthy of such a large amount of attention from the President of the French Republic. At the very limit, it’s something for the Prime Minister, and certainly more in the domain of the Interior Minister (that’s the Home Secretary.)

I come back to my introduction for a moment; the French right always plays on fear, and is an expert in focusing on a detail to turn it into a generalisation. It scares people.

The next issue is that he called the entire community gens du voyage which I translate as ‘travellers’ or at least ‘travelling people’. It of course supposed to imply that the entire group have no fixed domicile, don’t pay taxes, don’t have incomes (fortune telling not included) yet do have cars and spend a lot of time begging.

The French have never liked gypsies (they’re not French, after all), but for Sarkozy to start finger-wagging at such a group, no matter how marginal and poorly integrated (probably their fault as much as the French’s) at what is quite simply just delinquency and petty crime, which are by no means rare activities, seems misleading to me.

Francophones might like to read this piece from a journalist at Le Figaro as well, here.