analysis
The recent spate of violence has brought France’s focus back to the suburbs. Why have previous action plans had little success here? Which solution approaches are now colliding in the debate – and which ones offer perspectives?
It was, of all things, a training center for young people in the poor north of Paris that Emmanuel Macron had chosen in 2016 to announce his candidacy for president. He wanted to create a spirit of optimism and signal: The young people in our suburbs have potential and they deserve our trust!
Just a few weeks after moving into the Elysée Palace in 2017, the newly elected President cut grants to the cities; less money for subsidized jobs, less help for housing policy. That was a first blow to the neck for the mayors. The second followed a few months later: Macron let the “Borloo Report” disappear in a drawer without a word.
He himself had asked the former minister for urban development, the centrist Jean-Louis Borloo, to draw up a long-term plan of action for the poor suburbs. Borloo set to work with the aim of involving all stakeholders and creating a plan that addresses all levels: security, drug control, education, training, culture, sports, building renovation, digitization. And: Borloo had involved the local politicians. At the time, some of them even spoke of the “euphoria” that the plan had triggered in town halls. The disappointment was all the more bitter.
A strained relationship
Since then, the relationship between the mayors and their president has been strained. In his second term, Macron has almost doubled the funds for structural renovations in the suburbs and is investing another twelve billion euros. He has halved the number of students in primary school classes in particularly difficult neighborhoods so that disadvantaged children can learn better.
But at the annual congress of mayors, Macron is always received rather coldly. They feel neglected and patronized. This also became clear at the hastily convened meeting in the Elysée Palace on Tuesday.
Ali Rabeh, for example, the Moroccan-born mayor of Trappes in the south-west of Paris, was disappointed: “If you hold such short-term therapy sessions here, you give the rioters the feeling that you only get attention with riots and setting fires reached the banlieues. That’s dangerous! You have to keep talking all year round and talk about urban development. Otherwise you can’t change the situation effectively.”
Political scientist Martial Foucault from the CEVIPOF institute at SciencesPo University also criticizes: “The mayors are only convened when there is a crisis. You don’t work with them with foresight.” And Patrick Chaimovitch, green mayor of Colombes in the west of Paris, where there was a curfew for three days, explains in an interview with the ARD Studio Paris: “Our budget has been gradually eroded for years, as have that of clubs and local associations. We are up to our necks in water. This trend started before Macron, but it has clearly intensified in recent years.”
A fatal strategy
The turning point came at the beginning of the 2000s, say mayors and sociologists; at the time when the conservative Nicolas Sarkozy was interior minister. He made a name for himself as a law-and-order politician and received much applause from the right when he declared after the riots in 2005 that he would “liberate the suburbs from the criminal rabble with the Kärcher”.
The issue of police and security became the focus – with fatal consequences, explains the mayor of Grigny from the Communist Party in an interview with the radio station France Culture: “The Kärcher strategy must stop. It is at the heart of the police doctrine, which relies on repression . Let me remind you: without the deadly incidents between the police and young men in the suburbs, such as in Clichy-Sous-Bois in 2005 or now with Nahel in Nanterre, there would be no riots.”
It’s about upbringing, education and infrastructure
According to Philippe Rio, the criminal youngsters, some of whom are in a catastrophic state, should be caught better. “In my town of Grigny, 50 percent of young people leave school without a degree. We need a strong public service. The children must be at the center of the strategy, not Kärcher.” It also doesn’t help to invest only in concrete, in the renovation of buildings.
It’s about upbringing, education and also psychological help – and about infrastructure: Who, for example, in Castellane, a high-rise area in Marseille, has to drive an hour by bus to withdraw money because there are simply no more bank branches. Anyone who no longer has a post office, an optician or a pediatrician on site not only feels left behind, but is left behind.
The search for a way out
How can you help the neighborhoods out of their misery, where more than half of the residents often come from families with a history of migration and where there is an unemployment rate of 19 percent – twice the national average?
The mayors give different answers depending on their party affiliation: the leader of the conservative Republicans, Eric Ciotti, for example, receives approval from many of his party colleagues in the city halls when he calls for the parents of delinquent youths to be punished and their state subsidies to be cut.
The republican mayor of l’Hay-les Roses, whose family was attacked and injured in the recent riots, not only wants more money for club work, but also the opportunity to use drones to fight crime. Since 1977 there have been more than ten action plans for deprived neighborhoods in France. The sums that were spent on it are now the subject of political polemics.
Suburban spending is part of the discourse
Different social groups are positioned against each other. The right and extreme right in particular repeatedly point out that “everything” is being done for the suburbs of France, which are characterized by immigration, and “nothing” for the rural areas of France. Wrong, explains Jean-Louis Borloo in an interview for the magazine “Le 1 Hebdo” from 2021: “I condemn this incredible manipulation of the figures. Converted to the number of inhabitants, these districts have four times less resources than others.”
The sociologist Renault Eppstein speaks of a poisoned discourse. In 2020 he published a study on 40 years of urban development. “Of course there is extra money for the particularly disadvantaged neighborhoods. But if you look at how much money is spent from the normal public pots, then a school in a bourgeois neighborhood is in a much better position than schools in poor neighborhoods.”
Drama or Opportunity?
So France is struggling to find the right answers to the unrest. Political scientist Martial Foucault is convinced that the problem of the suburbs must be tackled much more fundamentally. He criticizes: “Emmanuel Macron is doing something very contradictory. He says he is in favor of decentralization, i.e. more autonomy for the town halls, he wants to give the mayors more powers. At the same time, however, he says no to more money and no to financial autonomy.”
On the one hand, President Macron advocates quick and tough measures by the judiciary. At the same time, he has given himself and his government a period of reflection and understanding. It is still completely open what a new and sustainable strategy for the development of the banlieue in France will look like.
Jean-Louis Borloo says: “What country can afford to have 150,000 young people hanging out at the foot of the skyscrapers? This is absurd! These neighborhoods are either our drama or our opportunity. You just have to decide what you want.”