Jacques Chirac was swept into power in the runoff presidential election of 2002 with 82% of the vote. He achieved this unprecedented tally because his opponent was Jean-Marie Le Pen, a xenophobic man often called a French fascist. Le Pen’s defeat was preceded by a million man march in which the whole country, except for far-right National Front voters, rejected his anti-immigrant and racist views. They wouldn’t allow France to become the kind of vision that Le Pen wanted, which left him with a mere 17% of the vote.

The election campaign that year says quite a bit about the state of the country this year. A lot of the campaign focused on issues of law enforcement due to recent outbursts of crime — especially from immigrants. Le Pen and his National Front did well mostly among the French unemployed and blue collar workers, many of whom have high contact with unintegrated immigrants, receiving 38% and 26.1% from them respectively. He also did well in the south, where tensions among French and Arabs run high. These same voters all said that crime and law enforcement were their main reasons for voting for Le Pen.

These immigrants, many of whom are Muslim and come from Northern Africa, including their French-born children, have been stuck in social limbo for generations. Poverty has shown not to necessarily be the main motivator for crime as some would have us believe; instead, it is a lack of opportunity for class mobility. It is this lack of opportunity, along with typical French bias against its immigrant population, over such a long period of time that has driven them away in disgust at French society. At this point, they don’t even want to integrate. They have been tucked away and radicalized rather than assimilated and moderated.

On this front, while it has been a problem long running, Chirac has failed to create the necessary opportunity that would allow young immigrants to pursue the equivalent of the “French Dream.” While the unemployment rate officially stands at 9.8%, which is bad enough, unemployment for people under the age of 25% currently stands at a staggering 23%. Chirac himself has even admitted to the president of Latvia that he has failed in this regard, saying that the “ghettoisation of youths of African or North African origin” was to be deplored, as was French society’s “incapacity to fully accept them.” In essense, these people have no stake in society, and ironically it is the French social model with its cumbersome bureaucracy and statist policies that have created such an inequality of opportunity.

Of course, the law must be upheld and the rioters dealt with. Soon. But it must come with the assurance that French politicians have realized that they need to deregulate, lower taxes, and generally open up the economy so that the poor can create opportunity for themselves and thus have a stake in society. Only then will they integrate, and therefore moderate. Yet as optimistic as that is, it is unlikely to happen. The French state, without considering the possibility of “revolution” and the creation of a more malleable Sixth Republic, simply moves too slowly.

The bigger fear is that French politicians have not grasped the problem at all, paving the way for the popular idea that cracking down, even though the rioters have no regard for the law, is the only way to go. They will not be able to solve this problem by simply blaming Islam.

Those most affected by the riots — who had their cars torched, windows smashed, and who live among this on a daily basis — are those same blue-collar ethnic French most likely to vote for the National Front and politicians like Le Pen. Now that widespread fear of these rioters has gripped the entire ethnic French population completely, it is possible that, should the National Front moderate its rhetoric and capitalize on the situation, it could see even more improved poll results over a short period of time across the entire spectrum of the population. Even more possible than that, this crisis will force the moderate center-right, which has shown itself now to be entirely too weak, to move farther to the right, therefore culminating in a greater consensus on simply cracking down on the immigrant population instead of addressing the the fundamental problem of the lack of opportunity created by the French social model.

As we see here at Publius all the time, governments that fail to address a lack of opportunity all too often face the prospect of high degrees of civil unrest. The difference is that the countries we cover here tend to be considered part of the Third World, whereas France is assuredly more modern. But similar conclusions can be drawn. If France continues to fail, its ethnic French population and the politicians that represent them will increasingly become polarized from its unrestive immigrant population, eventually culminating in much worse than what we have seen over the past two weeks.