Elections and Expulsions

Tomorrow we vote, well, strictly, they vote. In my family I’m the only one who is disenfranchised. I can vote in the Municipal Elections, I could even be Mayor of Lyon, (in theory only) and I can vote here in the European elections, but I cannot vote in the Regional Elections. I pay my taxes and that’s as far as it goes.

The Regions are important. Last time, 2004, every region but one, Alsace, went to the Socialist Party. This time Sarkozy began by ordering Ministers to head the lists in various Departments (a region is made up of several Departments) and he seemed to be making the elections a test of his Presidency but, once it became clear his party was unpopular, he began backing off. It didn’t stop him trying to cull favour everywhere possible. He said publicly how important he thought ecology was, before meeting french farmers and saying that he was sick of the environmental lobby getting in the way of farming. He even went further in hypocrisy than even he had ever gone before by ordering, on Monday, that Najlae Lhimer should be allowed to return to France. This, only after the outcry against the injustice of her situation became threatening.

Who is Najlae Lhimer? She is an eighteen year old Moroccan girl who had entered France quite legally, was following a course in a state school, for a national exam which she will sit in May. Where is the problem? The problem is that when a foreign student reaches 18 they loose the right to remain in France. She would probably have been all right if her elder brother, with whom she was living, having had no contact with her parents for a number of years, hadn’t got into the habit of beating her up.

In February, after a particularly violent attack she decided to make a formal complaint, after all we have been made aware by all the media of the necessity of protecting women from this kind of abuse.

So on the 20^th of February she went to the gendarmerie to ask for protection. As her 18^th birthday had passed they arrested her and she was deported from the country the following day. There are some problems even french gendarmes can deal with!

The students at her school launched a national campaign against this obvious injustice and helped by Réseau éducation sans frontières (RESF), last Monday, the day given over to women’s right’s, Sarkozy revoked her deportation and ordered that she be granted a visa. Any ship in a storm, some might say.

When she arrived at the airport this morning her classmates held up a banner with the message, "le pays des gendarmes et des préfets t'a expulsée. Bienvenue Najlae dans celui de la solidarité et de la fraternité". (You were deported from the country of gendarmes and Préfects, welcome to the land of solidarity and fraternity)

RESF estimate there are probably several thousand young people in the same situation.

Latest estimations show that the Union for the Presidential Majority, UMP, has no chance of making the slightest progress in tomorrow’s elections.