The first round of voting in the French presidential elections takes place in one week. A hot-button issue for the three main candidates -- not to mention French society -- are the banlieues, the impoverished suburbs that ghettoize immigrants, mainly North African Muslims from former French colonies.

From the NYT magazine:

These cités, as the housing projects are known, suffer from much more than being simply ugly or neglected. Nor is their poverty what sets them apart; there is poverty in Paris itself, after all, and in the French countryside as well. Still less is it their immigrant character: the great French cities, like all major European cities these days, are filled with new immigrants, the majority of them Muslims. (A third of the Muslims in Europe now live in France.) And yet there is something particularly soulless and depressing about these suburbs. An increasing number of those who live in the cités have the sense that they are unwelcome in a France whose treatment of them, whether hostile or indifferent, utterly contradicts the claim the country makes for itself: that in France everyone is treated equally and that the Republic neither makes nor will accept any distinction between citizens on the basis of race, class or ethnic background.

The elections have pitted Nicolas Sarkozy against two main challengers, the Socialist Party’s Ségolene Royal and an upstart center-right candidate from the small Union for a Democratic France, or U.D.F., Francois Bayrou. Much of Sarkozy’s political identity in the campaign comes from the mutually antagonistic relationship he has with young men like Mamadou and Ahmad. As interior minister, Sarkozy was responsible for confronting the unrest in the cités that in 2005 boiled over into full-scale riots, and in doing so he came to embody the hostility that many of the Français de souche — that is, French people whose ancestors have lived in France for centuries — now feel toward the Français issus de l’immigration, that is, French people whose parents or grandparents immigrated from the Maghreb or sub-Saharan Africa or the islands of the Indian Ocean. In Sarkozy’s campaign speeches, he denies any affiliation with the country’s anti-immigrant parties. But as the presidential campaign nears its conclusion (the first round of voting takes place next weekend), Sarkozy has seemed only to accentuate his hard-line stances on illegal immigration, on assimilation and on “security,” which in France today refers mostly to the violence of the suburban young.

For many observers, both inside and outside the country, the future of France is at stake in this election. Sarkozy’s supporters, who include a number of prominent intellectuals (unlike in almost every other rich country, their role continues to be significant in France), say he represents a clean break with the politics of the past half-century in France. For the novelist Marc Weitzmann, an enthusiastic “Sarkozyiste,” French postwar politics was dominated first by an unholy alliance between Charles de Gaulle and the French Communist Party and then by the Socialist François Mitterrand and the Gaullist Jacques Chirac, who in a sense perpetuated this sclerotic political arrangement. For Weitzmann, Sarkozy provides an alternative to a system that has failed to produce social peace, failed to adapt to France’s reduced role in the world and above all failed to reform its economy on either the Tony Blair model or the German Social Democratic model.

A decade ago, it would have been inconceivable to have found a Parisian intellectual like the writer Pascal Bruckner supporting a right-wing candidate like Sarkozy. But as Bruckner put it to me recently, Sarkozy “wants to give a kick in the rear to our old, decrepit country, to put an end to the French feeling of self-hatred, to reinforce our self-esteem and the value of work. He wants to extricate us from our decadence and put an end to the so-called ‘French exception,’ which is nothing more than the narcissism of failure.”

Philip Gordon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, largely agrees. Like Bruckner, he is persuaded of the novelty of Sarkozy in French politics. “He’s a new type of character for the Fifth Republic,” Gordon told me. Unlike most French politicians, Sarkozy did not graduate from one of France’s so-called great schools; he attended the University of Paris. Notably, he is not himself a member of the Français de souche; his father, a public-relations executive, immigrated from Hungary in 1946. What’s more, Gordon says, Sarkozy “is radically different in orientation from those within the Gaullist movement who have come before him, including Jacques Chirac.” In economic policy, Sarkozy is neoliberal rather than statist, and in foreign affairs, he is Atlanticist rather than Europeanist and pro-Israel rather than pro-Palestinian.

The article goes on to talk about how Sarkozy has made issues of immigration and identity centrepieces of his campaign, the impact of the 2005 riots on this campaign, and the impact of Sarkozy describing the rioters as racaille ("scum" in English, but in French, it comes close to the N-word).

Unsurprisingly, Sarkozy has not spent any time campaigning in the banlieues, although some in the Muslim community leadership think there might be a difference between a Sarkozy in power and a Sarkozy trying to get into power.

So, how about the lefty Royal and the centrist Bayrou?

Bayrou has made frequent visits to the suburbs, where young voters are increasingly drawn to him. Sarkozy seems unconcerned; given the public mood, he may have calculated that being despised in the suburbs will help him with the electorate as a whole more than it will hurt him. Such is the depth of mainstream French disquiet, in fact, that many figures in French politics who have traditionally viewed themselves as defenders of immigrants’ rights and of the residents of the suburbs are bowing to the prevailing winds and taking a tougher stance toward the immigrant youth. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, once one of the most radical of the student leaders of May ’68 in France and now an influential voice in European Socialist politics, recently declared in Le Monde that if he and his fellow Socialist Party members “do not speak clearly on the suburbs and on immigration, we leave an avenue open to Le Pen.”

Royal has had difficulty articulating a coherent response to the electorate’s shift. She horrified many of her more left-leaning supporters during the campaign by calling for the military to be involved in training programs for delinquent youths and for “putting school and family back at the center of society” — a coded way of promising that if elected she would get tough with the immigrant youth of the suburbs. Royal has presented herself as the anti-Sarkozy, but in an effort not to cede the ground of patriotism to him, she recently said that she thought every French household should have a tricolor flag. The events of the Gare du Nord forced her onto the defensive once more. ...

The big finish:

In the campaign’s remaining days, the voters who oppose Sarkozy will mostly be trying to work out whether Royal or Bayrou has the better chance of defeating him in the runoff. Bayrou’s hope is that Royal will turn off many of her natural constituents and that they will choose him instead. Socialists reply that voters will in the end abandon Bayrou as a kind of impractical fantasy and return to the fold. They point to the fact that the polls consistently show that Royal’s support is hard while Bayrou’s is soft. What is undeniable, and what even some members of the Bayrou and Royal campaign staffs will agree to off the record, is that the 2007 French presidential election is really a referendum on Nicolas Sarkozy.

When I accompanied Bayrou into the RER station in central Paris for one of his recent campaign swings through the suburbs, a number of people in the crowd, which included many girls with head scarves and young men in hooded sweatshirts and hip-hop regalia, shouted, “Save us from Sarkozy,” as if Bayrou were a physician and the U.M.P. candidate a dread disease. A lot of Sarkozy’s opponents, and not only in the suburbs, think that he is precisely the “new type of character” who will heighten the French crisis, not resolve it: a man who will sow division in a country already bitterly divided and aggravate social, religious and racial tensions in a country already racked by them.

Sarkozy’s supporters obviously reject these apocalyptic predictions of what their candidate will do should he become president. But they agree with supporters of Royal and Bayrou that Sarkozy has challenged the traditional right-left fault lines that have, to one degree or another, dominated French politics since the storming of the Bastille in 1789. Although Sarkozy is the most conservative candidate and a member of the incumbent party, supporters like Marc Weitzmann tend to view him as representing change and hope — and Royal and Bayrou as representing the status quo. For Sarkozy’s opponents, he represents change too: precisely the wrong kind of change.