The murder of seven people jolted the 'technocratic' election campaign, so where is the debate about why it happened?
It was two weeks ago; it already seems like a century. The election campaign was beginning to send everyone to sleep. François Hollande, the Socialist candidate, was so far ahead in the polls that it was difficult to see how Nicolas Sarkozy could climb back.
It had become a campaign without excitement. Worse than that – no campaign had ever seemed so technical. The yoke of debt meant that all the candidates had their eyes fixed on figures. Five years ago, in 2007, the television coverage of the election focused on security, on schools … This time one of the broadcasting stars of the campaign was turning out to be a financial journalist, François Lenglet. This was the measure of the campaign.
But that was before the intervention in the campaign of Mohamed Merah, born like so many young Frenchmen of Algerian parents and raised on an estate in Toulouse. His father left for Algeria when he was five, his mother was largely unemployed. He left school at 16 and liked cars, especially large cars, which he drove without a licence, ending up with 18 months in prison. His journey then was one of many a small-time French delinquent from our housing estates, of Paris, Lyon, Toulouse…
Except that Merah killed – or executed, more like – seven people in a fortnight. Before dying under the bullets of Raid, the elite French police unit, he made some attempt to explain, from behind the door of the apartment that he had turned into a vast arsenal, just what had motivated his madness. The soldiers he killed in the back? Members of the 17th Regiment who had killed his "brothers" in Afghanistan. The small children from the Jewish school? A way of "avenging Palestinian children".
When this massacre took place, this strange, technocratic campaign, which seemed already written in advance, was put on hold. A truce was declared. But once Merah was in turn killed, one might have imagined that a great debate would take off, including among the candidates. And, in particular, a debate centring on this pressing question: What is Mohamed Merah the symptom of?
For the moment, at least, this is not the case. Only one question is asked, and very softly at that: have there not been serious failings and gaps in the French intelligence services? The French press asks the question, but the left hesitates to take it up. This is doubtless because the candidate of the extreme right, Marine Le Pen, has already got hold of the theme and won't let it go.
By contrast, we hear very little about what Merah says about the social malaise on our estates. And what he says about the state of affairs in our prisons, the indoctrination that takes place there, we hear nothing, or almost nothing.
The right, in power since 1995, prefers to stay silent. The left – which under François Mitterrand sinned through seeking to be angelic, preferring to celebrate a "mixed" France rather than working to anticipate the problems tied to immigration – is troubled.
Silent, on one side; troubled on the other. At least it's no longer a technocratic campaign.