Obama stirs complex feelings in France

As Barack Obama’s overseas tour continues to prompt swoons of European delight-more than 200,000 came out to see him speak in Berlin Thursday-Friday’s stop in France will provoke more than simple adoration. While many Europeans see Obama as a symbol of change in the United States, in France, where racial issues play a particularly divisive role in domestic politics, Obama has become a symbol of some French voters' hopes for their own country. Obama meets with French President Nicolas Sarkozy later this morning. “The French are looking in the mirror and reflecting on their own shortcomings when it comes to multiethnic and multiracial society,” said Georgetown professor Charles Kupchan, who is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I think it’s safe to say that it would be almost unthinkable that a minority would be a leading contender for the presidency of France.” France has a substantial population of nonwhite immigrants, largely from former colonies in North and West Africa, that has struggled to participate in French political life. A French group that studies diversity issues released a report in March showing that minorities occupied just 2,000 out of 520,000 city council seats across France. There is only one black member of Parliament from mainland France. “I think that in Obama, the French see a minority figure who has succeeded in making it to the top,” Kupchan said. After Obama secured the Democratic nomination, a French civil rights group, the Conseil Représentatif des Associations Noires, issued a statement decrying the absence of similar figures in French politics. “What black candidate could stand for the French presidency with a chance of being elected that is equal to that of a white?” the statement asked. On June 29, Le Monde, France’s leading newspaper, reprinted Obama’s entire March 18 speech on race under a headline that quoted a translation of the address: “Race is a subject that our country cannot allow itself to ignore.” Obama was referring to his own nation’s troubled racial past and present — but French readers could have taken a different suggestion from the headline. French interest in Obama developed long before the Illinois Democrat had even secured his party’s nomination: In February, the newspaper Le Parisien released a poll showing that Obama would have beaten Hillary Rodham Clinton 38 percent to 36 percent in a vote of the French public, despite Clinton’s long presence on the international scene. “When the primaries started, people were for Hillary,” explained Corine Lesnes, a reporter for Le Monde who covers the American presidential race. “But when they found out about Obama, the ‘Obamania’ started.” “People are looking for the face of an America they can admire and take as a model,” she said, describing the French reaction to Obama’s race in this way: “The United States is a society where a guy like Obama can make it to Harvard. The dream is alive.”
By ALEXANDER BURNS
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0708/12043.html
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