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Chirac keeps low profile as French riots continue

Paris, Nov 8 Jacques Chirac used to speak with passion about France’s widening gap between privileged and poor and tell how he would fight rising crime. That was when he was running for president in 1995 and re-election in 2002.

Now that France faces a spreading revolt by poor young men in its grimy suburbs and sees cars, shops and schools firebombed nightly, Chirac has kept almost completely out of sight.

Chirac, who regularly addresses the nation on television on other issues, has made only one public appearance so far, saying on Sunday he was determined to restore order. Announcing steps such as authorising curfews are left to his ministers.This low profile has reinforced the impression that he and his conservative government have few options for answering the challenge the unrest has presented to its policies for fighting joblessness, crime and social exclusion.

“The absence of the president is remarkable in this period we’re going through,� Francois Bayrou, head of the centrist Union of French Democracy (UDF) party, said on Tuesday.

“He was elected on the issues of the social fracture in 1995 and of crime in 2002. And the least we can say is that what’s happening in the suburbs goes to the heart of these issues.�This long silence has not gone unnoticed in the rundown housing estates where rioters, many of them French-born citizens of Arab and African descent, charge that the state ignores the unemployment and racial discrimination they face.

-Reuters