Why does French opposition lawmakers and media accuse Sarkozy of pandering to the far right?”
French opposition lawmakers and media attacked a host of new government proposals targeting Gypsies and immigrants suspected of crimes, charging Sunday that President Nicolas Sarkozy was pandering to the far-right in a bid to boost his popularity. The interior minister defended the measures, calling them part of France’s “war against insecurity.” Earlier in the week, Sarkozy pushed for a change in France’s immigration law to make it easier to expel Gypsies, or Roma, in the country illegally and pledged to evacuate their camps, which he called a source of trafficking, prostitution and child exploitation. The centrist Journal du Dimanche newspaper suggested that Sarkozy was staking his claim to the anti-immigrant platform that has for decades been a mainstay of the extreme-right National Front party, in a bid to win the support of deeply conservative swaths of the population and the minority far-right.
