Sarkozy blames French model for riots Chirac's riot speech criticised as timid

President Jacques Chirac's response to almost three weeks of urban riots in France was widely criticised yesterday as belated, timid and confused. Even in his own centre-right political "family" the President's 13-minute television and radio address to the nation was damned with faint praise.

His Interior Minister, and detested political rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, went even further. In an outspoken speech to the National Assembly, he implicitly blamed M. Chirac, and the whole of the French political system, for allowing economic and social problems to pile up over 30 years, not just in the poor suburbs, but in France as a whole.

The "sickness in the suburbs" was a reflection of a wider French "malaise", and the blockages in French society caused by selfishness and corporatism, M. Sarkozy said. "The troubled suburbs are the extreme expression of a country which despairs for the future. They are not another France but France as we have built, and managed it, for the past 30 years."

This amounted to a brutal repudiation of the approach of M. Chirac, but also of the Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin. Both insist that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the French social "model".

The centre-piece of M. Chirac's statement on Monday was a plan to create a "civil volunteer" force to help unemployed and disaffected youngsters acquire skills for the workplace. Even politicians on the centre-right poured cold water on the idea. The plan turned out in any case to be a reworking of proposals already announced. Some politicians said the idea was too limited, and too vague, to substitute for the "nation-building" influence of compulsory military service which was abolished in 1996 - by M. Chirac himself.

President Chirac also called for all French people to examine their consciences and help to root out the "poison" of racial discrimination "in words, and in looks, in the heart and in deeds". He promised to hold a meeting with media executives to try to persuade them to include more faces of people from Arab or African backgrounds on French television screens. He will also urge French employers to give equal treatment to job-seekers with Arab- or African-sounding names.

M. Chirac bowed to the prejudices of many on the right by suggesting that the unrest might be connected to France's generous laws on "family" immigration. Leaders of M. Chirac's UMP party were talking yesterday of introducing a law to clamp down on the "reunification" of immigrant families.

The National Assembly and Senate were expected last night to rubber-stamp M. Chirac's call for a three-month extension of emergency powers, despite a clear reduction in the level of violence in recent days.

Of the 2,800 youths arrested since the troubles began, only 120 were not born in France. Many of the rioters are the children of North African or African immigrants of the 1960s and 1970s.

On Monday night and yesterday morning, only 215 cars were incinerated, compared to 1,400 at the height of the riots. The "normal" average for car burnings in France is 100 a day.