France: President Hollande can do no right

A teenage girl has revealed the weakness of French President François Hollande, said Dominique Garraud in the Charente Libre. Leonarda Dibrani, 15, became a national icon this month when police hauled her off a school bus in front of horrified classmates and teachers. Along with the rest of her Roma family, she was then quickly deported to Kosovo to join her father, who had already been expelled from France. That unfortunate media spectacle turned into a national political event when Hollande decided to weigh in. In the “kind of presidential televised speech usually reserved for major decisions and exceptional events,” Hollande announced that he would invite Leonarda back to France to finish her -education—but without her family.

In one idiotic maneuver, said François-Xavier Bellamy in Le Figaro, Hollande has shown his utter ignorance of three pillars of the state: “the family, the law, and his own role as president.” To tell a young girl to choose between France and her family is, as Leonarda herself said, “heartless.” After the trauma of a humiliating arrest and expulsion, the girl was “thrust by Hollande into a nightmarish episode of a reality TV show.” The nightmare for France, though, is that the president seems to think he can single-handedly set aside immigration law and make a monarchical exception for one person. “What the hell was he doing?” asked Bruno Dive in the Sud Ouest. If anyone were to intervene in a single case of deportation—doubtful anyway—it should be the interior minister, not the president. Hollande’s anything-but-Solomonic solution of allowing the girl to return but not her brothers, sisters, and parents “attempts to please everyone and instead pleases no one.” His approval rating has sunk to 23 percent, beating the record low set by his conservative predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.

The irony is that deportation should have been a no-brainer, said Jean-Michel Helvig inLa République des Pyrénées. Leonarda’s father lied on the family’s 2009 asylum application, claiming that the children were all born in Kosovo when, in fact, they were born in Italy. Not only did they lack “credible justification for asylum,” but they also showed “no desire for integration” into France. The father refused job offers, was cited for domestic violence and petty offenses, “and made no attempt to hide his desire to get on welfare as soon as possible.” Most Roma families are law-abiding Europeans and many deserve asylum. But this family is practically “a caricature of the worst stereotypes about Roma.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Hollande is now paying the price for “years of political cowardice,” said Eric Decouty in Libération. During its 10 years in opposition, his Socialist Party never managed to draw up a plan to deal with illegal immigrants and their offspring, many of whom have been raised as French. Right now, France has “no migration policy.” Given the lack of true leadership and the spread of xenophobia, it’s unclear how we’ll ever get one.