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Jean-paul Pelissier / Reuters
A masked special unit policeman looks out of one of the ground floor windows of the apartment where gunman Mohamed Merah had been holed up, in Toulouse, France on March 23, 2012. Merah died in a hail of bullets on Thursday as he scrambled out of a ground-floor window during a gunbattle with elite police commandos.
Eric Feferberg / AFP - Getty Images
France's incumbent President and UMP candidate for the 2012 presidential election Nicolas Sarkozy delivers a speech in Strasbourg on March 22, 2012.
As police investigators continue to search the apartment in Toulouse where a 30-hour siege ended in a cacophony of gunfire on Thursday, attention is turning to the effect events of the past two weeks will have on French politics.
France's presidential election race has resumed irrevocably altered by the killing of Mohamed Merah, an al Qaeda-inspired gunman whose murders have shifted the political debate in favor of incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy.
The young self-styled Islamist's crimes spread fear, triggered an emotive debate about immigration and integration, and gave Sarkozy a small bounce in the polls as he sought to close the gap behind Socialist rival Francois Hollande.
With only one month left to go before the first round of the election, Merah's influence is likely to endure.
"Of course what has happened in the past week has changed the course of events," a senior Sarkozy campaign adviser said on Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"There wasn't much talk about security and terrorism before. But this is going to raise questions about our system of integration, our approach to fundamentalism and our tolerance of certain practices here. You're going to hear a lot about that in the weeks to come," he said. Continue reading.
-- Reuters contributed to this post
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If France's immigrants don't like the French way of life they should be sent back to where ever they came from. A very simple solution like what is done in Australia.
This certainly worked out well for Sarkozy.
cui bono
What should concern is not the 'benefits' to Sarkozy campain... Is the disconnection of the Socialists, not just in France... In a populist like fashion they try to be "understanding humanists"... and the price of this approach is growing... extremists and fundamentalists are making quite a 'profit' of this... as well as the populists that wide close an eye (or even two).
From the other side the extreme right (like Le Pen)... make their profit too of a dangerous situation created, in particular, by the islamists that are not ready to integrate into the societies and culture they emigrate to.
Indeed the world is already immerse in 'undeclared' war... unnable to show some consensual unity around some real humanist principles.
"The young self-styled Islamist"
Nothing "self-styled" about this Islamist at all. This Islamist is Islam.
There is nothing "self-styled" in a manipulative brain washing 'education' of fundamnetalist/extremists followers...