Burqa-wearing Muslim woman to run for presidency over French ban

A BURQA-WEARING Frenchwoman has declared her intention to run for the presidency against Nicolas Sarkozy.

Kenza Drider styles herself the Freedom Candidate.

Her campaign literature shows her in her full veil standing in front of a line of police – an act made illegal by French legislation banning the burqa in public in April.

Mrs Drider declared her unlikely candidacy yesterday, part of a movement mounting an attack on the new law.

“When a woman wants to maintain her freedom, she must be bold,” she said.

President Sarkozy argues the veil imprisons women. Polls show most French people support the ban, which authorities estimate affects fewer than 2,000 women. Mrs Drider declared her candidacy in Meaux, the city east of Paris run by senior conservative MP and Sarkozy ally Jean-Francois Cope.

“I have the ambition today to serve all women who are the object of stigmatisation or social, economic or political discrimination,” Mrs Drider said.

“It is important that we show that we are here, we are French citizens and that we, as well, can bring solutions to French citizens.”

With Islam the second religion in France, there are worries veiled Muslim women could compromise the nation’s secular foundations, women’s rights and encourage radical Islam.

MPs banned Muslim headscarves in French classrooms in 2004. Most French Muslim women wear the “niqab,” a cloth attached to a headscarf, rather than the burqa, where the woman is shrouded apart from a mesh covering the eyes.

Belgium passed a similar face veil ban in July, and the Netherlands announced last Friday it plans to follow suit. A draft law has been approved in Italy.

In France, the veil ban was also seen as a manoeuvre by Mr Sarkozy’s UMP party, which Mr Cope chairs, to lure far-right voters from the National Front.

“I tried to understand this law and what I understood is that this is a law which puts us under house arrest,” Mrs Drider said, referring to women who choose to stay home rather than remove their face veils, or risk arrest and an on-the-spot fine.

One woman in a long black robe was seen recently in a chic Paris suburb wearing a surgical mask on her face – one of several tricks developed to get around the ban.

Mrs Drider, 32, who has worn a face veil for 13 years, was the only veiled woman to testify before a commission of MPs studying a potential ban before the law was passed.

The mother-of-four claimed she went about the southern city of Avignon, where she lives, facing down insults from passers-by but left alone by police.

Rachid Nekkaz, a wealthy businessman, has promised to pay fines for women who break the law. With his association, Don’t Touch My Constitution, he heads Mrs Drider’s support committee for her presidential campaign.

She now has to get 500 mayors to back her candidacy for the elections in April and May next year. With more than 36,000 mayors in France, she thinks this is doable.

“My candidacy is to say the real problem in France is not us … The real problem in France is really women’s freedom … whatever their religion,” she said. “So let’s not focus on what I wear. Let’s deal with the real problems.

“My candidacy is really for that, to say don’t stop at what I wear but go much deeper.”