PARIS, February 14 (IslamOnline.net) - Crying foul over meager representation for the upcoming regional elections, French Muslim immigrants in several parties are championing a "civic rights movement," with a new study indicating "very serious failings" in the country’s integration policy over the past 30 years, reported The Guardian on Friday, February 14.

Leading immigrant members of the ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party, mostly second-generation immigrants of North African origin, underlined that despite earlier promises of fair chances, it would be "extremely lucky" for any of them to win any of the 1,720 electoral seats.

"We are enormously disappointed," Rachid Kaci, a UMP activist who did not make it on to the party's list in the Ile-de-France region, told the British paper.

"For months we have had grand speeches about equality of opportunity and an end to discrimination. But now that there is a real opportunity to send a powerful message, they do nothing. It is scandalous," he added.

Other UMP members said that while immigrant candidates had been included on the party's slates, they were rarely high enough up the list to be elected.

"We refuse to be extras, to boost the party's image, just for the campaign," Yazid Sabeg told The Guardian.

"Are we really going to have to insist on quotas to achieve proper political integration?" he asked.

A recent study by two university sociologists indicated that immigrants of North African origin held just seven seats on local and regional councils around France, and there were none in the national assembly.

Aissa Dermouche, the only senior state representative of immigrant origin, was sworn in this week after being hauled from relative obscurity as head of a Nantes business school and hailed by Chirac as a shining example of integration.

In general, however, affirmative action is dismissed by politicians as an admission that the ideals of liberty and equality have not worked, said The Guardian.

This follows a heated debate in France about the country's failure to do more to integrate its six million-strong immigrant, mainly Muslims.

Critics said the banning of hijab in state schools - despite the opposition of Muslims at home and abroad - failed to address the underlying problems of discrimination in education, jobs and housing, the British paper said.

Feeling the same pinch, immigrant activists from the Socialist and Green parties joined hands with colleagues from the ruling party to launch a cross-party "civic rights movement".

Green spokesman Stephane Pocrain told The Guardian the aim of the campaign was to secure proper political representation.

"Politicians here simply do not resemble the French population," he stressed.

France's High Council on Integration said last month that integration policy over the past 30 years showed "very serious failings".

The body, the paper said, wrote this week to all the political parties asking them to ensure immigrants got an equal chance to be candidates.

Community leaders say the Socialists, punished by voters in 2002 for the failure of Lionel Jospin to include an immigrant in his 1997 government, have made a big effort for the March regional polls.

Analysts believe that up to 40 Socialist regional councilors of immigrant origin should be elected, the paper said.

Depressingly, France is not unique, analysts and observers believe.

From the lists of those selected for this year elections, it looks as if the meager 10 ethnic minority members of the European parliament, out of 626, will actually drop.

Claude Moraes, a British member of the European parliament, wrote to the Guardian asserting that across the EU, national election lists are becoming less diverse.

"The UK does not do any better - the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly, elected under PR, are still entirely white bodies," the British Labor lawmaker said.