They are the sons and daughters of immigrants and were President Jacques Chirac's foot soldiers in the battle to win the votes of their communities in France's bleak city suburbs.
Now, in a blow for efforts at racial integration in France, these high-profile grassroots activists have accused Chirac's conservative allies of breaking promises to field them as electable candidates in regional elections this month.
"We received promises from the very highest level. But we have been let down," said Slimane Dib, 37, a leading member of Chirac's UMP party in this racially-mixed suburb north of Paris.
"The message of these elections to immigrants is: You are not French after all," said Dib, who along with several other prominent UMP candidates of North African origin have withdrawn from March 21 and 28 elections to regional councils across France.
Under the poll system, parties give their candidates a rank on ballot lists - the higher the rank, the better their chances of becoming one of France's 1,829 regional councillors.
Dib says the 17th position allocated to him on the UMP list for the Seine-Saint-Denis area gave him no chance of election. Other ethnic origin UMP activists around the country have been ranked even lower, he says.
"Last year I was out in the streets telling Muslims the ban on headscarves in schools was intended to help their children fit into French society, not exclude them," he said of the controversial step demanded by Chirac in December.
"You can't do that and get nothing in return. My credibility is in tatters. I had no choice but to pull out," Dib said in an interview at the UMP's office in Aubervilliers town hall.
French mainstream parties left and right have never found much space for the estimated 10 percent of France's population that is not white.
While ethnic diversity is creeping into other European parliaments, the only black faces in the National Assembly are those of deputies for overseas constituencies such as the French Antilles in the Caribbean.
They are equally scarce elsewhere in public life, from the media to the arts. One of the rare exceptions was the racially mixed team that won the 1998 soccer World Cup with stars such as Zinedine Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants.
Chirac's party had vowed to change that amid signs that the sense of alienation among many in France's Muslim community - according to some estimates it numbers five million - was turning it into a recruiting ground for radical Islamic groups.
Chirac included two junior ministers of North African origin in his government in 2002 and created a national council of Islam led by moderates. A Muslim was named this year as a county prefect in charge of law and order in the eastern Jura region.
Tokia Saifi, one of the two junior ministers, was asked to come up with names of 17 UMP activists of ethnic origin suitable for local office after the March elections. Most of those names, it emerged last month, were thrown in the bin.
"We run the risk of sending out a negative signal," Saifi told Le Monde newspaper in February, estimating that just five of the candidates she had earmarked now stood any chance of election. Saifi declined to be interviewed for this feature.
Dib suspects UMP party bosses became afraid that they would lose votes to the anti-immigrant National Front led by Jean-Marie Le Pen if they fielded too many ethnic candidates, an accusation that UMP officials have denied.
"It is not up to the UMP to present a Franco-Maghreb list," said Eric Raoult, who heads the party list in Seine-Saint-Denis. "I had to wait 16 years before I won election," Liberation daily quoted him as saying.
Bariza Khiari, daughter of Algerian immigrants who fought discrimination to win a seat on the national committee of the opposition Socialist Party, says the problem goes deeper and cuts across party lines.
"The French political system is a self-perpetuating elite that is out of touch with social reality," said Khiari, who came up through the trade union system to launch a political career.
"I've experienced it: someone will come up to you and say, 'You know, your name doesn't look good on the ballot list', or something. Things aren't going to change overnight," she added.
Khiari is an exception to the rule. She fights her political battles not in immigrant communities but in a well-heeled area of Paris.
She is tipped to be the first woman of ethnic origin to sit in France's Senate upper house after September polls.
Neither she nor Dib advocate party quotas to raise ethnic representation - something that would anyway be unworkable in a country where it is illegal to classify by ethnic origin.
Both say they are nonetheless campaigning inside their parties to nurture ethnic talent. The alternative, said Dib, is to risk ethnic minorities turning elsewhere for leadership.
"The winners would be the fundamentalists, the extremists," he said. "They will say that we tried to get a seat at the table of the French Republic but were thrown off".
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