Europe: SWING TO FAR RIGHT FUELS REFUGEE FEARS

When he strolls the boulevards of his adoptive French city with his 9-year-old daughter, Bel-kacem Djedid senses in her a kind of loss, or maybe just a notion that she is different from the people around her. "I see it in her eyes, in the sadness there," said Djedid, an Algerian. Maybe, he said, speaking by telephone from Lyon, it is the fact that her clothes are Red Cross hand-me-downs or that he cannot afford the fancy toys that betoken Europe's prosperity or the vacations that her classmates enjoy. "Sometimes she says, 'Why am I not like them?'" Djedid said, speaking of her classmates. "And I say that, one day, the time will come and you will be like them." What basically makes the Djedid family different is that they are asylum seekers, hoping to qualify as refugees. That status means that they and hundreds of thousands of others like them across Europe are denied normal lives because of a web of bureaucratic constraints and ambiguities sometimes worthy of Kafka. Now more than ever, as it seeks to expand its membership, the 15-nation European Union confronts a crucial decision on whether to embrace outsiders, as the United States does, or to reject them as intruders. But with rightist forces gaining ground, people like Djedid and his daughter are also the subject of a rising resentment, like that preached by Jean-Marie Le Pen, who shocked France this month by earning a place in the second round of national elections for president.