The chairman of a French technology company has called on France to learn from the election of Barack Obama and take concrete steps to end discrimination against France's minorities. Yazid Sabeg, the only ethnic Arab to head a French public company, published a “manifesto” in the influential French weekly, Le Journal du Dimanche, calling for both private and public sectors to achieve “real equality” in France.

The election of Obama, he wrote, “highlighted the shortcomings of the French Republic and the gap that separates us from a country whose citizens have gone beyond the racial question to elect as president a man who happens to be black.”

Mr. Sabeg is the chairman of CS (Communications et Systèmes) Group, a technology company based in Paris. Born in Algeria and brought to France at age two by his dockworker father, Mr. Sabeg earned a PhD at the University of Paris before going into business. He has been an outspoken proponent of “positive discrimination” as affirmative action is often called in Europe.

While the election of Mr. Obama has been celebrated in France and elsewhere in Europe, it has also set off a debate about the lack of opportunity for people of color. Libération, a liberal daily, ran several sobering articles last week lamenting the failure of left or right to take action to end discrimination. There is just one black member of the French Assembly who does not represent an overseas territory and just four of Arab origin in the Senate. By most estimates just a dozen of France’s 2,000 mayors are nonwhite.

Since the racial riots in France in 2005, the government has promised to take steps to correct inequalities. Earlier this year, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has appointed several women of immigrant backgrounds to the most diverse cabinet in France’s history, announced a plan to reduce the isolation of poor mostly-minority suburbs around France’s major cities by improving schools, job training, and public transportation. Mr. Sabeg has described these steps as "an empty shell."

Mr. Sabeg’s manifesto has drawn the support of a number of French political leaders and intellectuals. President Sarkozy’s wife, Carla Bruni, even wrote a front-page article in the same newspaper supporting his proprosal. In his article, Mr. Sabeg argues that affirmative action policies in the U.S. led to the creation of a black middle class. “With the arrival of Obama,” he wrote, “we can no longer argue that diversity is the enemy of merit or tolerate injustice as the consequence of the principle of equality.” French law forbids collecting data on the race and ethnic origin of citizens, which makes it difficult to track racial progress – or identify discrimination.

Mr. Sabeg called for pressure on all French political parties to subscribe to a commitment to diversity, on the French government to improve schools in deprived areas, and on private companies and the government to commit to hiring policies that will deliver results.

Periodic tests by the French media show that job candidates with identifiable ethnic names or addresses in poor areas are much less likely to be called for interviews than whites with identical credentials. Mr. Sabeg has said in the past that for several years his company was denied security clearance to do defense work for the French government because of malicious rumors that he had ties to Muslim militants.

In a survey for the Journal du Dimanche, 80 percent of respondents said they would vote for a black candidate for President of France, but just 58 percent would back an Arab.