Much buzzing on the web at the moment about whether it’s right to publish, on voting day and while the polling stations are still open, rumours about how the candidates are doing. The law is quite clear: on the eve or day of an election it is illegal to publish or broadcast any poll by whatever means. The problem, for some who claim that the web is a force for open democracy, is that journalists and politicians know well in advance what the result is likely to be: why should they be the only ones to have that privileged information? By around 6.00 p.m. rumours circulate freely between newspaper offices, TV studios and candidates’ campaign headquarters (polling finishes at 8.00 p.m.). At the same time bloggers abroad can post what they have heard, and voters in France can pick up the rumours – so why punish French bloggers for doing no more? The answer, equally democratic, is that it is inadmissible that some voters should be more equal than others – in other words, those who wait until after 6.00 before they vote, read the blogs to see how the wind is blowing and then rush off to their polling booth can manipulate the final result. They are not necessarily expressing their political belief but following (or trying to upset) what they have been led to believe is a trend.

In the 1999 European elections, Paris-Match set up a site within Geocities US, through which they channelled whatever they heard. Not good enough: the editor of Paris-Match was taken to court. This year the national commission controlling the elections has said it will have a team watching the web for contraventions, and that anyone found breaking the law will be prosecuted – the maximum fine is 75,000€. A couple of journalists - thus possessors of this privileged information - Jean-Marc Morandini from Europe 1, a popular private radio station, and Guy Birenbaum, an independent with a reputation for breaking taboos, have announced they will publish and be damned. Others, equally well-known on the web like Nicolas Vanbremeersch at Versac.net, have condemned them for unrepublican behaviour and created a rather self-righteous sticker you can put on your blog to show that you for one are not going to blow raspberries at teacher. Presumably Messrs. Morandini and Birenbaum believe in the equally republican concept of justifiable civil disobedience advocated by, amongst others, José Bové (see France Profonde of April 2006).

While I agree with Versac, I do find it fascinating that we continually rush to punish those who are only supplying a demand (like prostitutes), rather than recognising the demand for what it is and addressing that. The rumours presumably come from exit polls. If exit polls were forbidden, or if it were forbidden to ask people how they had voted until after the polling booths had closed, journalists, politicians and foreign commentators would all be in the same boat as everyone else. Then we could all go round with little stickers on our foreheads saying “I don’t talk to strangers” - or “Don’t ask: I voted Le Pen” or similar.

“If Nicolas Sarkozy is elected in a couple of weeks, we shall have no excuse.” Thus writes former socialist prime minister Michel Rocard in Friday’s Le Monde, calling for an alliance between the Socialists and François Bayrou’s UDF party. As one of France’s elder statesmen, he sees nothing to stop the two parties joining forces - their policies on employment, housing, debt, education, Europe are essentially the same, he says. Well, not really. But the very fact that Rocard feels he has to say this shows how weak he believes the socialist position to be. He clearly believes that on her own Royal will not get into the second round and that if Bayrou gets through he will not necessarily hold out a hand to her. Better, says Rocard, to cement an alliance now. On Sunday Bernard Kouchner, another experienced socialist politician, founder of Medecins Sans Frontiers and Head of the UN administration in Kosovo in 1999, agreed with Rocard that an alliance is the only way now to save the socialists from a second defeat in a row.

Ségolène Royal immediately brushed aside any chance of rapprochement; initially Bayrou said he was pleased, that Rocard’s suggestion confirmed Bayrou’s main argument that to pull France out of its crisis the best of both left and right have to come together. Then this morning on the radio Bayrou changed his mind, saying it was too early to form an alliance with only the left. The UDF’s position was to be independent of both major parties and he could not suddenly join one or the other.

On Sunday, just one week from the first round vote, three polls showed Ségolène Royal climbing again, taking votes apparently from Bayrou, so maybe she is right and does not need that helping hand. But Sarkozy is still well in the lead and might still get a majority in the first round, which would cancel the second.

Rocard and Kouchner are not the first socialist heavy-weights to jump ship and swim to the centre. Presumably they feel that if Royal wins they will not get a look-in, so they may as well go to Bayrou who, if he wins, will be desperately looking for people to form a government. But their public defection has not caused much damage. It’s an fascinating aspect of this election that none of the oldies, left or right, carry any weight with the voters. As if the older and more experienced you are, the less people want to listen to you. In that sense there really has been a break.

Are Le Pen and Sarkozy discussing a possible alliance? In an interview today with Le Figaro, Le Pen admits that he has been to see Sarkozy twice, “to discuss technical election problems”, adding that he has no personal bone to pick with Sarko as he had with Chirac. “If Sarkozy says he wants to come closer to us, why not?” Le Pen said. ”It would depend on whether it was in the national and my party’s interest. In any case, we have no preconceived feelings, either against him or anyone else.”

It is intriguing if Sarkozy is holding out some sort of olive branch to Le Pen: “Chirac didn’t want to talk to us. If Sarkozy wants to talk to all the political parties including the Front National, it’s a new era, certainly,” adds Le Pen. If Sarkozy finds himself against Bayrou in the second round, the polls show Sarkozy beaten each time. To win he would need Le Pen’s 15 - 20%. Of course he need not ask for it, Le Pen could appear to make the offer spontaneously, but even so it would be a very bold, desperate move for Sarkozy to accept, since the outcry - and despair, including internationally - would be enormous, tainting Sarkozy’s presidency from the start. It is almost inconceivable he would do it, since he would probably lose more on the moderate right than he would gain from the extreme. But then again, in today’s Libération Sarkozy seems to be preparing the ground, saying that all the main candidates have moved further right - with the sole exception of Le Pen, implying that Le Pen is now more moderate, and adding “Just because Le Pen touches something does not mean it has to be forbidden.”

Ten days to go before the first round, the candidates, the press and perhaps even the voters seem to have run out of steam as they obsessively compare this moment in the campaign with its equivalents 5, 12, 19 years ago. Predictably they all conclude: ”Anything could happen”.

Nicolas Sarkozy, threatened by Le Pen, and Ségolène Royal, threatened by Bayrou, are both trying to shore up their own camp: Sarkozy, having veered hard right for the past month, is going back to a more reasonable line and asking ingenuously why would anyone be afraid of him? Soon he’ll have himself photographed with his son, to prove what a nice, ordinary guy he is and his son will say: “If I was old enough to vote, I ‘d vote for my dad!” Which will make the headlines because no one else has anything to say.

Royal, having tried to fight off the centrist threat of Bayrou taking her moderate voters, now faces the harder task of winning back the traditional and more intransigent left. Otherwise, with at least six left-wing rivals sucking out her votes, she won’t get enough to go through to the second round. The most recent poll has her rivals between them (but not counting the Green candidate) taking 10.5% of the vote to her 24% and Sarkozy’s 28%. But worse than the figures is the growing rumour that she won’t make it - that alone is enough to drive many of her moderate supporters to believe there’s no point in voting Royal, better to vote Bayrou in order to stop Sarkozy. So Royal is now back on firmer socialist ground, caring for those who find it hard to get work, particularly a first job.

From the start Royal’s campaign has muddled to traditional lines of left and right: she has promised military style camps for young offenders and suggested everyone hang out the French flag on national holidays, as they do in America. She wants to soften the hard-and-fast rule about school catchment areas, giving people more choice. But then on employment and the economy she keeps to the ideology of jobs guaranteed for life and high employers’ charges, insisting that these have no effect on unemployment. She also puts a lot of emphasis on education and equality of opportunity: at the moment there is a great difference between universities (which are not selective and rarely guarantee a job at the end of the course) and the grandes écoles (which demand at least a year’s preparation before a highly competitive entrance exam, but are much better suited to finding a well-paid job at the end). This mix-and-match policy may be her undoing, since three quarters of French people say they personally conform to the old left or right party lines. While many feel the Socialist Party needed modernising, evolving away from its Marxist origins, she may have taken it too far - which is why the far left can mobilise 10.5%. But then 42% of the electorate still haven’t made up their mind. So perhaps the only positive thing one can say is that “Anything could happen.”

Yesterday the election campaign officially started. That’s not a misprint, but one of those strange quirks of French electoral procedure. What it means is that from now on every newspaper, radio and TV station is obliged by law to give exactly equal time to each of the 12 candidates. If you give column-space or air-time to one, you have to give an equal amount to the others (the media watchdog CSA, counts the minutes). There are 11 days left to give every candidate his or her fair share. And blogs? Where do they fit in? Are they media? If they are, I consider this blog to be off-shore. I do not want to give exactly the same number of words to each candidate.

At the same time, the polls are registering the highest ever number of Don’t Knows: 42 or 47% depending. All the candidates are desperate to win them over, yet the experts say it is too late to get involved in policies: if after 3 months hard graft arguing over unemployment, security, economics, national identity etc the candidates have not convinced half the voters, they’re not going to be persuaded now. What will sway them, says prevailing wisdom, is force of personality: who looks best suited to run France, who fits most closely to the image of a president. It is the person who matters now, not the policy. At this stage in the last presidential elections, outsider Olivier Besancenot rose high in the polls: he’s one of the Trotskyist candidates, a postman with a beatific face and a convincing manner. A lot of intelligent people have told me over the past couple of weeks as I toured Strasbourg and Paris that he is their man. I have to say that despite his enormous charm, that makes me sad: he is so violently anti everything that has got the UK back on its feet over the past decade or so. But there is a strong current in the present election to close off France from everything that is happening outside, as if the best way to protect the country against the rising economies of China, India and Brazil, is to close in on itself, like a hedgehog rolling into a ball or a tortoise retreating into its shell. In a sense that has been Chirac’s line for the past 12 years, the Gaullist patriotic withdrawal, standing aloof from the rest of the world. I had hoped that when candidates promised change, they meant they wanted to change that. Apparently not. Only Sarkozy, for a while, pushed a certain openess to other countries, but he soon changed as it lost him support. Even the centrist François Bayrou dare not suggest vaguely free-market solutions or look for examples beyond France’s borders.

Of course the reason why almost half the electorate is still undecided may be precisely because, knowing that France needs to look positively outwards, they are frustrated that no candidate has offered them that possibility. No candidate has said “it’s time to learn from the success of Ireland, Spain, Sweden, Denmark and even (deep breath) Britain”. Not copy, simply accept that some of what those countries do might help France. Of the twelve candidates, 6 are left-wing, 2 extreme right, one is Green, the tenth (Hunting, Shooting, Fishing) defends the countryside, leaving only Sarko and Bayrou. If those two make it into the second round, that may be because many French people reject that “closed-in upon ourselves” view. As I have said so many times, this election really is important for France, because the country is in a terrible mess, with its unemployment and massive debt, its falling self-confidence and rising number of pensioners. The election is the best way of making a fresh start. But maybe it’s already too late. What seems certain is that after 3 months debate, nearly half the voters are still waiting, unsatisfied.

With less than two weeks to go, François Bayrou is rising again, Ségolène Royal falling. Nicolas Sarkozy remains where he has been from the very begining: unshakeably in the lead. Behind them all, Le Pen also rises.

People are starting to wonder whether the surprise of this election, like Le Pen’s appearance in the second round last time, or the No vote to Europe in 2005, will be the absence of a second round at all. That Sarkozy will get a majority in the first round. It is possible: I can imagine many people see his victory as inevitable, so see no point in prolonging the agony. Why submit yourself to a further two weeks of press speculation? For two things seem beyond doubt: one is that Sarkozy will get into the second round, two is that he will win it. As far as I can see, no poll gives Bayrou, Le Pen or even Royal a chance against him in round two. So indeed, why wait?

Many leaders of the Socialist Party are openly planning for 2012 as the candidate they never wanted, Ségolène Royal, seems unable to convince that she really has what it takes to run the country. Enough people on the left are moving elsewhere, mainly to Bayrou. But Bayrou fails to convince that he can make his power-sharing system work. How can Socialists and UMP people work together in a centrist government? France invented the idea of a left and a right in politics and when the chips are down most people fall back on one or other of those positions. Unfortunately clichés always work better than new ideas.

It’s fascinating to see how the press is taking Bayrou’s comeback. Last September he began his rise in public opinion by heavily criticising the press for their blinkered vision, for even back then they had decided there were only two candidates in this election: Sarkozy and Royal. As Bayrou climbed up closer to Royal in the opinion polls, so the press had to swallow the insults and accept him as the third man. Then how they crowed when he started to fall, they loved it! Now he’s clawing his way back up, getting ready, perhaps, to beat Royal into the second round. But then, the French press is used to being proved wrong, predicting a Yes vote to Europe and Jospin’s certain place in the second round in 2002.

On Friday Jean-Marie Le Pen went to the very tower-block estate where, in November 2005, Sarkozy had provoked riots by calling some of the inhabitants “scum”, promising to flush them out with a high-powered German pressure-cleaner, a Kärcher. By going “where our former interior minister dares not set foot”, Le Pen was trying to disprove the theory that his anti-immigrant policy cuts him off from that whole section of French society. The previous day Sarkozy had to cancel a visit to part of Lyon because of a demonstration against him. His people decided that footage of him being heckled and shouted at would be worse for his image than having to admit they were forced to cancel. Image is all. Meanwhile one of Sarkozy’s spokeswomen, Rachida Dati, fell about laughing with a couple of journalists, on film, as she claimed that if Sarko wins she would be made “minister of urban renewal with a Kärcher”. The clip can be seen on the web.

More and more this election campaign resembles a piece of nineteenth century fiction. The two principal characters are a man and a woman: the man seems utterly sure of himself and appears to dominate, though this facade is undermined by suggestions of instability. The woman is more attractive, seeming to care for the human being hidden inside all of us, but from time to time she makes one of those inevitable gaffs to which women, we are told, are prone when they confront the “real world” e.g. how many nuclear submarines have we got? As in every good plot, there is another man, lurking just behind them, clean-living and Christian, rising and falling in our opinion: do we want him to triumph or is he really just a wet please-all? Is that rumour of a mistress going to take hold? Just as we think the author has put all his cards on the table, an elderly wicked uncle, rumoured to have died long ago, emerges to threaten all three characters. At first glance his ideas are outrageous but perhaps, after all, many readers are starting to see the sense behind them? Running thoughout the story in the background there is a large cast of minor characters, none of whom are very important, but they add colour and moments of drama (one rambunctious chap is threatened with gaol for wilfully destroying fields of genetically modified crops). Cleverly conceived, together they represent the full spectrum of human activity while never really impinging on the plot. You know you don’t have to remember who’s who because they will make no difference to the pitiful tale of a man and a woman at the forefront of the narrative. And with every day that passes, the end draws nearer, the outcome less certain

I have never met Nicolas Sarkozy, although not for the want of trying. A few years ago, when he was still unknown in Britain, I wrote a portrait of him for Prospect, phoning his press office every day for maybe three weeks, trying to get an interview. He is a fascinating, if mildly repulsive man, reminiscent of a character sprung from the mind of a Jacobean dramatist, and ever since that time I have listened carefully to those who know him – Charles de Courson for instance telling me last week that so divisive is Sarkozy’s nature that if he gets in, the country will collapse within two years. Leaders naturally bring people together, and Sarkozy so far has shown himself the opposite. So Michel Onfray’s blog in which he describes meeting the candidate was a must-read.

For those who can’t face 3,113 words in French (and you thought I’m long-winded!) I will give a résumé (meaning shortened version, for those with no French at all). Michel Onfray is a 47 year old philosopher, already cited in this blog some time ago, who achieved high-profile with his book La Traité d’Athéologie, which sold a remarkable 300,000 copies. Put simply, he is a hedonist, believing in the present, not in the dream of a rosy future, whether religion-based or utopic. He believes in the value of our senses, that we should know the world and see the world as it is. Anyway, the French magazine Philosophie asked Onfray to interview Sarkozy.

On his blog, he describes the meeting: Onfray is accompanied by two of the staff of the magazine, Sarkozy by two advisors. “A stormy beginning. Aggression on his part. He paces round his cage, looking, weighing me up, judging. A great wounded animal, he has read my blog and looks me up and down.” Onfray recently started a blog for this election, and early on he compared Sarkozy to the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. In the same way that the wolf disguises his grey fur with the grandmother’s nightdress, the lupine free-marketeer Sarko has dressed himself up in clothing of the left, claiming to believe in the Republic and its social, caring values. It is for this comparison that the following scene is enacted: “His legs are crossed, one of them incessantly twitching nervously, the foot never stops moving…..First blow with his paw, claws out, then a second, a third, he can’t stop, lets himself go, aggressing, hitting, striking hard, talking to himself, a flow of words impossible to control or canalize. One, two, ten, twenty autistic sentences. His cabinet director and colleague watch and listen to him impassively. I can imagine them present at a heavy [police] interrogation, wearing the same mask, the mask of a person in authority watching someone die without a flicker of emotion. The monologue continues, interminable torrent, bitchy comments thrown out like gall from a sick, bilious man or the venom surging through the body of a person intent on murder. Boasting, provoking, sure of his ground as he pushes his adversary to fight back, he says in essence: “So you’ve come to see the great demagogue, you who are nothing whatsoever, you throw yourself into the wolf’s jaws!” I say something, it is torn apart, destroyed, broken, rejected….. I try again. Same treatment, a torrent of acid words. I try again, same thing. I begin to find it’s going on a bit long…”

As Onfray says, how, if one has wanted, since the cradle, to be president of the republic, if one aspires to walk with the great of this world, be the head of the army, have a nuclear arsenal at one’s disposal, how can one turn like a mortally wounded animal on someone just because they wrote on their blog something mildly critical. All Onfray said in his blog was that Sarkozy had recently converted to Gaullism, the idea of the nation and the republic. “In fact the whole of the first half hour were a hysterical piece of play-acting of someone lost body and soul in a dance of death around a ritual victim, while round about two men from each camp impotently watch this primitive scene.”

Sarkozy, called away to the telephone, returns calmer, and under the influence of his minders begins to talk about the matter in hand, an interview about that area thought to be the monopoly of all educated Parisians, philosophy. Sarkozy announces that he firmly believes that we are born either good or evil and that whatever happens to us, everything is determined by nature: “I tend to think,” says Sarkozy quoted by Onfray and later in the magazine, “that one is born a pedophile…. There are 1,200 or 1,300 young people who kill themselves each year, and not because their parents didn’t look after them. But because they had a genetic fragility…take smokers: some develop cancers, others don’t. The first have a hereditary physiological weakness..” For Onfray, believing that you are controlled by your genes in this way is terrible, a pure piece of American stupidity.

Sarkozy then says that he has never heard anything as absurd as Socrates’ “Know yourself” “This admission turns me to ice – for him. And for what it says about him….In other words this person who wants to lead the destinies of the French nation believes that knowledge of oneself is a vain undertaking?” Onfray reminds his readers that the last three heads of state have all had need of expert psychological help at different times during their mandate. Clearly Sarkozy feels this sign of fragility is not for him.

The description of the meeting reminds me inevitably of the interview with Jacques Chirac told by the journalists from the New York Times, retold on this blog. In France there is a constant and ritual dance between politicians and journalists, who are not allowed by law to comment on a public person’s private life, and so find other ways to undermine their credibility. The world of blogs, a French samizdat, is of course, ideal for that. The comparison, as they say in France, is not anodyne. I cringe to imagine France under Sarkozy, if mild criticism provokes that sort of anger, what will happen to the already acquiescent French press? Imagine Sarkozy interviewed by John Humphrys – he would provide the excuse for bringing back the guillotine. If Sarkozy is elected we shall have a lively passage, as a ferry captain told me once, setting out across the Channel in a force ten gale.

The Bayrou moment may be over. With less than three weeks to go before the first round of elections, the candidate of the extreme centre is dropping in the polls, while Le Pen inexorably rises. If that fall continues it will be a shame, for although it is hard to see quite how he would manage with only a small party behind him, Bayrou is a better alternative than either the divisive Sarkozy or the irresolute Royal. In my view he is the only one who can lead France out of its present doldrums. But even if he does not make it into the second round, he has sown terror in the camps of the other two principal candidates and forced both of them back from their extreme views to a more consensual centre.
Perhaps to put himself back into the public eye Bayrou said over the weekend that if elected he would close the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. That doesn’t mean much, if anything, to most English observers, but since I am making a film about the school, it fascinates me. My film is also critical of the school, using an enarque of distinction, Charles de Courson, now one of France’s main experts in public finance, to balance the naturally gung-ho views of ENA’s director. The bright and entertaining De Courson is also one of Bayrou’s chief advisors.
The school forms administrators, which sounds terminally grey, but since the top 10% go into what the French call the Grands Corps, those bodies like the Diplomatic Service or the Prefectural Service which in turn dominate government ministries, a small percentage become very powerful in the country. Some of them, so close to the seat of power, become seduced into a career in politics, like Chirac, Jospin, Royal, Juppé. And they start at the top, parachuted into a constituency of choice, quickly becoming ministers and higher. Others leave the public domain and move into France’s largest companies, both nationalised, like Gaz de France or SNCF, and private. Like the political, they are parachuted in at the top with no real idea of how to manage, and certainly no idea how to manage a large, often multinational company. The appalling mess made by the aptly-named Jean-Marie Messier at Vivendi is the prime example of what happens when an enarque runs a private company.
But in a sense that’s not the main problem, it’s more the other end, the selection. To get into ENA you need two university degrees or a degree from a Grande Ecole like Science Po. Then a year’s preparation course for the entrance exam. Six out of seven will fail the written exam, and the few who pass go on to sit three orals. Two are technical, one, the mythical Grand Oral, is general: candidates have to talk to 15 minutes on a given subject (and not 15 minutes 5 seconds, they have to wind up their argument and conclude exactly as the bell rings) before being faced with half an hour of cross questioning from a panel of illustrious sadists. Less than 100 students are accepted each year, and in 60 years there have been just 5,600 graduates, la crème de la crème. In the same period Oxbridge has churned out well over a million.
As a school, it’s not hard to fault: very few people can afford to study for so many years, so the intake perpetuates a monoculture of a certain class of person: most students’ parents are either in the Grand Corps or teachers in higher education. Over the 60 years of the school’s existence they have created a Parisian caste, inter-marrying like the ancien régime and, according to De Courson, like the ancien régime they are turning their backs on the problems of their co-citizens, not necessarily consciously but because they don’t hear, perhaps cannot understand the cries from the street. “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.”
Bayrou sees clearly this “rupture profonde entre le pouvoir et les citoyens” and proposes a school for public service, like ENA, but taking students from mixed backgrounds, and without such high academic qualifications. He would make it impossible for the graduates to leak into the private sector.
The director of the school, in our film, accepts these criticisms but says they are no longer relevant: he was appointed 5 years ago precisely to put these things right, and although his reforms are not complete, he feels they are well on the way. And of course it will take a decade for his first graduates to percolate into the system, let alone make a mark on the public mind, so it may be that Bayrou is too late. The other thing the current director says is that whereas for years ENA generated great national pride, it has recently become fashionable to make the school scapegoat for France’s ills. Indeed many graduates now hide their diplomas in public.
Two things fascinate me from my brief experience with ENA and its students: one is their dedication to l’intérêt général, la chose publique. They call it a vocation, a noble calling, and the director confirms that public administration in France is seen as one of the nation’s highest careers. He too, like his students, often uses the word noblesse, which makes me think that (le comte) Charles de Courson is right when he compares them to the ancien régime. My impression is that in Britain the Civil Service is not seen as a noble career, fit only for the very highest minds and greatest souls. Rather the reverse. The other, non-related thing that struck me was that before the filming I contacted a recent graduate who had spent a weekend telling a mutual friend how irrelevant ENA is, how bad the teaching and inadequate the preparation for the real world. When I asked him whether he would say this on our film, he replied he was willing to tell me all his criticisms, but anonymously and not on camera. Clearly he is afraid of reprisals in his career. Which goes to show how tentacularly powerful ENA is.
As a solidly established member of the nobility, le comte Charles de Courson (his family is from Bayeux, his ancestors came over with the Conqueror) is not afraid to criticize, albeit with circumspection. He told me that unlike many of his class, his family have always shifted with the times, often as precursors. On his mother’s side, for example, one of his aristocratic forebears had voted for the execution of Louis XVI. Was that in the l’intérêt général or merely self-interest ?

Finally the filming of the documentary on the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, France’s post-post-graduate school for those who want to run the country, is finished and I can settle into the editing and go back to writing this blog on a regular basis. I apologise to my regular readers for the long breaks, although I hope my new knowledge about the French elite will find its way into the blog.
On Friday, in Paris, I had one of those enriching conversations about the election with two people who at 8.30 I did not know but by 6.00 I knew quite well: my cameraman and the taxi-driver who ferried us about the capital all day. The cameraman, like so many others, has spent the last couple of months on the road with most of the different candidates. He follows them every day, watches more than listens, and never gets to talk to them himself, since he is simply the medium though which the message passes. But having spent his entire working life watching people through his viewfinder he is a pretty shrewd judge of what’s what. The taxi-driver, also accepted as no more than a means to an end, listens all day to his fares as they chatter on  about the election, watching only through his mirror. The cameraman had no time for Sarkozy, but, as a left-leaning person, was terminally disappointed by Royal, while Bayrou is too soft to succeed. Nobody likes a man who is half one thing and half another.
What preoccupied the cameraman was the environment, perplexed by the central contradiction that cutting back on emissions means cutting back on our way of life. At the mention of green-house gases, of course, the taxi-driver shifted in his seat uncomfortably, fiddled with the volume on his radio and tried to bring the conversation back to more reasonable topics, like the recent violence at the Gare du Nord. As the day wore on and we got to know each other better he did come up with the suggestion that a massive, taxi-exempt congestion charge in Paris would be the best way of cutting exhaust emission at a stroke, enabling him to work in greater freedom.
Just after Christmas, the campaign kicked off with great excitement and chatter about the environment – at that time there were four of five potential candidates representing the various factions of the ecology movement. That first surge culminated with a much publicized document drawn up by the charismatic Nicolas Hulot, a television presenter. Hulot challenged all the major candidates to sign his charter, in effect promising that if elected they would address in  proper fashion the problems of climate change. Hulot is a household name in France (not because his grandfather gave the family name to Jacques Tati’s cinematic persona, but because of the popularity of his own unpronounceable entitled  TV series Ushuaïa) and at that early stage of the election he had the clout to be able to make candidates bend to his will. But since then the campaign has degenerated into intense navel-gazing (well, that’s not entirely fair – the unemployed, the national debt, the economy generally are all important, but they are purely French issues, and the president is supposed to look beyond France into the greater abyss), with none of the main candidates talking seriously about Europe (the 50^th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome was greeted by silence all round), let alone the rest of the world. A fact which in itself shows France’s changing perspective: a few years ago it considered itself a weight in international affairs. So the silence on how France is going to fight global warming, for instance, is sad. Monsieur Hulot thought so too, and yesterday organised a rally in Paris to bring the environment back into the headlines – the only way to make the candidates sit up and take notice.
As the cameraman said, the reason candidates have dropped green issues is obvious.: de-polluting the atmosphere is in direct contradiction with increasing economic growth, both personal and national. Cutting back on green-house gases means cutting back on our wasteful lifestyle – all of us, not just big companies – and at every level. Next weekend the French roads will be choked with cars, admittedly most of them full, which makes a change, crawling off to holiday destinations because we have all come to assume that holiday homes a long way from our principal homes are a right. Airports will be full of people flying to further destinations for the same reason. But if people stop going on holiday, the hotel and restaurant trade will suffer, airlines will collapse, more people will be made redundant. But even in our working lives we all move about the country to an extraordinary extent, creating the wealth which France needs to get back into a situation of full employment. The French public know this, and may be the reason why the only Green candidate, Dominique Voynet, is scarcely polling 1% (Hulot decided not to stand, naively considering his charter was sufficient)
Last year university students took to the streets because the government seemed to be proposing employment measures that might reduce the style in which they have become accustomed to live by reducing the number of lifetime-guaranteed jobs. Learning from that, the presidential candidates have built on the assumption that everyone wants to have greater job-security and earn more money, so it is little wonder they have not, dare not, address serious environmental issues. It’s a choice we all have to make.
Hulot’s demonstration will bring the subject back on to the agenda of all the candidates, but it is now plain that none of them take it seriously. Like all their campaign promises, commitment to the environment is to be taken as gentle fiction.