Tuesday (the 29th May) was an anniversary which few if any of the French press picked up – yet it was only the second anniversary of a major event with international repercussions: on the 29th May two years’ ago the French rejected the European Referendum. It was, by any measure, a bold vote. By saying No to the European Constitution, the French voters effectively killed it, at the same time casting the European Union into a limbo-land from which it has not yet emerged. Why was its memory passed over in silence?

Only 24 months ago the vote was hailed as a milestone, proof of France’s individuality, its independence from the rest of the world – by saying No to the constitution, France was saying No to globalisation, to unchecked competition and foreign investment in France (another way of losing control of your own resources). The No vote was the crowning victory of Marie-Georges Buffet, National Secretary of the Communist Party and José Bové, a sheep-farmer and national hero who campaigns relentlessly against globalisation and what he believes to be the domination of agriculture (thus what we eat) by two or three multinational firms. Yet two years later Buffet and Bové have been abandoned. There is no other word for it: both stood in the recent presidential election, both received humiliating scores. Marie-Georges Buffet polled the lowest ever vote for a Communist candidate in a presidential election (just over 700,000), Bové did worse with less than 500,000. Buffet did so badly that it looks as though the once mighty Communist Party, so feared by General de Gaulle, bastion of post-war thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, has finally died and is no longer a credible part of the democratic scene. The party’s headquarters will be sold to pay their lost election expenses.

Why have French voters decided that what Buffet and Bové stand for is no longer viable? I don’t have an answer yet. I am simply stating what I see and hear. The shadow of that No vote hung heavily over the first part of the presidential campaign, everybody scared stiff that France would knock over the world’s furniture again. All through the campaign the thread of anti-globalisation, anti-freemarket, anti-capitalism was strong. Again and again France was described lovingly as an exception. So the international and national relief on Monday 23rd April, when it became clear that the French could vote responsibly, was the stuff of banner headlines. The ghost of the No vote to the European Constitution two short years ago had been laid to rest. To such a point that on its anniversary it is not mentioned, as if it had been a momentary lapse in an otherwise conventional marriage.

I apologise to readers who for the past week have seen this blog dead and lifeless. We have been changing our host, and somewhere down the line the two most recent posts were deleted - plus the comments which they provoked. There was one from “John” replying to my reply to his first comment and one from an American reader whose comment I would like to see again and perhaps answer. I have managed to reconstruct my two posts, so if either “John” or the American reads this (sorry, I can’t remember your name), and has a copy of their comment or can remember what they said, please send it again.

I promise we shall soon be changing the banner at the top of the page - but since that operation will probably send the whole blog crashing, I hesitate.

This piece was first posted on May 24th

Answering Sean’s point about Bayrou and his “appalling tactical and strategic choices between the two rounds,” I agree that from the outside it did look extraordinary: there was a man who against all expectation had gathered huge public support in a short time, whose ideas for forming a national coalition government seemed to touch a national nerve and be exactly what a high percentage of the French electorate wanted. Then he blew it. What is interesting about the above sentence is that if you substitute “woman” for “man” and “she” for “he”, it is also true. For in fact in the campaign two candidates came from nowhere and both did very well: together they represented more French people than Sarkozy, who had dominated the political landscape for five years, ever since he was first appointed to the ministry of the interior. Both of these outsider candidates touched a nerve in the French, but somehow it was not enough. In fact both made mistakes – Ségolène Royal early on in the campaign, Bayrou, as Sean says, the day after the first round of elections. Royal managed to recover sufficiently from her mistakes to get a very reasonable score, Bayrou having attained a reasonable score, took a gamble and lost. A one-off mistake or does he not have what it takes? At the moment it looks as if neither he nor Royal will survive. I hope once the parliamentary elections are over I shall be able to talk quietly to Charles de Courson, one of Bayrou’s advisors, to find out what he thinks happened.

But both Royal and Bayrou were up against a formidable and well-funded campaigning machine, dazzling the senses with its parade of rock-stars and other personalities, the whole directed by a man who is a remarkable strategist. Having spent the whole of his first campaign playing to the right and extreme right, Sarkozy moved not to the left, as everyone predicted, but to the more easily winnable centre. Within hours of getting into the second round he was pulling Bayrou’s men to him. He did this in large part by blatantly copying Bayrou’s ideas for a coalition - something he had pooh-poohed all through the first campaign. 22 of Bayrou’s 29 MP’s changed sides, most before the second round. His ideas stolen, Bayrou’s ship was literally abandoned.

One of those who left him was Hervé Morin, and for his lack of loyalty to Bayrou, Sarkozy rewarded him with the ministry of defence. Then, to show he is not really a Sarko-puppet, Morin decided to form his own party, with several of Bayrou’s other former friends. But French law says a party must field at least 50 candidates, or rather if a party fields 50 candidates it receives 1.63 euro for each vote received. 50 necessary candidates from the 22 he had leaves?……Morin was having difficulty making up the numbers, so he flicked through his well-thumbed copy of “Politics for Dummies”, written and presented to him by his friend with the unpronounceable name celebrating his fifth decade as president of a former French colony in West Africa. Morin found the answer in the section marked “Elections – How to Win Them”: he enlisted his family. So the candidates now standing for Morin’s “Parti social liberal européen” include: Catherine Broussot-Morin (his wife), Julien Morin, Philippe Morin and, for parity, Lisa Morin. Still not enough, so he roped in his parliamentary assistant, his press agent, his secretaries, his internet technician and…….his chauffeur. All are now candidates for parliament.

My first reaction was that if this is the sort of person Sarkozy believes is the best possible Minister of Defence, his judgement – well, what I thought does not matter. But then I learnt that in fact this is common practice among smaller parties in France, a way of getting state money to keep you solvent for five years. My taxes pay for M. Morin’s family. In other words it is not that Morin was copying some stereotype African dictator, more that African dictators copy common French practice.

This piece was first posted on May 23rd

We all like praise, but criticism is far more stimulating. The first (if we like cats or dogs), makes us want to roll on our backs and have our tummies tickled, the second makes us think about what we are doing or not doing. So the several recent flattering comments (thank you) on this blog about my even-handed approach stimulate me less than John’s single remark that I am biased. His criticism also raises many questions about the difference between blogging and journalism.

A word of explanation. Although this blog goes out under the Prospect banner and although Prospect generously pays for the web site, what I write is not under any sort of editorial control, neither does it represent in any way the opinions of any of the Prospect editorial staff. If I am more biased on this blog than I am in the France Profonde column, that is because, to my mind, there is a great difference between the two. A blog is a place of free expression, of personal opinion. It should be the on-line equivalent of a dinner-party conversation where, pleasantly pissed you can let yourself go while still listening to what other people are saying. Knowing that nobody likes ranters, bloggers who want to be read are moderate, even balanced. Going back to my opening comparison, writing a column for a magazine is like being a dog on the lead (good in itself, you’re out and about, having a walk, sniffing all those smells, but there are known limits): writing a blog is when the leash is taken off. You run, you jump, you roll in the grass. You experience what Dave Eggers describes so well in his beautiful short story “After I was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned”.

But it would be wrong to think that a newspaper (even the mighty Prospect) is unbiased. Just as no newspaper, documentary film or radio programme delivers some absolute, immutable Truth, so there is nothing written, filmed or recorded which does not contain bias of some sort (let’s remember that one of the earliest uses of the word was in the Elizabethan sport of bowls: the bias is the weight put into an otherwise perfect sphere (“made to run even upon even ground”), with the express purpose of making it lean one way or the other. In other words without the bias, the game is pretty dull. The skill is making the bias work to your advantage, which is why the bowling green has to be a flat and smooth as is humanly possible).

There’s a fascinating, in-depth view on bias and truth in newspaper journalism by the Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger: notes for a talk he gave on Monday (May 21st) to the Niemann Foundation in Harvard about press ombudsmen (isn’t that the beauty of what we are now living? I didn’t have to be there, but sitting here in France profonde I can just pick it up, the whole thing). On newspaper balance he quotes Washington Post columnist David Broder:

“I would like to see us say over and over until the point has been
made… that the newspaper that drops on your doorstep is a partial,
hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate
rendering of some of the things we heard about in the past 24 hours…
distorted despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias by the very
process of compression that makes it possible for you… to read it in
about an hour. If we labelled the paper accurately then we would
immediately add: But it’s the best we could do under the
circumstances, and we will be back tomorrow with a corrected
updated version...”

That final sentence could be a credo for the political blog.

As far as my bias towards Nicolas Sarkozy is concerned, I simply reflect in an imperfect way what I have learnt about the man. In 2004 I wrote (for Prospect) a long, basically admiring portrait of him (indeed it was the Prospect editor who asked me to put in more criticism: how about his dirigisme? And the contradiction between what he says and what he does?). Since then I have watched him with more than professional interest. He is one of the very few politicians capable of getting France moving (although it has to be recognised that not all French people want their country to get moving, if that means losing the generous benefits). But as an example of the way Sarkozy works, take the immigrant holding centre at Sangatte on the French coast near Calais. For years it helped and sheltered the hundreds of refugees from countries such as Afghanistan who wanted to get across to Britain. Demand was far higher than the building could cope with, overcrowding made conditions awful. Lionel Jospin’s Socialist government talked for years about closing it down but did nothing. As far as I remember, no Socialist minister even visited the place. Sarkozy’s great difference was that he went there, was appalled by what he saw and went straight to London to talk to (from memory) Gordon Brown and others about finding a solution. I spoke to someone who had been present at that Downing Street meeting, and they told me everyone was impressed (and seduced, in the best sense) by Sarkozy. Subsequently the Red Cross centre was closed down: problem solved. Sarkozy had fulfilled his promise, he had taken action, he was widely seen as the great positive driving force for France. Except that, four years on, the problem of the refugees is still there. There may be slightly fewer, but there are still hundreds waiting to find a way across the Channel. Instead of being housed, even if inadequately, and fed at the Red Cross shelter, they now sleep out where they can, begging and doing everything else that desperate people do to survive. The burghers of Calais are no different to anyone else – they don’t like it in their backyard. They want Sangatte back. Many reasonable (but undoubtedly biased) people have said that closing the centre was a mistake.

Sarkozy is many good things, but he is not a thinker: he’s a doer. Yesterday (May 21st), touring hospitals in the same area as Sangatte (Dunkirk), he promised money for French hospitals. Great: they need it in bucketfuls. As John says, he also promised money for universities. Let’s be honest, over the past four months he’s promised a great many things to a great many people, indeed he would not have been elected president unless he had made hundreds of promises – people who say “I’m not going to make any promises”, like François Bayrou, are simply not elected. Presidential elections are seen in France as Christmas. Now Sarkozy says he’s going to honour all his promises. As I wrote on May 17th, I sincerely hope he does – without ruining France further. For promises, like Christmas, cost money and the French national debt is already huge. The equivalent of the entire education budget goes just to paying interest on the debt (mostly to foreigners, which angers and worries many French people). So how can Sarkozy honour all those promises he made on the campaign trail? But if he does not (including diminishing the national debt), people’s anger will be great. Like an over-generous father he has promised too much, and if he does not deliver the bitterness of disappointment will be great. That is what I am afraid of.

Today is his investiture – his day of glory, the day he has been dreaming of, so he tells us, since he was an adolescent – and already everywhere Sarkozy is sowing division and discord. I maintain he cannot help it – it is his nature. He says he wants to unite his compatriots – bring together in one government elements of the left and centre as well as his own further right – but he cannot help dividing them: his friends on the right, who believe that having stood by him during the difficult days they are being passed over, and the left, furious with some of their own most illustrious because they are contemplating serving under Sarkozy. Already there is anger even hatred on left and right - though in fact he is uniting his former friends and foes against him, both camps now sharpening their knives – and it’s only the start.

Like buying a ticket on the roller-coaster, popping the Sarkozy ticket into the ballot-box promised a rough ride. What is happening, of course, is that his own, unashamed thirst for power, endorsed by the majority vote, has made personal ambition acceptable in others. Whereas under Chirac and Mitterrand we all had to pretend to care deeply about others, now everyone can admit that clawing their way to the top is what they have always wanted. That unmistakable light behind the eyes is clear on the faces of those being wooed (or who think they’re being wooed) for a ministerial post. Bernard Kouchner, for example, a good man who founded the NGO “Médecins sans frontières », was a Socialist secretary of state then Health Minister under Mitterrand before becoming a very successful UN Special Representative in Kosovo. He has said he will no longer accept a secondary role: he feels he is too important. Despised as a turn-coat by his Socialist comrades, his eager little face tells us he can’t wait to thumb his nose at them from behind the smoked glass of his motorcaded car. Today’s press says he has accepted the ministry of Foreign Affairs – one of the most prestigious.

“I am not going to sit down with a man like Kouchner,” a remark ascribed in Le Monde to one of Sarko’s lieutenants. These party faithfuls have spent the past four months bad-mouthing the Socialists – and now here is their man, rather than choosing from amongst his own, asking the enemy to be in his government!

Patrick Devedjian, an MP and Sarkozy man from way back, takes this badly. He says he and his friends helped Sarkozy when it mattered most. Ah, but “without you, nothing would have been possible,” cried Sarkozy on Monday, resigning as head of the UMP party. A tear in his eye? Not likely!  “Loyalty is for the feelings [overtones of sentimental], efficiency for government.” To which Devedjian replies “I don’t think loyalty is necessarily the opposite of competence.” Adding, apparently, that Sarko’s boys helped the new president “over Clearstream, don’t forget.” Clearstream – short-hand for one of those murky financial shenanigans which are reputed to make some people extremely wealthy, though it’s never quite clear who or how. The very mention of the name sets up all sorts of unsettling echoes of corruption, funds being siphoned to distant off-shore banks. A Sarkozy-like pseudonym appeared on one of the (fictitious) listings. The fact that one of Sarkozy’s closest threatens to spill the beans is serious, for it implies there are beans to spill.

Meanwhile as though by coincidence, the Paris court decided yesterday to continue with the prosecution of the three key people in the Clearstream saga, and totally unconnected though the same day, former prime minister Alain Juppé, already convicted once for mishandling public funds, was hauled in last night for questioning about another doubtful practice. There is obviously more to come.

For those interested in this blog, I shall continue writing and posting for the foreseeable future. Probably not every day, perhaps two or three times a week. I shall comment on French politics, which in the autumn promises to be lively, as Sarkozy’s promised policies jerk into action. But I shall also expand into other aspects of life in France, inviting comments as always from readers so that the blog becomes more of a dialogue, less of a sermon – as well as writing about books and films, old as well as new if they are relevant to whatever is happening, and the French blogosphere, which I still consider to be one of the most interesting alternative ways of looking at France. Under Sarkozy’s presidency, much of the media is likely to become even more insipid, since his chums own chunks of the press and television, so the best place for a different take on events remains the intelligent blogosphere.

The presidential election closed less than a week ago and already a different campaign for a different election is well under way, parliamentary this time: the faces change but the polices, promises and demagoguery remain the same. One should feel some sympathy for these poor French citizens who, every day since Christmas, have been bombarded with a continuous wash of political comment on the radio, TV and press – not to mention the dozens of books published. By the time this election is finished (June 17th), it will have been six months – half a year dominated by domestic election campaigns, half a whole year thinking almost exclusively about themselves, their problems, how to solve them. Everyone says that the campaign has shown the French are passionate about politics: a cynic might say they just love talking about their problems, that the campaign has been a six-month collective session with an unseen shrink.

As the new campaign begins, the result looks like a foregone conclusion. At this stage it seems inevitable that for the next five years the Assemblée Nationale will be dominated by Sarkozy’s party, with a divided Socialist opposition struggling to show any teeth and the smaller parties not even in sight, since proportional representation cannot come in before 2012 – if Sarkozy shows any desire for it, which so far he has not.
 
The French Socialist Party is going through the same agonies the British Conservative party experienced between 1997 and 2005: like the British Conservatives, it’s far more than simply picking themselves up, shaking themselves down and starting all over again, they will have to remake themselves totally, finding policies that suit a new electorate and a leader who can inspire them with confidence. But whereas the British Conservatives always wanted to get elected, I wonder whether the French Socialist Party actually prefers following polices that it knows will never attract a majority of today’s French people. Or whether a party driven by an ideology such as socialism in its purer, 19th century form, cannot possibly unite, since ideologies arouse such great passions and people disagree hotly over minutiae. If politics is the art of the do-able (and not just, as Bismark thought, the possible), perhaps 21st century Socialism is not really politics – more a religion, a belief, a state of mind. Anyway, apparently Royal will not do, even though in the second round she polled more votes than Mitterrand ever did.

As for François Bayrou, it looks as though his dream of creating a meaningful party which unites the best of the left with the best of the right is doomed. The majority of his MP’s have abandoned principles – if they ever had them – in favour of looking after No. 1. Sarkozy promised that if they swear allegiance to him, he would not put one of his own candidates to run against them in their constituency. They care more about their careers than anything vaguely resembling integrity, their leader or indeed the 7 million who voted for him in the first round. The left, which a fortnight ago was wooing Bayrou, talking in public about moving closer to the centre, has abandoned all that in the wake of their defeat. So those who voted Bayrou less than three short weeks ago in the first round of the presidential election, will have almost no representation in parliament. His new party, the Mouvement pour Democracy, or MoDem as it’s called, will not manage more than half a dozen seats and leave Bayrou powerless, despite his considerable following.

730 cars burned and 592 arrests before President Sarkozy has been in office 24 hours. Under France’s new and more efficient system for dealing with delinquents, some have already been given prison sentences.

Last Friday, on the eve of the election, Nicolas Sarkozy created a pilgrimage. It’s something French presidents do: they choose a place that has some national significance (but not identifiable with the Catholic Church or the French monarchy) and make an annual pilgrimage there, to soak up some deep mystic force that is recognisably French and which will in turn give them greater inner strength. François Mitterrand chose an outcrop of rock near Macon which is supposed to have been inhabited for the past 7,000 years. Sarkozy chose Les Glières, a plateau up in the Haute-Savoie Alps where in 1944 the French resistance fought a desperate and unsuccessful battle against their own police militia and the German air force and army.

“Alone, he came out of the woods,” wrote Le Monde, showing that they were there first – together with several hundred colleagues. Lucky they were, so they could record Sarkozy’s thoughts: “I want to say to the young generation that if, in two days’ time, they are going to vote it is because of men like [these] who sacrificed their life.” He added he would come here every year to pay his respects to this spirit of resistance in France. It is noble. It is important to remember history.

Why? The obvious answer is that it tells us about the present. If so, Les Glières might be an odd choice: some two thousand French militiamen and police besieged 450 of their own compatriots, whom they termed terrorists. Many of the resisters were communists, so there was an obvious political element to the battle. Today those terrorists are called heroes. The French police failed to overwhelm their compatriots, so the Germans came in with some 4,000 men to flush out and kill all the terrorist/heroes.

There is absolutely no similarity with the 592 young people who were arrested on Sunday night, whom the French police (who bear absolutely no resemblance to the French police of 1944) call delinquents but who call themselves resistants. The context is entirely different: the young men on the Glières plateau in 1944 risked and found death in a country deprived of democracy and all freedom of speech, movement or thought. Those arrested yesterday were protesting against a man elected by a good majority of the entirely free French – their violence is anti-democratic.

The only link is the idea of resistance, a strong and noble tradition in France. José Bové, who will be returning to prison any day now to purge his sentence for destroying genetically modified crops, resists. He has a large following. He quotes the 19th century American Henry Thoreau who went to jail rather than pay a tax he judged unfounded and wrote the now famous essay “Civil Disobedience” whose first title was “Resistance to Civil Government”. As Sarkozy says, it is right to remember history.

Now Sarkozy has gone to Malta for a few days. He wants to rest, of course, but more importantly, as with his pilgrimage to Les Glières three days earlier, he wants to be seen by the world’s press “escaping”, he wants everyone to know that he has gone somewhere quiet so that he can learn, from within, “how to habiter la function presidentielle, to get used to the weight of responsibility which weighs on my shoulders and take the necessary distance to become a man of the nation.” Like a larva metamorphosing into a butterfly, he will emerge, radiant with the full understanding of his role. There is nothing wrong with that, it is just so ridiculously theatrical. So absurdly self-important. He made an enormous fuss about “disappearing”, knowing that the world’s press would immediately start a search and that search would create its own story. It is an indication of how he sees the French presidency – not as a job but the starring role in some glamour movie called French Politics. All the time saying Look at moi! Look at moi!

Thus yesterday, when the rest of France, led by its president Jacques Chirac, was publicly commemorating the victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 – remembering history – the histrionic president-elect was pulling the spotlight on to himself. He failed to turn up for his first presidential duty, accompanying Chirac at the ceremony on the Champs Elysées. His absence was, as he knew it would be, much noticed. On Friday he had declared we must remember the heroes of 1944, the following Tuesday they are not important enough for him to move from his yacht off Malta. It is that continual inconsistency, which some call the meaninglessness of his words, we shall have to watch.

Meanwhile Ségolène Royal’s Socialist Party seems on the brink of melt-down. The older elephants want to re-take control, blaming Royal for the highest electoral score they have ever had – over 1 million more than Mitterrand achieved in 1981 when he became the first socialist president of France, and more than when he was re-elected in 1988. They blame her for doing what they could not, attracting the voters who will rule France tomorrow. The absurd in-fighting of the current Socialist Party is tragic. You cannot renew with the old. More importantly, France under Sarkozy needs an effective, united and strong democratic opposition – as the League for the Rights of Man and other organisations concerned with civil liberties said on Monday. Without it, resistance, civil disobedience, delinquency, heroism or terrorism, call it what you will, can only flourish.
 

Hope must be the key word now. Hope that Sarkozy’s character is not as volatile, authoritarian or arrogant as it has been at times during the past three months. Hope that the majority of the French voters were right and knew what they were doing. Hope that all French people go along with the majority decision and fall in behind the reforms France needs and Sarkozy promises. Hope that hope itself is not dashed – either by the new president’s actions or by the stubborn refusal of the street - at least within a few months. Give hope a chance.

Both candidates represented change – Sarkozy’s line was perhaps the more dynamic, more adventurous. Even in the furthest reaches of France profonde Sarkozy is known for his hyper-activity and straight-to-the-heart decision-taking, so his victory must be evidence that above all else the French want a dynamic leader. Someone to lead them out of the mess they believe they are in. The inherent problem with every leader, though, is that as well as decisive they are divisive – they inevitably become more unpopular as time goes on – Churchill, Thatcher, De Gaulle - because making difficult decisions polarises opinion, until such time as they are kicked out. Which dynamic leaders have retired gracefully?

Which is why hope now is so important. We simply have to hope that Sarkozy manages to achieve something useful before opinion turns. That he is finally l’homme providentiel for whom so many of his compatriots yearn.

Two years ago this month 55% of French voters threw out the EU Constitution, effectively pushing France to the side-lines of Europe. Last night in his victory speech Sarkozy’s very first declaration was: “This evening France is back in Europe.” As his first priority after a campaign that has studiously avoided long debate on this very sensitive subject, that may have surprised many. But before the month is out he wants to put a proposal for a mini-treaty on the table at Brussels – significantly only allowing decisions to be taken more quickly. This mini-treaty will be ratified by national parliaments, not by the public at large (too bad for Ireland, whose Constitution will not allow that; too bad for the will of the people).

Even before May is out Sarkozy will set in motion discussions about all the domestic things he has promised: employment, employers’ charges, the 35-hour week. But first, his government: small, he has said no more than 15 ministers, giving him more power, indeed he has said that he will participate more than his predecessors in the day-to-day running of the country, not just its foreign policy which, until now, has been the president’s main role. Government posts will be open, apparently, to the centre and even to socialists, with parity between men and women; politics, we are told, will be entirely transformed. It’s hard to see quite what that means, but we have to hope.

As messages of goodwill arrive, in particular from George W. Bush who phoned Sarkozy personally within half an hour of his victory, one is missing: there has been silence from the present president of France.

Both augur badly, but we must hope. Is there any chance, though, unless there is some semblance of national unity? The night saw several schools torched throughout France, as well as cars. As if in answer, Sarkozy promised, at the end of his list of quick reforms, “heavier penalties for recidivists”, with an alarmingly narrow definition of recidivist. The already disgracefully overcrowded prisons will soon be receiving cartloads of new arrivals.

Meanwhile at the headquarters of the Socialist Party there’s a strong risk of business as usual, if yet again it tears itself in pieces in the aftermath of defeat. All those elephants who reviled Mme Royal in January and were forced to sing lukewarm praises during the campaign, will return to the attack, trampling her underfoot this time, thus strengthening yet further Sarkozy’s grip on France. We must hope, against reason and experience. One has to hope: after all, the first morning after a major election, the dawn of a new age, is the best of times – and the worst of times.

“There’s nowt as queer as folk” – a saying intended to refer to Yorkshiremen (and women) but could be widened to include my neighbours in France. Two days away from the presidential election, as the whole country gears up to decide which of the only two variants of France on offer they are going to vote for, an opinion poll asked them who is the person they would most like to see playing an important role in French political life. One could assume the person they will vote for. Not at all. The answer, resoundingly, is François Bayrou – the man they ejected from the presidential race ten days ago. His popularity has grown by ten points since the last similar poll. Which is the political party you consider the best? The UDF – Bayrou’s party. The man is 9 points ahead of Sarkozy and 13 points ahead of Royal; his party is 7 points ahead of Sarkozy’s and 10 ahead of the Socialists. Is this guilt for having rejected him at the ballot box? Regret? Wanting to make him feel better? Because it’s easier to vote for someone who’s not actually standing? Or a realisation that he is actually the key?

Yesterday Bayrou cannily refused to say who he will vote for, and refused to “tell” his electorate who they should vote for. By keeping his independence he is informing whoever wins the presidential race on Sunday that they are likely to lose power in next month’s parliamentary elections (yes, the story is far from over: “French elections 2” is already being scripted – shooting begins Monday morning). Mathematically, only the party allied to Bayrou can win a parliamentary majority, and that party will create the government (and prime minister). Sarkozy may well find that if he wins on Sunday his victory is pyrrhic, lasting little more than a month.

Meanwhile, as if it were Zidane’s head-butt, the press, media and blogosphere goes over and over Royal’s outburst of anger in Wednesday’s televised debate. In two hours forty minutes of confrontation, it was the only moment of passion. Whether it was real or fake no one can decide, but she expressed something like anger at the present government’s attitude towards handicapped people. For the said press, media and blogosphere, that was the high point of the debate. On the same day, far away in Bangkok, the international panel of experts discussing global warming made a joint declaration that the next couple of years are crucial to the future of the planet. Just to make the comparison clearer, let’s say during the next five years – the length of time the next president of France will be in office – our life-styles have got to begin to change radically if we want all our children – not only the handicapped – to survive. On the one hand the possibly irreversible destruction of life on our planet and on the other a spat about which political party gives most money (not the same as concern or care) to a very small, though very serious section of our society. Both are important, but why is only one present at this final moment of the presidential election campaign? In January everyone was talking environment. Way back then the same old press, media and blogosphere said it was the issue which would dominate and be déterminante in the whole campaign. How wrong they were.

The reason it has disappeared from the radar screens is that neither Sarkozy nor Royal dares tackle it – global warming is a vote-killer. Aeroplane commuting is a major reason the far-flung regions of France, all the Mediterranean coast-line for example, are doing well: people can live there and fly in to Paris, or London for the week. Everyone needs a car – if only to swell the traffic jams during the spring and summer holidays. If we didn’t use cars, where would the government get its astronomic and vital income from fuel-tax from? If the government didn’t have that income, centres caring for handicapped children would certainly receive even less, as would the unemployed, the sick and the elderly. So all the pious promises would be shown up for what they are. Much easier to argue about whether people can work half an hour more or less each week – as fascinating as how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

Is that why neither Royal nor Sarkozy is the most important political person at the moment?

It was very interesting to watch the television debate between Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal with two Americans. Both bright, well-read people, both psychologists from Virginia on a visit to Europe – their first in ten years. Neither knew anything about Royal, apart from that she is a woman, one had read a profile of Sarkozy in the Boston Globe from which he’d understood Sarkozy is on the right and proud of being photographed with Bush (which classified him as unspeakable as far as my visitors were concerned). Earlier, on the drive up from the airport, I had tried to help by comparing him with Nixon – tricky, slippery as soap in the bath and possibly dishonest. When they saw him in the debate they immediately understood. With the quite wonderful film “The Life of Others” being in everyone’s mind, the idea of a president bugging people (something Mitterrand did too) is easy to imagine.
 
The first thing they noticed was how long each candidate talked – four or five minutes each. “30 seconds is the maximum a listener can take in information, that’s what the studies show.” He means American studies done on Americans, it would be interesting to know if the same work has been done on different nationalities. But generally he’s probably right. Certainly the concept of sound bytes has not hit France, where every event from the opening of an art exhibition to a major birthday is marked by interminable speeches by five or six people. Sound bytes may force the mind into superficiality, but that may be better than the alternative, palpable in this debate as each candidate changed subject in mid-sentence, rolling from statistics to anecdotes, drawing conclusions from single incidents (one police woman raped on the way home means the country is suffering from a shortage of civil servants). Even if the language was not a problem, the logic was sometimes hard to follow. This morning several French blogs admit they lost the thread at times, or simply gave up. As my French wife said, we’ve heard it all before anyway.

The most interesting thing was to see it from the Martian’s (or visiting Americans’) point of view. The boxing-ring set, the absurdity of the broadcaster’s perfectly serious opening announcement that we were about to take part in a key moment in the history of France, that the entire world was watching (meaning even people in France profonde). When my American guests saw the presenters – both stars in their own country – they could not suppress a guffaw of laughter. It’s true that trying to look suitably solemn both looked deeply bored to be hosting this ‘key moment of French history’, but then I find other countries’ TV presenters generally look odd, they all seem to think that their position needs a non-human gravitas so they never look like you or me – well, you, anyway.

The result of confrontation? Royal was better than I expected, she held her own against Sarkozy, who managed to keep his temper. She was especially good on social issues (always her strong point), a bit woolly on economics. But Sarkozy’s other speciality (when he’s not being aggressive) is to play the victim (“Why do people hate me so much?”), his extraordinary eye-brows enabling him to show innocent surprise that people should take against him. Maybe that’s why ten days ago more women voted for him than voted for Royal.