Comments on: Bayrou gets it right again

by: Tim

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 10:44:57 +0000

You’re right to correct me: Bové has long maintained that the current CAP policy is harmful to African farmers. I should perhaps have written “the first professional French politician”, meaning a politician in a position of influence and responsability.
On your second point, I don’t think I feel that Bové is “politically unreliable”, but he is certainly politically untried, which I recognise is part of his appeal, but is also a danger. Being president of the French republic is an enormous responsibility which needs great skills and experience in many diverse areas: as yet Bové does not have that experience, although he may have the skills. We do not know.
Several weeks ago on this blog I noted that there are almost as many candidates as there are weeks in the year, each of them sincere and most with interesting ideas, and that rather than choosing one it might be more effective to put each one at the Elysée for a week a year in rotation. Like vegetables in a garden.

by: Stephane

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 21:32:01 +0000

How surprising to read:

“Bayrou is the first French politician I have heard admit that the [French-inspired] CAP policy, based on production, is wrong for all sorts of reasons. […] World agriculture […], is endangered by the (French) agricultural policy. European subsidies on production have ruined African agriculture: “We have assassinated the African farmer,”…

Please allow me to add that this is precisely what the “antilibéraux” and “altermondialistes” have been saying for years…
Just like Bayrou’s recent discovery of the fact that the media are under the great influence of UMP’s hard line of supporters, or his all of sudden revelation that the “république” ’s values are in danger (and they are, actually)…

It’s pretty odd to read this from someone who claims to write from “France profonde”. Are you deliberately ignoring these facts and misleading readers on the big part of french who are yearning for a third way? I’m deliberately using the word misleading because you seem to ignore the awkward fact that Bayrou’s attitude is very opportunistic (and might in the end generate stronger discontent if he does what he did when he was minister of education).

Misleading information (and polls BTW produced by Sarkozy’s “friends”) is all we’ve had in this country for decades now… And this is precisely one of the reasons why “France has a large, perhaps huge, as yet uncounted number of people who are dissatisfied and disillusioned with not just the main candidates, but the whole existing political set-up, elitist, Paris-based.”!

I understand you consider Bove or his supporters (that are not the anti europe far left as usually described) as politically unreliable… Why? Because they claim to be anti-something? Because they cut GMO’s crops (simply because they are asking to think twice first)? or because they are questioning the ridiculous perpetual “croissance” that is precisely harming not just African agriculture but the whole planet we all live on?

This is precisely the condescending and scornful attitude of the UMP and the PS, the “rappers, left-bank intellectuals or any other Paris-Match favoured pipole”…

by: unionsbuerger.de

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 13:50:23 +0000

In Germany, French People will vote for Bayrou