One noticeable change since the presidential and parliamentary elections in France has been the decline in interest in the blogosphere. In a sense this is inevitable – there’s far less to write about now. During the four month campaign there was an almost overwhelming choice of subjects for writers as well as readers – when you’d had your fill of Sarkozy you could flip to Ségolène Royal, across to François Bayrou then out to the quirky extremities with Le Pen and Bové. Those were the days! Now there is just one subject – Sarkozy. By dominating politics, by emasculating the opposition, he gives us little else to write about.

Just mentioning the names of his erstwhile rivals makes us realise how far we have travelled in two months. Already Royal & Co. feel like 1960’s has-beens. The fact that Sarkozy has chosen one of the people who failed even to be elected as a presidential candidate, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, as a candidate to head the IMF says much about how far we have forgotten (and are no longer interested in) Messrs Royal, Bayrou, Le Pen and Bové (will Sarkozy offer him a personal amnesty on July 14^th? Or leave him to rot in the overcrowded dungeons of state? If he offers a pardon, would Bové accept it?).

During those heady days of the election campaign, DSK was excluded and reviled for being old fashion, fuddy-duddy, more elephantine than the worst Socialist elephants. Passé was too modern to describe his politics. Today he is honoured as Europe’s best-choice to run the IMF – for the simple reason that Sarkozy has singled him out (if no one apart from Junker of Luxembourg had suggested DSK, would other European leaders have even thought of him?). And those others, Royal, Bové et al., who incarnated a potentially new, exciting, re-vamped France are dismissed as being ridiculous and completely sans intérêt.

And of course (coming back to my starting point about declining interest in the blogosphere) during the campaign when blog-scribes like myself wanted to change scene or colour things differently we could discuss other blogs. But now, like those failed candidates, the much-hoped-for 5^th Power has also dissolved into the ether. The success of the EU summit at the end of June was the final nail in the coffin of the cinquième pouvoir, since the 27 countries agreed on how to get round and consign to the dustbin of history the French blogosphere’s only real achievement, the orchestration of a campaign against the Constitution in 2005. By agreeing that the reformed treaty will be voted by controllable national governments and not by the people, political orthodoxy has won a considerable victory, re-establishing itself as the first and only real power, and bloggers like myself have little else to look at other than Sarkozy – who remains fascinating but, rather like J.K. Rowling, he concentrates everything round the single narrative when sometimes we cry out for sub-plot.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 8:22 am and is filed under Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.