Today France will have its first round of elections to evict Sarkozy from the Elysee, umm, I mean, elect its president. Sarkozy, initially elected only by a moderate margin, has managed the task of making himself the most unpopular president in French history. For a country that has challenged, with some success, the United States for most inept leadership, this is no mean feat.
Sarkozy, my French friends advise me, will not be missed. His style, more suited to Dallas or Miami than Toulouse or Bordeaux, has grated on the collective French nerve.
It seems that the election will not be fought so much on ideas and politics as it will be on the man. That a man who was described by Chirac as a “pup” and “less known that Mitterrand’s Labrador” will almost certainly be France’s next president can be explained no other way.
What is disheartening is that Hollande’s platform, if carried out, would be disastrous for France. It seems that many, if not most, French voters recognise this. Yet it is a risk they are willing to take, so deep is the common loathing for the incumbent. This contempt is well-earned. France has always been a country that could accept a great deal of sleaze, so long as it was kept quiet and an appearance of class was always kept up. Sarkozy has bore himself with as much class as a heroine-addicted stripper.
My fear is, I suppose, that France will now hasten its decline. Once a power with ambitions checked only by the superiority of a sceptered isle, a land of greater virtue to its north, will more quickly resemble a larger version of Venice. A land with a profound past, though little future. A land filled with the ghosts of glories gone by, capturing the world’s imagination, but ever so slowly sinking into time’s murky waters.
I’ve not always shown much fondness for France. For that matter, I admit that I’ve often shown great ill-will. Nationalism hasn’t completely lost its hold on the mind, after all, and my country has often been as the receiving end of France’s aggressions diplomatically and militarily. Yet France’s achievements cannot be denied. The beauty of its language, the lingua franca of a more civilised age now long gone. While its art, cuisine, literature, and architecture are not necessarily my favourite their quality cannot be denied. If not necessarily the best at everything, France has done well more consistently than most in its achievements.
Boadicea's Chariot 
As you can imagine, I’ve not really followed politics in France very closely of late!
I suspect that the voting patterns of most Western electorates are increasingly determined by the ‘unpopularity’ of the leader rather than a considered opinion of the policies of the opposition party. We have created a ‘personality’ society and we expect our prospective leaders to perform like mega-stars on the political scene before being elected and then crucify them when they continue to behave like super-stars and do not live up to the high expectations and promises that they have had to give in order to gain high office.
Whereas, once, people often voted for the ‘devil’ they knew – they are, as you say, more willing to vote for the unknown simply because they loathe the present incumbent so heartily, Unfortunately it does not seem to have occurred to the present crop of Western politicians that they have not been voted into high office because people like what they are saying – they are only there because of the electorate’s negative view of their predecessors.
I’m not entirely in agreement with your praise of the French language – I have one or two problems with a language that seeks to set limits on ‘foreign’ intrusions. Nor do I think that France’s art, literature or architecture are in any way superior to the achievements of other countries – although I’m prepared to admit some ignorance in those fields.
I do, however, take exception to the notion that French cuisine has much to recommend it… a country that makes a delicacy out of frogs legs and snails seems to me to somewhat lacking in the normal decencies of civilised behaviour… 🙂
Dare I say that there are one or two other countries around the world who should realise that they no longer have the power and prestige that they once had? They would do well to to take the role that grand-parents have to take (if they are sensible!) of wise counsellors rather than autocratic, paternalistic dictators.
I wonder how much being a Hungarian immigrant has to do with grating on the collective frog nerve?
Likewise the Millipedes in the UK, they are equally grating as was Michael Howard.
Maybe not being a dyed in the wool native leads to this flamboyant behaviour? The ‘not being totally comfortable in the skin’ syndrome causes all sorts of excesses.
I don’t think his choice of wife helped very much either, a very peculiar creature!
Personally I admire the frogs for their language and the refusal to allow it to be traduced by franglais. Long may the old buffers of the Academie Francais keep at it. Look at the crap that has been introduced into English and the cardinal crimes of text speak and ‘ebonics’!
World wide there is a dearth of real leaders, too many sound bites on TV, idiot populism and universal franchise has seen off the genuine and the intelligent. Real people will no longer stand. The whole damned thing is reduced to a bunch of oligarchical Simon Cowells! Sarky does not seem to be any worse than the rest of a bad bunch.
Anyway, considering the shower in the UK and USA currently, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones!
The thought of Romney and Balls make me want to throw up. They could have competitions to see who could leave the biggest slime trail……..
There’s nothing wrong with frogs – in their place – which is second. Only a loser would believe he could protect a language, but the same loser pretended to protect his country too not so long ago; and then claimed a place on the podium.
Janus, seemingly twice they lost the war and bloody well won the peace. Unlike us who definitely won the war and have been losing consistently ever since.
Actually I can think of 4 wars they lost militarily and subsequently won very generously.
CO, I may be wrong but I believe La Belle France is getting its comeuppance. Nobody buys the pleas for special agricultural assistance or their swaggering ‘leadership’ of Europe. Only money talks and France is running out.
I’ve asked it before and I’ll ask it again. How did France end up with a quarter of Berlin at the end of WW2 and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council? Why not Norway, Belgium, Denmark or Greece? And how come Les Grenouilles were allowed to complete their nuclear tests in the Pacific in the face of worldwide opposition, then shrug their Gallic shoulders and announce that they had suspended testing in the face of international opinion? Fekkers all.
OZ
janus, wishful thinking! The bleeding frogs have the wonderful ability to be able to fall straight into the mire and come up smelling of roses and whiter than white! Maybe well get lucky this time but don’t hold your breath!
QZ, and more to the point how did they get away with half the Ruhr, Alsace etc etc and shedloads of reparations after WWI? Treaty of Versailles was very much in their favour.
Plus the Napoleonic wars, we had sweet FA out of that except a few crummy colonies that were more trouble than they were worth! What did the Russians get for having Moscow burnt to the ground, nothing that I can think of.
Nobody ever seems to get anything out of the frogs, they shrug their shoulders disdainfully give the two fingered salute and swan off and completely ignore all and sundry. (Being part frog myself, just a tiny part, I know how it is done!) Trouble with the British is that we get these ridiculous attacks of conscience and a bizarre sense of being fair! Very destructive sometimes!
Considering how the British love to hate the frogs and they are our favourite enemy, have been for 1000 years. Why don’t we just declare war on them for fun, just them and us.
We could draft in all the wogs and yobs, so could they and we could kiil n birds with one stone so to speak and have the jolliest time and thoroughly cheer ourselves up! So much more fun than the Olympics, we could do it for the Queen’s jubillee, I’m sure the Rouyal family would like to join in too.
With my lungs I bags a sniper position at one of the barricades and lots of ammunition.
Oh and we’ll ban aeroplanes, tanks, just give them broadswords, knives, long bows, small arms and maces for the Scots. It shouldn’t last more than a couple of weeks should it?
Boadicea: Taste is always highly subjective and those who like everything simply have no taste.
Like Christina I admire the French their desire to keep their language French, not that odious beast Franglais. Germany has failed to even try and is now faced with one of the world’s most hideous miscreations, Denglish. It is one thing to adopt a word if there is no indigenous equivalent. It’s another, much nastier thing, to drop senselessly borrowed words into the middle of sentences. It sounds off, but it’s trendy and it’s ruining the German language.
France is not necessarily the best with its products of human cultural development but it does quite well in all fields. I prefer Japanese literature, Spanish art, English cheeses, and Portuguese music, but the French have also done quite well in those fields as well and much of it cannot be denied.
You are right, of course, in your assessment of the culture of personality. It’s sad that leaders like Churchill would never get elected for all the wrong reasons but Blair and Obama get in, no worries. It doesn’t bode well for the future of global society. Perhaps the Chinese are on to something, selecting the most able leaders in smoky back rooms.
CO: the French are like amoebas, instead of taking a stand they simply ooze through the cracks.
They lose wars, but win the peace — others take the blows and pay the bill leaving them to reap the benefits without having to make sacrifices.
Janus: I partially agree with you. France is getting what it deserves, but it’s also sad to see a country with that many cultural achievements sink so helplessly. Actually, so long as they continue to do well culturally a political decline would not be harmful to the world.
OZ: I had long wondered that myself and last year was finally given a convincing answer.
The United States wanted two pliable, dependent countries to give it a built-in majority at
the United Nations Security Council. After the First World War the shared hatred of Germany
blinded the British and they gave the French more than was their due.
Chris, definitely a gold star for the amoeba crack!!!!!
If you please may I adopt that one for the lexicon?
Christina: you have my blessing.
Quite interesting statistics from the first round today. Narrow margin between Hollande and Sarkozy, narrower than many predicted; not quite the expected tally for Melenchon and a sizeable number of votes for the FN. Could make the second round more interesting.
Some of my French friends no longer wish to support Sarkozy, although they belong to the UMP, but absolutely refuse to vote for Hollande. As Christopher says, Hollande’s policies would be disastrous for France. Perhaps if the French elect Hollande as president, they will not give the Socialists a majority in oarliament in June. A period of “cohabitation” might be useful.
Sheona: my sense is that Hollande will win comfortably, but he will not take a majority in parliament.
The disgust with Sarkozy does not translate into the embrace of Hollande’s policies. As you said, cohabitation. Similar things happen frequently in the USA and, in fact, happened in 2010.
CO, good evening and just checking.
Given that you are calling this conflict Brits v Frogs, why are suggesting that said Frogs should be allowed maces to smack us Jocks? Is there just a possibility, perchance, that you are suggesting that we would be wielding our maces on the Frog side?
If so, away and boil your Welsh backside, with respect. I’m as British as you and just as proud of that as you could ever be.
Mackie: I think she was mentioning that the Scots should be given maces in order to facilitate their wacking sense into the pond dwellers.
Marine Le Pen has done very well, a force for the future maybe….18/20% is a credit to her. I know it won’t count this time round.
Tina….you speak a lot of sense.
JM, laughing too much to write or punctuate correct English!
Trust a lawyer!!
No, I was giving all sides swords and small arms and the Scots may have maces to brain the frogs. I didn’t countenance you fighting with them, they didn’t do much good for you last time round, did they?
To many of you ended up in Nova Scotia! (One of the cloacas of the Western World!)
No ruderies about the Welsh you may well need their longbows when we all run out of bullets!
Christopher, I admire your sense of linguistic purity but langauge just ain’t like that. Language is what people speak and write, not what academics would like them to. Frogs have weekends now, whether purists like or not.
I think it’s interesting that Sarkozy has called for three TV debates before the second round, while Hollande only wants one. It seems le petit Nicolas may feel he’s not quite finished yet.
Christopher. At the risk of taking this post off course – Janus is right. The language of any country is a living and ever evolving expression of the way the inhabitants of that country want to communicate.
English has adopted words and phrases from all over the world and, despite the best / worst attempts of those who try to insist that those words or phrases be spoken with the original accent, the English have just incorporated them into the language with no reference to the original accent – they have Anglicised the pronunciation and turned them into ‘Standard English’.
At the end of the day, it’s Joe Bloggs, Pierre Girard and Heinrich Schmidt at the street level who determine what the language will be and not Prof Bloggs, Girard or Schmidt in their ivory towers of Academia.
The personality cult will, I believe, eventually, undermine democracy in the West. I never thought I would ever think that the right to vote should be limited – but I’m beginning to think that no one should be able to vote without passing some sort of ‘test’ to show that they aren’t influenced by a ‘cheesy grin’ or some other personal attribute…
I’m not so sure that China has it entirely wrong. As long as they remain aware that their past history has shown that it is unwise to alienate too great a percentage of the population they might well succeed in delivering a stable Government.
It appears that the EU socialists are now getting their knickers in a twist about Marine LePen’s good showing in the first round. What have they got against democracy? Silly question – they’re socialist and EU.
Janus and Boadicea: the problem isn’t that languages change, they always have, currently are, and in the future always will. For a time French borrowed many words from Italian, a practise which caused no inconsiderable amount of concern at the time. Subsequently this became less popular and most Italian words that had been used were no longer used in daily life. Roughly 3/4ths of Korean vocabulary and 1/2 of Japanese vocabulary is Chinese in origin, though the tones have been dropped and much of the time the Korean and Japanese pronunciations are so different from the contemporary Chinese that they’re unrecognisable. (Cantonese remains much closer, though even in that case it is usually quite different)
The way it is done sounds so bad. It never sounds quite right and frankly, if Germans wanted to adopt something from English, then I would encourage them to adopt the grammar as the German is impossible.
Sheona: my sense is that Sarkozy sees that Hollande’s policies are not that popular and by having three debates he would be able to force Hollande to discuss and defend them in detail. Sarkozy is a right stubborn little bastard who has never given up easily. Even if he doesn’t manage it this time, he will try to make sure that the scale of his defeat will be minimised. And of course EU socialists will get their knickers in a twist over Madame LePen’s success. It isn’t even about her views on race or immigration. Rather, it’s her euroscepticism. The EU has been well known to turn a blind eye to the most ugly of rhetoric so long as the EU itself is not challenged.
Boadicea: you are not alone. Recently I have begun to question the absolute freedom of speech and press.
In the US, at least, the past few months have seen an uptake in hideous racial rhetoric coming from the left.
A narrative is set and different ethnic groups are getting pitted against each other, as are economic classes, for that matter, in order to try to help Obama’s re-election. It’s grown so bad that most television and commentaries are frankly unwatchable. This does not bode well for the future of the country.
As for China… The Chinese system was made to work for China, it would not necessarily transfer that easily to the West. Most Chinese I know are quick to dismiss democracy in China as a far-fetched ideal on the grounds that China would fragment into 70 countries almost overnight.
Of course Sarkozy ruffled a few EU feathers himself recently by threatening to take France out of the Schengen agreement. Eurocrats can never accept that anything the EU has done has gone sour. We were in France when a bunch of Italian troublemakers attempted to bring a train load of illegal Tunisian immigrants into France. Sarkozy simply closed the frontier and Ventimiglia got landed with a crowd of penniless, uninvited guests. Is it so difficult to accept that illiterate herdsmen and fishermen have nothing to contribute to a western industrialised country?
Interesting, for decades I have thought that universal suffrage was a gross mistake, not only should they be literate and numerate, the written test on civics and political understanding should be taken at 18+ with no lessons provided in any school, no courses offered and only a recommenced reading list.
That would sort the sheep from the goats!
Currently we are all hostage to parasites and soundbites. One a pain in the guts the other a pain in the arse!
Thank you for a very interesting thread, I shall now go and mull this in the veg garden, do you think I could put up my broccoli for election it is upright, multicoloured and looks fairly uncompromising?
Sheona: For a period of time Denmark also withdrew from the Schengen zone. Well, until Gucci Helle was elected. The problem with the Schengen agreement is that it worked perfectly well so long as it was an agreement between well-developed economies that ensured that not too many ruffians would cross the borders. It would simply not work when every Ali, Wang, and Okonkwo seemingly were given tourists visas
or mass movements of people with no skills or education went through Italy. Perhaps the main reason why the EU cannot admit that it has ever been wrong is because the union itself is untenable. If they admit that they were wrong about something as basic as an agreement to give freer access to travellers how could they deny that they were wrong to put Portugal, Ireland, and Finland on the same currency?
It seems that everyone knows that the herdsmen and fishermen have nothing to contribute, but there are still the Polly Toynbees and Gerhard Schröders of the world who think that the solution to low birth rates is bringing in people who like to have lots of children even if they are dole scroungers. (As an interesting side-note, more and more well-educated and skilled US citizens are looking to emigrate, perhaps they should receive more attention)
CO: your broccoli could also claim to be green to its core!
I agree with your proposal for voting requirements.
I confess that I am a Francophile. I love the women, like the men, understand the national arrogance, admire their pragmatism, think the language is sexy, believe the country to be one of the most beautiful, adore the food, drink too much of the wine and can forgive them almost anything for the fact they play rugby and the flair with which they do so.
Though they lost twice, I sometimes think Britain would be a better place had she followed the French example in WW2. I could be wrong, but let’s face it, we lost the peace.
As for the elections, France has always had shitty leaders. I cannot think of one that has ever attracted national, let alone international, respect. The Presidency is a job they give to someone they despise.
Christopher, there’s a very interesting article in today’s FAZ about the problems of the ageing Gastarbeiter, mainly of Turkish origin. Most of them have made no provision for old age and ill health and it seems the Muslim family no longer cares to look after the older members. Step forward the German taxpayer! Apparently one result of dementia is the loss of any acquired languages, so what little German they did know simply evaporates.
As regards Greece and Italy, they both have a lot of coastline to defend against illegal immigrants and could really do with some physical help from the rest of the EU, instead of self-righteous, politically correct whining from Brussels.
Sheona: the bit with the Gastarbeiter doesn’t bother me too much. They at least, in their younger years, did contribute to society. They worked and pain taxes. While they should have put away for old age, I’d rather see them get money than the Asis, our chavs, who have never contributed anything and have only scrounged off the dole.
It seems ironic that more and more pressure is getting thrown on Greece and Italy to control immigration with ever increasing budget cuts, but no help, as you say, is given. Spain is also struggling with the number of illegals crossing the sea. They also get no help at all from the EU and, in fact, are told to cut their budget even more. The sooner the EU collapses the better.
Gucci Helle is still getting it in the neck for sucking up to Shengen. Only last week a police action cleared out dozens of illegal workers in McDonalds caffs across Zealand and the South. With no border checks Copenhagen is a magnet for refugees from all over.
It depresses me that the only thing that might possibly get Europe back to some semblance of order is a major catastrophe, Janus. In theory the UK’s system is far better. One can easily fly in, but everyone is checked in the process. The only problem is that Bliar and Bruin undermined that, as well.
Christopher, unfortunately the ship-borne arrivals can often get through unchecked because of understaffing.
Christopher, to see the word “Shitstorm” on the front page of the online FAZ made me realise that there are some words that should not be adopted into German.
Janus, many French people still have a “fin de semaine”, probably to match “fin de journée”.
Are you really surprised? For far too many years Governments in Europe have taxed those who work, borrowed and juggled their budgets rather than deal with those who prefer to do nothing. The fear of civil unrest has encouraged those Governments to pay the idle to live in a manner and style to which they feel ‘entitled’ and to ‘import’ labour to take up the jobs that the indigenous population refuse to do because they are better off not working. And the ‘imports’ are taking advantage of the system
The major catastrophe is already upon us – just about every section of society feels alienated – and civil unrest can only spread.
Sheona: it happens that way. Could you please send me a link to that article about the ageing guest workers in Germany? I looked on the FAZ site and the only “shitstorm” article I found was about the Pirate Party.
Boadicea: I am not so much surprised as I am disheartened. As I’ve said before, the Chinese social state is the only sustainable one. “What? You too lazy to work?!?!?!? Then you too lazy to eat”!!! In the US 49pc of the population does not pay federal taxes and many of them receive more money back than they put in.
Many, especially blacks, have been made dependent on the state for their survival, thus securing a loyal voting bloc for one party. The same party behind that is now working on Latinos. Gads. I’m going to stop now, it’s not yet 10 AM and I’m already depressed.
Sorry, Christopher, the article was yesterday and seems to have disappeared into the archives.