My personal Muppet of the Week award goes to Spain this week. Even if the country is going to the dogs, the king still knows how to live the high life, going big-game hunting in Botswana as if austerity had never happened. Having bagged a few pachyderms, His Majesty stumbled over a pile of severed trunks, tripped and broke his aging hip. It didn't take long for the story to break. His subjects, most of them out of employment and in no mood for frivolity or decadence, got themselves into a fit.
They will get over it. The guy is king, and a pleasure hunt in defiance of popular misery has forever been a royal prerogative. No matter how agitated the complaining, the king will be king next year and the one after that until he puts down his crown or keels over dead. Politicians in elected office are not so lucky. They have to take the ire of the people more seriously, appeasing them and appealing to them simply to keep their job.
In France where a revolution or at least a general strike is never too far off, staying in power is a trick that speaks of magic. As it happens, President Sarkozy is readying his wand at the moment. The first round of the presidential election is only a week away.
During the election that swept Sarkozy into the Elysée five years ago, I lived in France. With the help of a teaser subscription to Le Monde, I followed the proceedings assiduously (and even wrote about them). The four main candidates were easy, but there was a howl of wing nuts on the left fringe whose purpose I couldn't figure out. All they achieved with their bickering over the right path towards communism and prosperity was preventing any sort of hard-left unity and splitting the dark red vote into chunks almost too small to count.
When I went down to Marseille over Easter, I was curious to see how things were shaping up this time around. Besides the Economist's harsh words of admonition, which I carried with me, I had nothing to go by. Here are a few of the things that struck me on the ground.
To advertise their campaigns, all presidential candidates are allocated the same space, usually near the town hall or the market. Temporary installations of metal poster boards, numbered and of uniform size, assure an égalité of presentation that is cute in concept but pointless in reality. The candidates' faces, in numbers determined by the financial health of each campaign, stare from walls, hoardings and kiosks. The official boards often go unused.
Various communists and anti-capitalists are still at it, but they are fewer in number than last time, and there isn't one as inspiring as the 33-year-old mailman with dreams of world revolution who ran in 2007. Instead, I noticed a woman modestly advertising herself as "a communist candidate", as if she didn't mind if people voted for one the others.
It would have puzzled me to see the left in decline in these days of economic crisis when the capitalist model itself is coming under renewed scrutiny on university campuses and in Left Bank cafés, had I not already read in the Economist that the French hard left, against time-honored traditions, had united their forces. The candidate for the Left Front is polling in third to fifth, depending on who's asking, and the numbers are close. The moderate left's candidate is tipped by many to win.
Never mind the previous paragraph, the left in France isn't interesting. There's too much of it, it's all over the place, and nothing can surprise because everything has been said (100% tax on incomes above €300,000, promised by the Left Front's candidate) and done (strikes and revolutions). The far right is more intriguing at the moment, represented as always by the National Front.
When the party was run by an angry old man named Le Pen, it was universally despised. In a shock to the system, Le Pen advanced to the second round of the Présidentielle in 2002, but the party lost air like a punctured balloon after that and descended into irrelevance. Then, about a year ago, Le Pen let daughter take over. The effect has been striking.
The only campaign relic I brought back with me is Marine Le Pen's brochure, which I found jammed underneath Fangio's windshield wiper one morning. At sixteen pages in fresh colors, the pamphlet exudes confidence. A benevolent smile radiates from the candidate's life-size face gracing the title. As far as I can tell, all pressing political issues are addressed inside. The presentation is clear but the phrasing deliberately cryptic.
Immigrants are criminal lice that must be squashed, reads one section – except it says: In all matters, priority will be given to French people. Benefits for families with at least one French parent will be increased. Anti-French racism will be confronted restlessly. Some paragraphs are necessarily more explicit and grim, but there are many that are rather warm and friendly. Overall the tone is down. The objective is clearly electability.
At some point I realized that the National Front, the party the candidate is heading, is never mentioned in the pamphlet. I studied it front to back, even read the fine print, there's nothing. On the last page you can cut out a form and pledge your support, but only to the candidate herself. The spin-doctors must have been of the opinion that the name National Front carried too many distasteful connotations, that the past must be suppressed to have a chance of glory.
What were they thinking? Marine Le Pen is her father's daughter. She shares his very distinct last name. Sure, the verbal goonery and the crude aggressiveness are gone. But no one will mistake Le Pen for the nurse of France's ills. Or will they? The first round of the Présidentielle on Sunday will show if the next Muppet of the Week award goes to the spin-doctors or to the French electorate.
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