Sarkozy: no free expression for voodoo rites

Sarkozy fights back against voodoo doll

What are they afraid of?

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has threatened to sue a publishing company unless it withdraws a Sarkozy doll that comes with a "voodoo manual" instructing readers to plant pins in it, his lawyer said Tuesday.

The doll is emblazoned with some of Sarkozy's most famous quotes such as "Get lost you pathetic arsehole" -- his words to a bystander who refused to shake his hand at a farm show last year. Readers are encouraged to plant pins in the quotes.

"Nicolas Sarkozy has instructed me to remind you that, whatever his status and fame, he has exclusive and absolute rights over his own image," lawyer Thierry Herzog wrote to publishers K&B in a letter published by newspaper Le Monde.

Confirming details to Reuters, Herzog said Sarkozy would sue the publishing firm if it didn't respond and pull the product. K&B has issued 20,000 copies of the manual and doll.

The company has also issued a Segolene Royal doll representing Sarkozy's rival in last year's presidential election. Her lawyer said she was also considering legal action.

Let's Go Sarko

Ever since the shocking scale of the French urban riots started making headlines outside of France a few years ago, there has been much talk about what might happen when the pendulum starts swinging the other way, should the day come when the French ruling class would grow fatigued at having to pretend there was some kind of justification for this raw adolescent rage.

President Nicholas Sarkozy, no stranger to wildly swinging from policy to policy himself, now sits astride a government sending in police by the hundreds, in company strength, in order to subdue a few dozen of the more barbaric youths, a manageable handful at a time. It is a sign of how bad things have become, that it should require forces of such magnitude to make such small changes for the better.

Reading the French media accounts of these massive police incursions into France’s worst no-go zones leaves me hoping, and saying a silent prayer, much as the French heartland holds its breath in cautious anticipation, that the cure does not end up worse than the disease.

What does it portend for France, that police operations need to take on the scope of military maneuvers, in order to be successful? Or that assembling a virtual army of occupation has come to be seen as the best way to fight crime? When the line blurs between the police and the military, I'm not convinced that this is a step in the right direction... although maybe I'm just in denial, as I struggle to avoid settling for the lesser of evils, thinking instead that there may still exist a "good" solution.

In trying to give shape to my conflicted thoughts on this new phase in France’s civil war, I created the following video, "Let’s Go Sarko".

Papa Sarkozy comes home to France

The French head of state, President Nicholas Sarkozy, had been on an important state visit to China when the recent wave of urban violence broke out in France's slum neighborhoods.

Reading the various accounts of his return, both in French and English news sources, I can't help but roll my eyes at what, to me, sounds like an unmistakeable invocation of that time-honored cry, "You just wait until your father gets home..!"

It is the avoidance of accepting both personal responsibility and personal commitment to engaging in solving problems, that leads to the scale of disorder currently plaguing La France, just as avoiding unsavory responsibilities leads to unruly children at home.

With characteristic elan, a returning President Sarkozy went straight from the airport to a hospilized police officer, recovering from a particularly savage beating at the hands of the barbarians now within France's gates. While Sarkozy's good at madly rushing off in all directions, I remain an agnostic on his supposed conservative credentials. Sure, he's "talking tough", and vowing to hold "a tough line", etc. But one person's definition of "tough" is not automatically the same as another's.

It is a major fault of the conservative blogosphere to only read in his words and deeds the definitions they've longed hope for, and not recognize what he is actually doing. Just read sites like GalliaWatch to discover how much of a disconnect exists between Sarkozy's actions and how they are reported in arenas like American talk radio. I have a lot of respect for Michael Medved and Dennis Prager, and other conservative hosts, but I have to wonder how they come to the conclusions they do about President Sarkozy whenever they comment on him. To be sure, he is decidedly more pro-west than other French politicians (and we can probably thank God he was elected and not Bayrou or [shiver-r-r] Segolene Royal), but we need to be honest with ourselves, and see that he is not the testorene Margaret Thatcher he is frequently made out to be. It's a good wake-up call I try to hold myself to, in not mistaking wishful thinking for shallow thinking.

Isn't it amazing; now that the internet has given us all a platform upon which to finally hear what everyone is thinking, we end up forgetting how to listen.

French presidential debate: Emotion vs Intellect

I’ve just watched the two-hours-plus televised debate between French presidential candidates Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal. Here are some initial reactions from a tired mind:

Sarkozy impressed me, Segolene depressed me... royally. God help the French Republique should she win its presidency following the second round of their election! I can't see how any nation could survive such a person as their steward for five long years, let alone today's France with today's problems in today's world.

This debate might as well have been between intellect and emotion as between two politicians. Sarkozy was wall-to-wall facts and figures, Segolene was nothing but "feelings" and platitudes. Which seemed to get the socialist's goat every once in while; more on that in a moment.

Watching the two of them discuss business and finance put me in mind of the old stereotype of a woman driver talking with her auto mechanic, the driver saying that she hears a funny clicking sound coming from under the hood, while the mechanic goes to great pains to describe how her engine works, specifying that the problem is with the carburetor, concluding with a long list of payment options for getting it replaced.

Throughout the debate, the socialist Segolene Royal was emotional, undisciplined, and lacking in self-control, to an unsettling degree. Meanwhile Nicolas Sarkozy, presented a calm, cool, and very self-controlled contrast.

The debate format allowed for both candidates to address each other directly, within topical bounds established by the debate's two moderators (although the socialist candidate started off demonstrating an inability to focus on the topics at hand, it took her half the debate to learn how to stay on subject). A pair of clocks kept less-than-exact account of how much time each candidate incrementally used of their 60 minute time period (Sego torpedoed much of this system's accuracy by talking over Sarkozy's time quite frequently, with the timekeepers understandably slow in turning his clock off and activating hers).

Sarkozy was clearly the better debater; an amusing tactic of his that made for some entertaining moments, was his recurring ability to slip in a stiletto-sharp cutting remark towards his opponent whenever she would interrupt him, delivered through either an impish smile or accentuated with those facile eyebrows of his ("she asks questions then doesn't let me answer them", "I'll answer that if madame gives me her permission", "I have too much respect for you, madame, to let you deceive yourself", etc) Sometimes his little sarcastic remarks would slip by under her radar, unchallenged from being unheard, other times it would noticeably tick her off, prompting a renewed (and unflattering) emotional outburst out of her, as she probably felt like he was contemptuous of her intelligence.

Which he undoubtedly was. Sarkozy went into detail, again and again, about the mechanics of how his proposals will work: where the money will come from, explained in a cause-and-effect description. Sego’s “cause and effect” was to have more “social dialog” and to “work with industry” in order to “launch economic growth above 2%”. At a later point, Sarkozy challenges a specific Segolene proposal: "what tax rate will you apply to fund that policy?" Sego's answer, “My tax will be what is necessary to bring about social justice", was about as specific as anything else she had to offer voters during the debate drama.

Segolene erupted into a particularly unbecoming and (if you'll pardon the expression) gauche emotional outburst at the 50-minute mark, over remarks Sarkozy made concerning integrating handicapped children into regular public schooling, accusing him of "immoral politics" over the issue (they disagreed over statistics on how thoroughly this was being done, and how important to Sarkozy it was that it be higher). Sarkozy handled the outburst with statesmanship and aplomb, toning down his voice in direct contrast to Sego raising hers. Final word on the point came from Sarkozy, before the moderators shepherded them towards a new topic: "I don't hold it [your outburst] against you, because everyone can lose their temper"... such polite contempt!

Also memorable was Sego using the terrible news of a recent rape of a female police officer to announce that women should be accompanied on their way home from work, and that subsequently she would not be reducing the number of government employees, to insure that these extra police escorts would be available. Sarkozy, at his turn, asks her, "are you saying you want female civil servants accompanied home each night..." (Royal, interrupting: "At night, yes")... "so we should have one civil service for the French public, and another civil service to serve the civil servants". His solution, he says, is to simply have fewer delinquents, and being tougher on sentencing.

The moderators began with an unintentionally revealing question at the very start of the debate. They asked each candidate, “to ease the tension” and to calm the atmosphere: "How do each of you feel?"

Royal: [smiling] “Very happy, thank you”
Sarkozy: [decidedly not smiling] “Focused, because a debate is very demanding.”

Emotion vs Intellect.

French election vote breakdown

There was much uncertainty during the lead-up to today's presidential election in France; one could even be forgiven for indulging in a measured amount of optimism... was France waking up, shedding its flirtation with nihilist socialism?
Then this morning came the voting results to torpedo such positive daydreams. Reality is that France is in a lot of trouble.

The official website for France's Minister of the Interior lists the entire voting breakdown, candidate by candidate, department by department. Here is some overall voting data:

On the left:

Ségolène Royal, PS ("Parti Socialiste", Socialist Party): 9,402,797 (25.83%)
Oliver Besancenot, LCR ("Ligue communiste révolutionnaire", Revolutionary Communist League): 1, 494,446 (4.11%)
Marie-George Buffet, PCF ("Parti Communiste Francaise", French Communist Party): 705 487 (1.94%)
Dominique Voynet, "Les Verts" (Green Party): 570 240 (1.57%)
Arlette Laguiller, LO ("Lutte ouvrière", Worker's Struggle): 486 495 (1.34%)
José Bové: 479,125 (1.32%)
Gérard Schivardi, PT ("Parti des Travailleurs", Worker's Party): 123 305 (0.34%)

Out of the total 36 395 644 votes cast, left-leaning candidates totals come to 13,261,895, or 36.45% of the total vote.

On the right:

Nicolas Sarkozy, UMP ("Union pour un mouvement populaire", Union for a popular movement): 11 323 599 (31.11%)
Jean-Marie Le Pen, FN ("Front National", National Front): 3,824,258 (10.51%)
Philippe de Villiers, MPF ("Mouvement Pour La France", Movement for France): 815,789 (2.24%)
Frédéric Nihous, CPNT ("Chasse-Pêche-Nature-Traditions", Hunting-Fishing-Nature-Traditions): 420,097 (1.15%) (sounds libertarian, so I'm including them with the right-wing party totals until I'm advised otherwise)

Out of the total 36 395 644 votes cast, France's equivalent of conservative candidacies received 16,383,743 votes, or 45.01% of the total vote.

Now, I've left one candidate out of these calculations: the "third man" (you'd think that was his Party name, as the French media refer to this expression so frequently when citing him), François Bayrou, candidate for the UDF ("l'Union pour la démocratie française", Union for french democracy). Considered a "centrist" candidate, his platform seemed to lean much more to the left than the right. With a final tally of 6,750,006 votes, his supporters could swing the election in the second round. His 18.55% block is up for grabs, since Bayrou, in his consession speech, failed to recommend either Sarkozy or Royal.
Listening to the various consession speeches this morning streaming over the net, there seemed a common theme within each respective side of the political spectrum. Neither Le Pen or de Villiers made recommendations for their conservative supporters to vote for Sarkozy in the second round. Meanwhile the leftist candidates tended to be more strategic in their consession speeches, urging voters to choose Royal "with no illusions", but out of desperation to beat the "right".
I think it's a safe bet that the next election will probably not see another 84.6% turnout rate, as France's right of center voters may not feel there is sufficient difference between the remaining candidacies of Sarkozy and Royal. Still, while not the best of choices, there's still difference enough between the likely success of each candidate's taking the helm of the ship of state.
Let's hope that the center-right can accept Sarkozy as the lesser of two evils, and return to the polls in sufficient strength to save France from perpetual civil unrest, rapid economic decline, and Segolene Royal.

France goes to the polls

France goes to the polls this sunday, to choose the next President of their nation.

I was trying to think of a way to frame a greeting to our French readers as they vote sunday in the first round of their Presidential Election, but I can't seem to come up with a turn of phrase that seems appropriate to the occasion.

"Good luck"? "Our condolences"? "I feel your pain"?

It probably sounds like a joke, I guess, but I am trying to be sincere. It's very hard to imagine any good to come out of this process; the only candidate that I felt would have shifted France back to a position of strength, Philippe de Villiers, has been consistently marginalized to the bottom of the list in poll after poll, seemingly unnoticed by his fellow citizens, despite the clear vision with which he identifies France's true problems and needs.

As we discussed at our meeting last week, over a third of the voters in these pre-election polls are declaring themselves "undecided", which makes the first round vote a gut call rather than a sure thing. Are they really undecided, though, or just ashamed to admit their intention to cast a vote for anti-American and anti-Israel Front National candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen..?

I'm going to put the remaining scraps of my credibility on the line, and project Le Pen and gadfly François Bayrou as, respectively, the number one and number two winners in tomorrow's election. I think Sarkozy will come in a close third, with Segolene Royal a distant fourth.

I think Bayrou will end with most of Sego's socialist party's immigrant voting block, pushing him ahead of her, and pulling her behind Sarkozy. I think Sarkozy will lose much of his conservative support to Le Pen, who will be seen as more hardline on the law and order issues that plague the nation.

Then in the second round we will see history repeating itself, as France declares itself horrified at the news of Le Pen in the second round once more, and will hold their collective noses and raise Bayrou to the Presidency.

Which reminds me, maybe there can be some good to come out of this election, following the second round, after all:

French citizens won't have this gentleman in charge anymore....

What are Your election predictions?

UPDATE: I'm listening to election returns over France-Info, and so far my prediction isn't shaping up very well! First results are Sarkozy at 29%, Royal at 26%, Bayrou at 18%, with Le Pen at 10%.

UPDATE: Philippe de Villiers at 2%! That's even less than in his previous presidential campaign.

UPDATE: Le Pen is talking, he's disappointed in the people for choosing "the representatives of the system" in casting their votes for Sarkozy.

UPDATE: some interesting commentary on the "collapse" of the small parties, particularly on the left. Less than half of the total vote as compared to their numbers in the last election.

UPDATE: Televised Presidential debate between Sarkozy and Royal set for May 3. Based on the high electoral turnout (over 80%!) that debate will likely score very high ratings.

Claude Reichman's latest article on the French Presidential elections

Claude Reichman, spokesperson for the Blue Revolution, the French movement dedicated to promoting economic and social reform in France, has a new article out on the current French presidential elections. He addresses the urgent need for significant reforms in their system, and surveys the likelyhood for their implementation following the election.
[translated by myself; clarifications or corrections welcome]

Presidential elections: a marionnettes show

The four principal candidates for the presidential election are partisans of rupture. None announce themselves as part of a continuity. None dare post a track record. And why! Of the four, only Jean-Marie Le Pen at least has coherence going for him. In the case of rupture, he has been lauding it since the creation of the Front National, over thirty-five years ago. Yet for a track record, he doesn’t have one, since he’s never been in power. But the others!

M. Sarkozy is the heir of RPR["Rassemblement pour la République"], of whom its glorious jewel, Jacques Chirac, has vigorously massacred France’s chances throughout his forty years of political life. Mme Royal is the heir to the socialist party, of whom their glorious jewel, François Mitterrand, plunged France into the chaos of deficits, debt, economic collapse, uncontrolled immagration and moral perversion since that party was created thirty six years ago and their first party leader became president of the Republic twenty six years ago. As for M. Bayrou, he is the heir of Union for french democracy [UDF, "Union pour la Démocratie Française"], created thirty three years ago for supporting the actions of its glorious jewel, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who, in order to guard our nation against socialism, judged it prudent to hurry towards it, just like the fool who throws himself into water in order not to get wet.

Therefore, each being the inheritors, whether they want it or not, of disastrous track records, M. Sarkozy, Mme Royal and M. Bayrou ask us to believe they are capable of a rupture that nothing in their pasts has made the least bit predicted. At least if they had a program! But no, nothing. Roaring words but empty of sense, unrealizable promises without any actual break with the economic, fiscal and social system that strangles France for the last third of a century, in short, just hot air. And it seems that the presidential campaign enthralls the French. Have we become this people without memory that Tocqueville had once perceived when he said that "in a democracy, each generation is a new nation"? It truly seems so.

Yet [,consider this]. There is conscious memory, and there is that which, huddled up within the deepest depths of the cortex, shelters remembrances both sorrowful and grandiose, the craziest of hopes and the most ancestral of fears, the unappeased desires and the most violent impulses. And it is this memory that waits to deliver its terrible exhalations, just as it always had in previous centuries when the nation was in danger.
Therefore, our candidates for the presidential election are but marionnettes in a scenario that overtakes them. When the great breath of history blows over our country, from the inmost depths of the people must rise a man or woman in whom France may recognize itself and to whom France will confide its destinies. For a limited time only, of course; for the rule demands this time once more that the savior is to be dismissed as soon as their mission is fulfilled, so that the people may once again danse a jig of regained happiness and unconcerned joy.

What can you do, happy people have no history. It is true everywhere, even in a nation with a history such as ours, at the same time glorious and tragic, and who primes itself to invest itself with new dramas that their leaders, unconsciously, have so well prepared for them.

Glory, therefore, to the next elected leader of the nation. If they knew what was in store for them, they would flee as fast as their legs could take them. Yet our political class, because they have appropriated for themselves the monopoly of popular representation and have therefore sheltered themselves from every true sanction, for such a long time now, can no longer even know that actions have consequences. A few decades ago, there was a theatrical play that became very successful. It was called "La facture" ["The bill"]. It seems that, together, we are prepared to reenact it. And this time no one will find it funny.

[The play Mr. Reichman refers to is a comedy about a woman that everybody likes, so well in fact that she fears the day she feels she will receive "the bill" for her good fortune.]