Les loups sont entrés dans Paris

Sarkozy is far from being "another Bush". If you think so, you clearly don't know much about French politics.

Kirk: LOL. Is this meant as a defense of Sarkozy or Bush? Thanks for the informed, well-reasoned and completely wrong "lesson" on French politics from an acknowledged authority. You are an authority, right?

revere, I share you deep sorrow and bitter disappointment. My daughter lives in France and, like me, is disconsolate.

Saying Sarkozy is another Bush is right on the mark.

Revere,

I live in France. Do you?

Kirk

Kirk: I'll let my French friends weigh in if they care to on your end. On my end, I know about Bush. And you voted for Bush/Sarkozy? Or can't you vote?

Oh too bad je don't parle no francaise. Is there, perhaps, a swahili translation I could peruse at my leisure?

twocrow: This is Reggiani's most famous song, about the occupation of Paris by the Germans in WWII ("The wolves have entered Paris"). In the last stanza, also excerpted here, they have left Paris and charming Elvire can smile and laugh once again. La lutte continue=keep fighting ("the struggle goes on").

I know many people here don't read French. This was a very personal message to my colleagues and old friends in France who are in despair. Two years ago I was in the same shape.

Stick to science. French politics you clearly know nothing about.

Moi, je lire francais, et je l'ai compris.

I'm not up on French politics. But if he's a French Bush, then I'd like to know more about his campaign financing, it might reveal a bit about who's really conducting the orchestra.

Some of the characters were scrambled, possibly due to accents that my OS doesn't recognize. I have rendered these words in parens with question marks. The f* translates as a four letter word of germanic derivation ending in 'uck'. I confess I had to use a dictionary, as my grasp of french profanities is less handy than I'd like.

The men have lost the (will?)
to live, and have f*'ed everything up
Their mothers, their brothers, their wenches
for them it was but one (???)
The sky will return to savagery
the (?) will eat up the countryside in consequence.

.....

The wolves
the wolves have invaded Paris
Some by Issy, some by Ivry
the wolves have invaded Paris
Cease to laugh, charming Elvira
the wolves have invaded Paris.
....

The wolves
the wolves have left from Paris
Some by Issy, some by Ivry
The wolves have left Paris
You may smile, charming Elvira
The wolves have left Paris
I love your laugh, charming Elvira
The wolves have left Paris.

A French Bush? Besides being an oxymoron, I think it's wrong. I'd have prefered Mme Royal (even if I don't like her too much either), but comparing Sarko to W is too flattering for the second. I spent the last years in France, and I wouldn't be surprised if Sarkozy does some intelligent things once in office. There will be a lot of noise coming from France in the next years, but that's badly needed. And remember, he belongs to the right wing, but in a country which is structurally on the left (just like the US is structurally on the right). Comparing Sarko to Bush, or today to the Germans' arrival, is far from the mark.

No, I didn't vote for Bush, and as a foreigner, I don't have the right to vote in France (at least for presidential elections).

The problem is that comparing the French right to the American right is the proverbials apples and oranges. The French left is very much to the left of US Democrats, and the French right is somewhere in the middle. A couple of examples: Sarkozy (and all of the French right, as well as left) is againts the Iraq war; he's called last night for a fight against global warming; he is, of course, in favor of the universal health care and retirement systems in France, which, in fact, weren't totally universal until a few years ago, under a "right-wing" president; he's in favor of free markets (as both Republicans and Democrats in the US), but something the French left is pretty much against; he's in favor of affirmative action, which the French left is vehemently against; issues like abortion and stem cell research have no naysayers here, on either side, unlike in the US. There is really no comparison between any European right and US neo-conservatives. One main difference: there are no religious fundamentalists running the show.

As for the poster who questioned who financed the campaign; political campaigns in France, as in most of Europe, are much more low-key than in the US. Television commercials are prohibited (aside from three, two-minute ads that are broadcast on state-run TV channels, at no cost to candidates).

Kirk

Sorry, but I would have jumped on this sooner but the stress fracture obtained at the expense a third horsepower electric drill has slowed me a bit.

Seems to me the French finally got it right. Chirac's oil for nukes program once ended under the bombs of a few years ago, put the nails in his coffin. Its okay, from what I hear they were going to do that literally in France to him this time around if he had run.

Sarkozy isnt Bush. But he is more centrist and thats what Europe needs right now rather than too far right or too far left. He will make a fine president.

I will say this about the French though and they should really listen up. The kind of affirmative action that is spoken of there means a complete takeover in the near future by immigrants. They will use their uterus to ensure that all future elections will be swayed by the new immigrant voters. As they say, you build it and they will come. You have UHC, food and every other kind of subsidy and one of the crappiest economies in Europe. Time to dump it all and start over. Start with the deportation of the illegals, work your way up from there.

Thank you Revere. I am French of American descent - naturalized French. I vote here.

My little village of Badefols d'Ans voted overwhelmingly for Segolene. My Departement of the Dordogne voted for Segolene. My region of Aquitaine voted for Segolene.

Waking up, the morning after, and hearing Sarkozy's speech that his administration is going to be based on work, authority and merit does not exactly fill us with joy here in my little hamlet. People already work hard and we don't connect wealth with merit. We would have loved to have heard the words, opportunity, equality, education, ecology.

Campaign financing does not work the same way in France as in the US. In the legislative elections each vote counts for 1 Euro 60 for each party. If you make 5% of the electorate in the Presidential primary you get 800,000 Euros.One doesn't need zillions for TV ads because it is strictly equal time and not paid for by the candidates. BUT...Sarkozy's friends own most of the press and media (Le Monde, France 1 TV, Le Point, L'Express, Paris Match, Radio Europe 1 etc. etc.) He is close to Dassault arms makers and the CEO's of the CAC 40. He will be faithful to his friends. Monsanto will be happy because, unlike Segolene, he is not against OGM corn in open fields. He is going to suppress inheritance taxes so, like Bush, he is the darling of the super rich. To fund this he is going to up the TVA tax which will be applicable to everyone, ie: more tax for the poor.

His book "Testimony" was translated into Italian and prefaced by Gianfranco Fini, the neofascist who said that they have a lot to learn from him. He was elected thanks to the support of the extreme right Le Pen supporters who massively voted for him. Berlesconi has given him his whole hearted support.

He is going to create a Ministry for "Immigratiion and National Identity" - National Identity reminds the French of wording of the Vichy government and sends cold shivers down people's spines.

One can have mixed feelings about Chirac, but one very positive thing that he did was bring France to terms with a certain collaboration during the war; ie, the French police rounding up the Jews for deportation. He admitted the atrocities committed during the Algerian war. Sarkozy in one of his last speeches said, "no more repentance". There is a reason why the Ligue of Human Rights endorsed Segolene. In an already racist country we shall now see despair lead to insurrection. Segolene had planned a major blitz of opportunity and intensified educational programs for the underpriviledged second generation North African and African populations, stuck within sordid ghettos around the big cities.

She had plans for low income housing. He wants to see "a country of property owners". I could go on and on. One can compare him to Bush in that he will maintain an aura of fear in the population, will be kind to the wealthy and ruthless with the poor, ecology will not be a first prioiity as it would have been with Segolene.

It is the morning after. It is sad and our little community is feeling downhearted, This area has always been repressed going back to medieval times, but it has always resisted.. I think of all of the American Civil Rights activists and how they felt seeing the sports dome in New Orleans after Katrina with the poor being left to die and how the politicians lied and lied. One feels depressed and tired, not for ourselves, who live in great beauty and in want to nothing, but for our sisters and brothers in need. But the 48% of the French who did not vote for Sarkozy are not going to go anywhere. He will rush through the repressive laws this summer while everyone is away on vacation. Then the trouble will start in the fall and let's talk again around November. For the moment there is nothing we can do but rest and become strong again.

By the way Revere, that Serge Reggiani song is wonderful. Seeing hundreds of police vans converging on Paris can indeed be compared to the wolves. I lived on the Boulevard St. Germain in May 1968 and had a first row seat for the barricades, the police brutality, the month long general strike, the demise of General DeGaulle and then the famous Grenelle Accords which were a great progress for French workers. I truly believe that there is going to be a very dark period in France and then things will get better again.

Vive la France!
Vive La Republique!

Randy, hope that stress fracture fixes soon... Just a tres short note to let you know I'm an Irish immigrant who moved to Oz when fourteen. Just a short while ago in Paris there were some really heavy generational-based riots due to BOYS CLUB mentality keepin' kids of "foreigners" out of private and public French power structures. Anger, Randy -- a real feeling of being fracked over by the parents of spoiltbrats who have no idea what real poverty actually means. How do I know all this!?! Well, I came to the conclusion based on how I've been (((MISTREATED))) by the culture I exist in -- Perth, WA: Oz-born kids have always been treated as "real" Aussies and folks like myself... Well, I coulda played the game and pretended the fat frack frackin' that dude next to me in the sauna aint my boss -- but, no. The bullcrap of a culture pretending to be somethang it never was -- get the picture yet!?!

O'Leary,

Sounds like you drank the kool-aid. I find it interesting that the socialists, in the last days of the campaign, suggested that there would be violence if Sarkozy won. Sounded like a threat to me; and your comments, especially this:

"Then the trouble will start in the fall and let's talk again around November. For the moment there is nothing we can do but rest and become strong again."

sound like the typical French confrontationism that his harmed the country for so long.

I do agree about the "national identity" thing; that bothers me as much as Ségolene's suggestion that everone should have a French flag in their home and brandish it on holidays. Both sides blundered in those suggestions. However, the lot-cost housing thing is false; current housing laws will continue, the only difference being that Sarkozy wants to make mortgage interest tax-deductible, which was the case here years ago. (I don't recall which side eliminated that deduction...)

Frankly, I strongly agree with Sarkozy's thoughts about work in France. I have lived here for more than twenty years, and have seen how the French just shrug off any suggestion that they need to actually work to get things done. They are so used to welfare (not in the absolute American sense, but in the little amounts paid here and there for different things), that they just think everything will be taken care of. I have known people who have worked in a variety of jobs, from factory workers to executives, and they all have that attitude. You say the French work too much? Ha! France works, overall, less than just about any industrialized country. Five weeks vacation (way too much) plus another two weeks of separate holidays; add to that the disastrous 35-hour work week (I thought it was a _great_ idea, until I realized it didn't mean 7-hour days, after which people could do things, but rather accumulated time off, which makes it very difficult for business to organize).

Anyway, this isn't the place for such a debate. If you think, like Revere, that Sarkozy is even remotely like Bush, you really need to look at thing more objectively.

Kirk

Kirk: Maybe you ought to spend some time in the US if you want to know what the "work" ethic is like: 2 jobs and little headway for too many. The poor French! They think the government is supposed to make their lives easier and allow them to have free time with their families instead of taking their money and using it to kill people. But a benighted folk. Oh, by the way, if you do come to the US, be sure to purchase expensive health insurance. It's not like France.

Regarding the Bush/Sarkozy comment. I am not sure the sense you took it in, but your comment is highly remiiscent of what some people said after Bush's election. "Well, I didn't vote for him but he'll probably do osme good things." Sarkozy has dished out the tough love/compassionate conservatism line we got from Bush and, in my estimation, it will come to the same thing. France is in for a rough ride. I hope not too much is destroyed before the train gets back on the tracks. That's what happened here and it is a tragedy. You don't experience Bush on a day to day basis as we do. And Sarkozy is heading in the same direction.

Health care

Sick leave

Kirk: I didn't say that the French work too much. I said that the people around here work hard. They work hard and well. For 10 years I was the Vice President and General Manager of a French firm and dealt with high end glass, plastic and packaging factories in France who exported to the US. The engineers, the sales people and the workers in the factories are extraordinarily productive. Having enough vacation only benefits people as they can recuperate and stay at the peak performance necessary to turn out top quality work. When people are dead tired they do not work as well. When Sarkozy says "Work more to earn more" it is a ruse. It is the unemployed who will suffer because employers will simply up the working time for existing employees and it will not create new jobs. Over time the overworked just burn out. It is not the time spent on the job, it is the quality of the workmanship.

When I say that we shall talk in November I am not threatening or being confrontational. It is just that the reality of hard right politics will have hit home. I only hope that this is not the case. Personally, I found Segolene's springboard jobs program for the young very fresh and innovating. Her motto in the campaign was "Donnant, donnant". Both sides giving and both sides receiving. What's so bad about that? Sure beats one side giving and one side taking.

As for the French flag thing, it was awkward but it was her way of bringing the left more towards the center. The Socialists have never used this symbolism and have let it become the banner of the Front National. As she was systematically ridiculed for just about everything she said, this was an easy target. At least the flag was at last brandished on the left and more power to her.

Lastly, I do not know what you mean by Kool-aid. What is that?

While I am British a number of my siblings hold dual nationalality and live, work and vote and France. I would also like to warn against seeing european politics in American terms. Main stream right wing parties might be a bit like Democrats but a Republican like platform would just be a political joke.

(O'Leary ;-) I guess you weren't around in 1978?)
Drink the koolaid; what the cultists were told by their leader (the drink was poisoned).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown

MRK, heal up soon!

Vive la France!

JJ: To say Sarkozy is another Bush isn't to see French politics in US terms. It is to see Sarkozy in terms the rest of the world (now) understands. Reagan followed by Bush disassembled many of the social programs that were a safety net for Americans. They both took a wrecking ball to them. Sarkozy, if he can, will change France in the same way. I wasn't saying Sarkozy was an Evangelical Christian or likely to make war on Cameroon. I was saying his orientation is like Bush's when it comes to reordering the French system of social supports, rights and privileges.

Revere,

Again, you are missing things. There's no way that anyone will trash the existing system of health care, retirement, etc. There will be adjustments to rights that only certain groups have - can you imagine that a TGV driver can take full retirement at age 50? That sort of thing irks more and more people in France, and there are, for example, a number of special groups that have advantageous retirement rights which are due to change. Equality means that everyone has the same conditions, and it has not been like that.

Again, you can't understand how it is to live in a country with health care, among other things. And, as you said, if I were ever to move back to the states, that would be the big problem. BTW, there are two things that keep me from returning to the US: health care and gun control.

Kirk

But the dark clouds of 2004 have given way to patches of blue sky in the US. This, too, shall pass. Someday, and soon . . .

Do you think we'll actually make it, Revere? On my darkest days I wonder. Jan. 20, 2009 is a long way off. The rhetoric surrounding Iran is already sufficiently developed to bring us to the brink of war within a couple of months.

I doubt it will happen given our threadbare military, but when has reality ever stopped Bush?

Kirk: People said the same thing when Reagan was elected. Hell, I said that when Reagan was elected. It won't be so bad. But it is incredbily easy to dismantle government from within. You just start cutting back on personnel, setting policies, etc. You don't make new laws. You just stop executing, redirecting money to make France "more competitive." You start a race to the bottom with Germany and the UK. Kirk, I hope you are right, for your sake and my old friends in France. But I've seen it happen up close. Sarkozy has Reagan-Bush written all over him from my vantage point. You believe I don't understand French politics. Quite right, in most respects. But I would counter you don't understand the power of this philosophy over any executive structure. The truth, like many (but not all) things probably lies in the middle, but I'd prefer to be completely wrong about this.

Nancy: I'm refusing to give in to my worst fears. In this case, I don't think he has the wherewithal but you never know. We need to keep up the pressure on the Democratic candidates, some of whom, even my favored ones, are abysmal on this.

isn't it strange that people usually subscribe to one
political direction and then argue that almost _everything_
which that party propagates is better than what the others
want ?
I mean, how likely is it ? Where are those people who are
30% Sarkozy,70% Royal or 60% Bush,40% Clinton ?

PARIS, May 7 (AP) - (Kyodo) French police have arrested a total of 592 people across the country as bands of rioters protested conservative Nicolas Sarkozy's presidential election victory Sunday, French media reported.

The police said a total of 730 vehicles were torched and 28 police officers were injured in violent incidents from Sunday night to Monday morning. Police fought stone-throwing rioters with tear gas, but it was not clear how many rioters were injured, according to Radio France.

On Sunday night, about 5,000 people gathered at the Place de la Bastille, a favored gathering spot for right-wing supporters during the election.

Other fights with the police broke out in Toulouse, Marseilles and Lyon.

So it goes back to what I said in other days.... You do what we want or we will riot, burn, steal and everything else to ensure that the laws of the Great Nation of France are not followed. So instead of calling out the army to fight in wars of liberation, the French are calling them out to stop the leftists who have become leftist anarchists. Can the call for vote fraud be far behind? Please, send Michael Moore on over. He is a man of the people who certainly has it all wired down about vote fraud. That is if you can get him off of his home on 5th Ave in New York. Man of the people and all.

Jon, you have a unique situation there. One thing that Sarkozy is going to do is round all of the illegals out and ask them which country they want to go to and dump them. The 35 hour work week in France is ludicrous. The only way Chirac could pump up the economy was to allow for that 35 hour week, AND as far as I am concerned there is one hell of a lot of explaining that needs to be done as it would appear his hands are all over sending parts for missile batteries to Iran and Iraq. Framatome as well needs to state for the record what they did and then let the law take its course.

France has an economy that is dying in the face of its own imposed hardships. The unions recognized it. We are starting to here. We are all competing with some guy in India, or SE Asia. Hell the jobs are now moving out of Mexico to Honduras because its cheaper there. O'Leary God bless you man but the entire world has gotten into this government is going to take care of me crap. We have slowly, surely, completely tried to put a net under everyone for a cradle to a grave scenario. Socialism at its finest and each and everytime its been started here, the people have spoken and shrugged it off. It starts with the medical care first, then food subsidies and then next thing you know you have people who dont work at all making more money off of welfare than the people who are actually working.

My rub with this whole thing is that there are people who will be put in power by people who think that the money that YOU earned belongs to someone else. All of this while they sit on their asses and do nothing.

Ever read De Tocqueville and his "Tour of America?" Mandatory in the War College now. The French should be reading it in earnest if they want their society not to collapse.