Replies to post #174859 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

How Nicolas Sarkozy got it wrong

From immigration to tax breaks, the self-obsessive 'president of the rich' made a series of errors on policy and personal image


Graffiti outside a French courthouse reads 'Sarkozy get out!'
Photograph: CHESNOT/SIPA/EPA

Angelique Chrisafis in Paris Sunday 6 May 2012 14.55 EDT

The writing was on the wall for Nicolas Sarkozy as early as March when pelted eggs slid down the windows of the Palais bar in the Basque town of Bayonne as he waited inside, calling in riot police to rescue him and ensure his safe exit. On the narrow street outside the bar, crowds, including Basque militants, were shouting "Sarkozy out!" and "Sod off Sarko". It showed a different French reality to the highly stage-managed public appearances Sarkozy had made as president, greeted by hand-picked supporters behind police barriers. It was also a far cry from Sarkozy's strongman glory days of his triumphal 2007 presidential campaign where he rode a white horse called Universe around the Camargue while wearing a checked cowboy shirt and Aviator shades.

During this election race, Sarkozy told a magazine if there was victory his whole team would have contributed to it. "But if there's failure, I'll be the only one responsible."

Earlier, he'd talked of politics as a drug, warning: "You have to withdraw the needle slowly." Behind the showmanship of his final rallies, the record-breakingly unpopular president had seemed tired, irritable and down. Even before he began his difficult re-election fight, he told journalists off the record, as he puffed a cigarette and not his usual cigars, how he had contemplated the possibility of losing.

Sarkozy is the 11th European leader to be ejected since the economic crisis. But the irony is that he was not booted out directly because of it. The eurozone crisis was paradoxically one of the only ways he could have won the election, selling himself as Super Sarko, an international firefighter and problem-solver, protecting France. That was the message of his election posters which featured his portrait against the sea: Captain Courage in a storm. But instead of vaunting his crisis-busting skills or even leadership in the intervention in Libya, he chose to pour his energies into veering hard-right in a crusade against immigration and halal meat, blaming Islam for the troubles in French society, and claiming to protect the Christian roots of Europe. Much of this harked back to his ill-fated far-right flirtations in office, from his controversial ministry of immigration and national identity, which he eventually abandoned, to a speech blaming Roma for crime in France and dismantling their camps.

Sarkozy's courtship of the far right ultimately failed. By bringing the favourite topics of the Front National into the mainstream, namely immigration and fear of Islam, he served only to strengthen its leader, Marine Le Pen. He also dented his own legacy, leaving himself for the time being remembered in French minds not for what he defined as his bullishness in defending France abroad, or for reforms such as lowering the pension age, but for a divisive, stigmatising campaign that even some in his own camp privately felt was repulsive.

Sunday's vote was a personal referendum on Sarkozy. At the start of his mandate, he was briefly the most popular president since Charles de Gaulle; then he plummeted to record lows for four years and festered there. Rejection of the "president of the rich" was not just about his ostentatious vaunting of money – celebrating his 2007 win at a flash restaurant with the nation's richest people and borrowing a millionaire's yacht when he had promised to retreat to a monastery. It was not just about unpresidential manners – sending text messages during an audience with the pope, saying "Sod off, you prat" to a man who refused to shake his hand at an agricultural fair or parading his first public date with Carla Bruni at Disneyland weeks after his high-profile divorce.

All this combined with a feeling of betrayal and disappointment at his record in office after he had promised to transform France to its core. Sarkozy had vowed to be the president who restored the values of work and reward, but he left France with 1 million more unemployed people and millions who struggled to make ends meet. The rich got richer on the back of his tax breaks for them, and France had a growing sense of injustice and doublespeak. Before the election, polls showed that 64% of French people were unhappy with Sarkozy and viewed his record in office as negative. Crucially, a majority felt he had never intended to keep his promises to France.

Sarkozy said the only thing that would win or lose him the election was authenticity. But sincerity was a problem on the stump. What was Sarkozyism, analysts wondered. It appeared to have no fixed ideology but was more about a style of frenetic "hyperpresidency" making constant zig-zagging, contrasting announcements, bending with the wind in order to cling to power. In office, Sarkozy had vowed to lead an "irreproachable republic" – then allowed his student son to be put forward to run La Defense, Europe's biggest purpose-built business district. "In the end, his problem was that he put himself first, and at the centre of everything," said one banker who did not vote for him.

The question is what Sarkozy does next. "I will have had a great life in politics," he said last week. "I'll do something else. I don't know what." He had previously said he wanted to make money in the private sector. But the first pressing issue will be the justice system and whether, when Sarkozy loses his presidential immunity, he is called to testify to judges investigating allegations of illegal campaign funding. A high-profile investigation is ongoing into whether the L'Oréal billionaire Liliane Bettencourt handed envelopes of cash to Sarkozy's treasurer, party members or even Sarkozy himself to illegally fund his last presidential campaign. Another investigation is examining allegations that kickbacks from French arms sales to Pakistan in the early 1990s secretly funded the failed presidential campaign of Sarkozy's mentor Édouard Balladur. Sarkozy was his campaign spokesman. Sarkozy has denied involvement in either case but has yet to give his version of events.

During five years in office, Sarkozy was omnipresent and laid himself bare: for the first time a French president revealed his body, posing for cameras dripping with sweat, or running up the steps of the Elysée in gym wear. He paraded his private life like never before. The psychoanalyst Serge Hefez wrote a book, Obsessive Sarkosis, about the extent to which Sarkozy had got under French people's skins, into their dreams and minds. "I'm sick of his face, of even hearing about him," said one leftwing voter outside a polling station.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/06/french-elections-2012-nicolas-sarkozy-failure

[StephanieVanbryce]

One very plausible story of what happens next is simply that the European Central Bank will decide it needs to bring the continent's newest leader to heel. If the ECB signals that it will only support the French banking system and the French economy if Hollande sticks with the status quo program, then Hollande may well have no choice. Elections in Europe aren't necessarily what they used to be. Nobody's crying over Silvio Berlusconi, but he was Italy's elected prime minister and he lost power not in an election but it a made-in-Frankfurt call by the central bank. __Matty Iglesias - in Slate

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/05/06/fran_ois_hollande_europe_s_last_best_hope.html

This was sent to me .. I haven't gone to read it yet ..I just thought it sounded right ... imo, IF..the people understand
this it will really really cause some dismay and even more political unrest ..

[StephanieVanbryce]

Désamour and Amour

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 8, 2012

PARIS

In the last election, Nicolas Sarkozy lost his wife. In this one, he lost France.

His friends worry about how the high-strung, pugnacious bantam will adjust to his political Elba.

“The falling out of love of the French will be worse than his divorce with Cécilia,” a Sarkozy friend told Le Parisien. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he goes through a small depression.”

This nation of elegant formality frowned at a leader lacking impulse control, who could arrive late for a meeting with the pope and then check his phone, and who could dismiss a citizen who wouldn’t shake his hand at an agricultural fair with a profane version of “Get lost, you poor idiot.” At a jubilant celebration at the Bastille Sunday night, French revelers held up plastic glasses of Champagne and signs telling Sarko: “Get lost, you poor idiot.”

The rejected suitor is retiring from politics to a home in a posh French neighborhood with his wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the wealthy and sleek singer and former supermodel, and their baby daughter, Giulia.

The French profess not to care about the personal lives of candidates, but even they are bemused by the roundelay of the first already divorced man to get divorced as president and the first never married father of four to get elected president. When Sarkozy faced the radiant Ségolène Royal in 2007, both of their partners — Cécilia Sarkozy and François Hollande — were in love with others, even though the candidates kept it under wraps.

This time the French gave a Gallic shrug as Sarko ran against his ex-opponent’s ex-partner and father of her four children. Thomas Hollande, their 27-year-old son, worked for his mom in 2007 and his dad this go-round. Hollande’s new girlfriend is Valérie Trierweiler, a beautiful reporter for the weekly magazine Paris Match who covered Royal and Hollande when they were the Socialist power couple and then left her husband for Hollande as he left Ségolène.

Relations between Royal and Hollande — and between the resentful Royal and the possessive Trierweiler — have long been frosty. But the trio appeared on stage at the Bastille on election night — with the two women spaced far apart — and Hollande kissed Royal on both cheeks. As Steven Erlanger, The Times’s Paris bureau chief, noted on the TV channel France 24, sometimes it seems as if “a complicated amorous life is a requirement to be a French president.”

The brutal satyriasis of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, however, pushed even the French past their limit. A book and movie have made splashes chronicling the astonishing election day in 2007 when the lithe and lovely Cécilia, who had worked as a political aide to Sarkozy, tried to flee her marriage to go to her lover in New York, the French global events producer Richard Attias. Her getaway ended up taking five months.

The impetuous Sarko speed-dated Carla at Euro Disney, conducted a poll to see if the French would accept the former girlfriend of Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton as Première Dame, and beat Cécilia to the altar (or the French mayor).

In a February TV interview, Sarkozy said his anguish over losing Cécilia led to early faux pas that haunted him. At the crowning moment of his political life, he conceded, “part of my head was devoted to” his exploding family. The night of his election, he went to a private dinner with rich friends at the flashy Champs-Élysées restaurant Fouquet’s; the next morning, he and his family jetted off to a billionaire’s yacht moored off Malta and feasted on lobsters.

President Bling-Bling, siding with the rich in his Ray Bans and Rolex, was born. Often last week, when I asked voters why they were so down on Sarkozy, they answered in shorthand with one word: “Fouquet’s.”

Now the French gossip magazines are consumed with Carla’s face (What did she do to mess it up?); Carla’s future (Will she stay with Sarko?); and Carla’s successor (Will Valérie marry the president so she can go on official trips? Will she have to stop being a journalist?).

The twice-married 47-year-old was christened “Valérie Rottweiler” by a Sarkozy deputy because she’s aggressive and sends tart tweets defending her lover and herself. Although Valérie is still hesitant about her new role, top Socialists told me she deserves credit for imbuing the second-rank, pudding-faced, scooter-riding party apparatchik Hollande with the confidence to defy expectations at a time when his peers had abandoned him.

Basking in the regard of “the love of my life,” as he calls her, he slimmed down, donned less nerdy glasses, and manned up for the big debate. When Ségolène beat him out to be the Socialist candidate, Hollande became known as “Mr. Royal.” But Valérie bolsters him, feeding him throat lozenges and making sure he’s wearing enough layers. As the Cinderella civil servant celebrated in the medieval city of Tulle Sunday night, he wooed Valérie out on stage, gave her a bouquet of red roses, and twirled her to the song she had requested: an accordion rendering of “La Vie en Rose.” The delirious crowd yelled “Un bisou!” A kiss! First the désamour, then the amour. C’est la vie.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/opinion/dowd-desamour-and-amour.html?hp

.............;) ..Love IT! ... Love FRANCE..uuu la la .. z love..;)