french elections:
[for the left] The results also reveal a stinging rebuke for the Socialists' habitual allies in government -- the Communist Party, whose candidate, Marie-Georges Buffet, got only 1.8%, and the Greens, whose candidate, Dominique Voynet, got just 1.5%. Independent left-of-the-left candidate José Bové -- the antiglobalization, farmers' union, and environmental leader --also did badly with just 1.3%, while the young candidate of the largest Trotskyist party, the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire's Olivier Besancenot, broke away from the left-of-the-left pack with 4.3% (triple the score of Trotskyist Arlette Laguiller of Lutte Ouvriere, who had only 1.4%).
(...) Not only that, Royal began to urge her rallies to sing La Marseillaise, declaring that France's national anthem was "neither xenophobic nor bloodthirsty." Now, most of the French left has long shunned La Marseillaise precisely for those reasons -- like its famous chorus, "Marchons, marchons! Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!" (Translation: Let us march, let us march, May impure blood soak the furrows of our fields.) Groans of protest and ridicule came from much of the left, including Royal's own Socialist Party, at her nationalist tap-dance and her obviously false declarations defending the outdated, racist, and sanguinary lyrics of La Marseillaise.
(...) nd, in the course of the interview, Sarko expressed the view that one was born a pedophile or suicidal (a genetic theory traceable to the works of Alain de Benoist, the philosopher of a Nordic Aryan revival who was the intellectual fountainhead of the dissolved extreme-right grouplet Orient, and whose racialist works are favored by Europe's neo-fascist movements.) Again, it was Bayrou, not Royal, who first rushed to denounce Sarko's declarations as a return to "eugenics" and the discredited theories of the Nazi past. By the time Royal did speak out against Sarko's declaration, even France's senior Catholic, Cardinal Vingt-Trois of Paris, had already excoriated Sarkozy's declaration.
(...) It is obvious from Le Pen's relatively low score today -- he was doing better, between 13-15%, in the last pre-election opinion polls -- that he was not able to repeat his 2002 success in large measure because Sarkozy had stolen much of his electorate with thinly-veiled appeals to racism and nationalism.
(...) And what did Marianne (whose journalists voted narrowly to endorse the centrist Bayrou over the Socialist Royal) say about Sarko? It assembled a series of anecdotes (some previously known, others recounted -- anonymously -- by leaders of Sarkozy's own party and business leaders) which portrayed Sarkozy as a self-absorbed, mercurial assassin who treats all criticism as "a declaration of war." Sarko explodes with anger at his critics, screaming, "I'll fuck 'em all, I'll fuck 'em!" or "I'll cut their balls off!" or "I'll have their skin," and he puts his yelled threats into practice (this is particularly true of critical journalists -- Sarko is very, very palsy with the French media barons who control 90% of the print and broadcast outlets, and has the scalps of several offending editors and journalists, both print and broadcast, on his belt.) Of his fellow conservative, the current Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, the mag quoted Sarko as saying, "I'll make sure he ends up hanging from a butcher's hook!"
(...) Sarko [was] one of the few French politicians to have supported the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.
(...) Serious European newspapers who have watched Sarkozy up close are similarly severe in their judgments about him. For the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Sarko is "a macho without scruples who plays on the fear of the people." For the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Sarkozy is "the most ambitious and pitiless politician in Europe who has no real convictions, but who chooses to align himself with the worst whims of the electorate." The Spanish daily El Pais sees in Sarko "the regenerators of the Spanish right of the end of the 19th century." And the Italian press frequently compares Sarkozy to Gianfranco Fini, the former Berlusconi vice-premier who is the leader of the so-called "post-fascist" Alleanza Nationale (the party Fini, a former fascist youth leader, built on the ruins of the neo-fascist, Mussolini-worshipping Italian Social Movement).
(...)