Category — Politics

I now know what it’s like to be caught in the middle of a huge demonstration, and be unable to move. Well, almost. I was walking along the rue du Faubourg St Antoine early this afternoon, on my way to BHV when groups of demonstrators, in support of the national strike, began marching past. They were all converging on the Place de la Bastille of course, and I was headed that way too. I was so intent on taking photos that it was too late by the time I realised I was caught in the middle of the Place, surrounded on all sides by the demonstrators, almost unable to move.

But what a peaceful, amicable affair it seemed to be. Sure, there was chanting and speeches (several simultaneously), but I saw nothing unruly, no pushing or shoving. It took me about an hour to cross the Place de la Bastille. There were no cars anywhere, just a dense throng of people, vans selling food and drink, balloons, people climbing on the Bastille column itself, television trucks, families with children, babies, and dogs.

The General Confederation of Workers (CGT) estimated the crowd at 300,000, and I wouldn’t be surprised, although the police claim the figure to be 65,000 (the unions claim a total of 1.5 million demonstrated all over France).

What struck me especially when I was in the middle of the throng was the atmosphere of calm solidarity, and the passion for social justice, that today’s strike was all about. We don’t see this sort of thing in Australia any more. We’ve long given up any hope that a strike will make any difference to anything. Today’s strike is to protest against the erosion of the standard of living, and also the so-callled ‘workplace reforms’ that we ‘enjoy’ in the Anglophone countries.

I was surprised, though, to hear that what had been reported on UK television, and probably elsewhere, was the conflict and car-torching that happened much later in the day near the Opera, and linked to the ‘dispersion of the demonstrators’. These could not have been the people I saw, and are much more likely to have been professional agitors, or disaffected troublemakers cashing in on the publicity.

I’m very glad I was right in the thick of it for an hour. It gave me a good insight into the passion of ordinary workers for social justice, and the calm and reasonable way in which they express it.

(This picture of Martine Aubry is from Liberation)

We’ve been hearing the idiom ‘d’un cheveu’ in the French news lately, so I decided to translate Yvan Amar’s explanation of it from his Les Mots de la Semaine column on Radio France:

In France they’ve been voting to elect the head of the Socialist Party. Of course, not everyone has voted, only the members of the party. And Martine Aubry has come first by a whisker (in French the idiom is ‘d’un cheveu’: by one hair). This is one of those expressions we hear often, and Abdalla Hamlaoui asked us what it means, and especially how it can be explained.

Everyone understands its meaning: Martine Aubrey had more votes than Segolene Royal, but very few! The difference was minimal, miniscule. So, we know that a hair is very fine, and often we use this word to express something which is so small as to be almost nothing.

But there is another reason for using this word. We say sometimes that one competitor has won by a head. This means that they have won by very little. So, one hair is even less than one head, but we are still using the same type of image because the hair is on the head. We also say quite often a ‘short head’, if we want to add that it’s only a little difference, or we might even say a ‘very short head’. And sometimes we keep only the adjective, as in a ‘short victory’, or a ‘very short victory’.

The photo is from German newspaper Die Welt.

There’s so much going on in PARIS political circles, I don’t know where to begin.

I think I’ll leave Mesdames Royal and Aubry to sort out who’s boss of the Socialist Party this week before I write about them, leaving me to concentrate on Madame le Ministre Dati.

Rachida Dati is Sarkozy’s Justice Minister and the first Muslim woman to hold a high government post. Since coming to office, she has pushed through many of Sarkozy’s law and order reforms, and is now facing opposition from the magistrates’ union on a number of issues, including overcrowded prisons with high suicide rates.

Now, at 42, Dati is to give birth to her first child in January, but has so far refused to name the father, saying her personal life is ‘complicated’, a descriptor that seems to have been lifted straight from Facebook. Dati has for some time, however, been wearing a large, expensive looking ring, on the fourth finger of her left hand. Until last week, anyway, when the so-called sympathetic-to-Sarkozy newspaper Le Figaro published an interview with Dati about her plans to reform criminal law.

This topic has been overshadowed, though, by the interest in her ring, or rather the disappearance of it. The photograph accompanying the interview was one that had originally appeared in Le Figaro in June, at that time complete with the ring, but this time with the ring photoshopped out. The motivations for this piece of journalistic creativity remain obscure. Was it a desire to de-bling a member of Sarkozy’s government, to detract attention from the fourth finger of her left hand, or something else? Whatever it was, it had the opposite effect.

No doubt everyone will be watching to see just who visits her next January. Mind you, she says she’ll only be taking a week’s maternity leave.

(Readers of German can also read the article in Die Welt from which the photo was taken.)

From Liberation:

Speeches, postcards, and an umbrella…

Three days of images from the heart of the Socialist Party…

And from Le Monde:

Direct from Reims: Royal slams the door, Hamon remains a candidate, Aubry and Delanoe keep quiet…

Three hours after the start of the meeting to decide which resolutions to adopt, Segolene Royal and her followers announced their departure. ‘The hand that we held out has not been grasped,’ said Royal. ‘We are taking action. I call on all the party members to choose next Thursday between a return to the methods of old, or a Socialist Party with alternative methods. The SP needs to change.’

I was interested to read in Liberation that Segolene Royal has won the Socialist Party’s endorsement of her policies. In the voting, Royal received 29%, with Aubry and Delanoe following with 25% each, and Hamon with 19%. Bertrand Delanoe, who has the support of Royal’s ex-partner Francois Hollande, is also mayor of Paris.

I’ve always liked Royal, and thought she conducted a reasonable campaign back in 2007. Stylish and assertive, she even wears heels when visiting remote farms! A good debater, she was a match for Sarkozy in their final debate, perhaps too much so, since as Adam Gopnik remarked in his article, ‘this allowed Sarkozy to look wistfully harried and play the one part that he’d never had the chance to play before–a sympathetic, erring, middle-class French husband being blasted by a furious wife.’

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I don’t think I know anyone who is not elated about Obama’s win. A friend and I watched the election results on his i-phone during an all-day meeting in Melbourne today and held our breath until the votes moved beyond the point of no return.

Obama should, however, watch out for anyone phoning with a French accent. The Masked Avengers like calling the newly-elected (as well as the too-idiotic-to-ever-be-elected) and Chirac and Sarkozy have both been pranked. See the clip below, in which Sarkozy takes a call from the ‘Canadian President’…