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’…

Campaign poster, early 2007

(Phrase of the week: avoir le vent en poupe = to be on the road to success; literally ‘to have the wind in the stern’)

Could the next FRENCH PRESIDENT be a communist? This might not be as far-fetched as it sounds, according to a report I’ve just read in Le Monde, headlined (and please correct me if my translation is wrong!): Olivier Besancenot has won credibility among left-wing sympathizers. More on this below. First some background…

As many will recall, in the French presidential elections of early 2007, Besancenot was the candidate for the LCR, the Revolutionary Communist League. A university graduate who works as a mail delivery man, in his election posters he looked about sixteen, although he’s in his early thirties (I wasn’t the only one to think he looked young; later I read another Le Monde article which described him as having a ‘chubby Tintin face’). Under this face on his election poster was the slogan, ‘Our lives are worth more than their profits’.

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