The unrest in France’s impoverished immigrant suburbs has dominated the country’s presidential campaign, leaving voters to wonder just what it means now to be French. nyt
Jane Kramer's Letter from Europe for the New Yorker:
There were no pleasantries, no little attempts at conversation, just Sarkozy’s right foot tapping on the floor and a look on his face that said, Don’t waste time. I asked him to tell me what was wrong with France. “Work,” he said. “In this country, work isn’t encouraged, it has no value. We’re in a crisis that comes from a very false idea of solidarity—the idea that you have to give as much to the person who doesn’t work as to the one who does. The élites have been wrong about this for decades. They have betrayed the idea of equality and given us egalitarianism.” I brought up the grim projects across the ring roads of every French city—hundreds of neighborhoods where young people are so disaffected and angry that the police are reluctant to enter, and where Sarkozy himself is largely unwelcome to campaign. “The voters there aren’t scared of me,” he said. “They are the ones who ask me to do something. Why else am I in first place in the polls? I have been interior minister for five years. I am efficient. I get things done. I say this in my campaign: the risk isn’t change, the risk is to refuse change.”
Christopher Hitchens deconstructs The Pen at Slate:
"The surprise "centrist" figure in the contest, Francois Bayrou, is an upper-crust Catholic from the elite ranks of Giscard d'Estaing's rump conservative faction. The front-runner, Nicolas Sarkozy, is a "law-and-order" hard-liner who promises to get tough with young Muslim slum-dwellers and rioters. The superficially glamorous Socialist, Segolene Royal, who got the nomination only by forcefully repudiating her party's Old Left, has pitched herself as the spokeswoman for the holy trinity of the tricolor, the Marseillaise, and Joan of Arc. M. Le Pen smirks broadly and says that everyone is moving his way in one form or another."
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Jane Kramer's Letter from Europe for the New Yorker:
There were no pleasantries, no little attempts at conversation, just Sarkozy’s right foot tapping on the floor and a look on his face that said, Don’t waste time. I asked him to tell me what was wrong with France. “Work,” he said. “In this country, work isn’t encouraged, it has no value. We’re in a crisis that comes from a very false idea of solidarity—the idea that you have to give as much to the person who doesn’t work as to the one who does. The élites have been wrong about this for decades. They have betrayed the idea of equality and given us egalitarianism.” I brought up the grim projects across the ring roads of every French city—hundreds of neighborhoods where young people are so disaffected and angry that the police are reluctant to enter, and where Sarkozy himself is largely unwelcome to campaign. “The voters there aren’t scared of me,” he said. “They are the ones who ask me to do something. Why else am I in first place in the polls? I have been interior minister for five years. I am efficient. I get things done. I say this in my campaign: the risk isn’t change, the risk is to refuse change.”
more here...
Christopher Hitchens deconstructs The Pen at Slate:
"The surprise "centrist" figure in the contest, Francois Bayrou, is an upper-crust Catholic from the elite ranks of Giscard d'Estaing's rump conservative faction. The front-runner, Nicolas Sarkozy, is a "law-and-order" hard-liner who promises to get tough with young Muslim slum-dwellers and rioters. The superficially glamorous Socialist, Segolene Royal, who got the nomination only by forcefully repudiating her party's Old Left, has pitched herself as the spokeswoman for the holy trinity of the tricolor, the Marseillaise, and Joan of Arc. M. Le Pen smirks broadly and says that everyone is moving his way in one form or another."
more here...
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