Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

Recently, France24 asked me (along with, no doubt, thousands of others) to contribute to a blog portraying the upcoming French presidential election as seen from the eyes of commentators overseas and I contributed my piece on Royal which they subsequently published. My article on Chirac even managed to hold its place as lead story on the site throughout March 12th and was picked up on their broadcasts too thus giving me my 2 seconds of fame.

What most impresses me about all this is that, seemingly for the first time, France is asking the rest of the world what they think of the events in France.

Obviously the presidential election is very much an internal matter for France. However, who the French president is matters outside France: how France reacts on the international stage will be very different depending on whether it’s Sarkozy, Royal or Bayrou as president. So it’s important that this election receives the exposure that it deserves worldwide and not just in France.

France24 itself seems symbolic of this new spirit of outreach through its decision to have a large proportion of its output in English and hopefully it will continue to reach out and pull us anglophones into its circle.   

Chirac has presided over a range of fairly high profile controversies since beginning with his authorisation of the nuclear tests in the Pacific just after his election in 1995. Just two years later he tried to manipulate the electoral process by dissolving the parliament and forcing an election at an opportune time for his own party though, such was the opposition to this action, he ended up weakening his powerbase.

Unexpectedly facing Le Pen in the second round of elections in 2002, he naturally had a landslide victory. The defeat of the European constitution in 2005 was quite a blow both to him and other nations in Europe. As with the nuclear tests in 1995, he typically followed solely the interests of France in opposing the war with Iraq. Also seemingly typical of French politicians, he withdrew the proposed First Employment Contract (Contrat Première Embauche or CPE) in the face of widespread student protests against this move to make it easier to both hire and fire young people.

On the whole, I think he will be remembered as one of the most typically French politicians. He seemed to consider only the interests of France abroad and followed (on the whole) the desires (if not always the needs) of the French people within the country.

Although it seemed likely that he would lose the election had he stood this time around, he seemed to recognise in his speech that France needs a different type of leadership in the future, one that begins to consider more completely France’s place in Europe and that takes a firmer stand on necessary policy changes.

The French author of the, largely, anti-American blog SuperFrenchie called us anti-France in a recent post.

As usual, he takes an aggressive tone but let’s look at what we’ve said here in the past.

We criticised the local education system for choosing not to educate children who don’t speak fluent French at age16 and not providing any means for those children to learn French. Are we right to be critical? Yes. Are we just wanting France to be like the UK? No, because most European countries provide these facilities for immigrants ie we think France should be more European.

We said that the French need to start using toilets. They are the only country I know where you can’t drive for a day without seeing someone peeing beside the road. It gives France a bad image and that’s why we’re critical of this practice.

We’ve been critical of French labour laws because they limit employment for the French. These days service type companies can work nearly anywhere and thoses jobs will just flow away from France if the employment laws don’t change which can’t be good for France.

We’re critical too of the really bad customer service in France. It’s not that we want France to be more like the UK but more like everywhere else in the world. The French do themselves a great dis-service by not demanding more.

I don’t think we’ve said yet but we’re also critical of the practice of French politicians always backing down in the face of any protests. As we said recently this gets the people what they want, which is often not what they need.

Of course, SuperFrenchie goes on to take quotes out of context as when he says that we’ve said things when we’re just quoting one of the election candidates.

So, yes, we are critical of France in a number of areas but we praise it too. I think it’s sad that we’re not writing this on a souped up version of Minitel and that, in general, France didn’t look outside the country to sell that and other French developed technology. For that matter, it’s a shame that we aren’t all using the Dvorak keyboard layout.

As we said recently, being critical of the government does’t make you anti the country because if it did then all politicians would be classed as being against their country. After all, their job is to change things.

Ordinarily the ill-will between America and France simply passes us by but with venturing out into blog-land a more than usual of late I’m that little bit more conscious of it from seeing the likes of the ever present anti-American sentiments of SuperFrenchie (ironically living in America).

That makes it more unusual to read of the thoughts of Nicolas Sarkozy who is very much pro-America and, in many ways, against seemingly core beliefs of his native France.

He is openly critical of the anti-work ethic of the French and the related anti-capitalism too. For him, the holding back of the entrepreneurs through excessive regulation and taxes has merely served to enpoverish everyone.

On the whole he would seem to be the ideal selection for France but his ideas run so much contrary to the cozy status-quo that I just can’t see him getting elected when there’s the opportunity to elect Royal and get even deeper into that spiralling cycle of increased regulation, benefits and taxes.

Perhaps next time around it will be his turn but by then the social costs of the turnaround from Royal’s policies will be enormous.

Belfast has always had a slightly rural feel about it. The countryside isn’t far from anywhere in the town and you can almost always see the green fields that surround the city. In other ways too it has never been terribly cosmopolitan with nightlife being relatively quiet for many years.

All that is changing though. For a number of years the nightlife has been getting considerably more lively and the city centre remains busy in the evenings these days with the increasing number of nightclubs and the like opening around the city not to mention the massive increase in city centre apartments that have been constructed over the last ten years or so.

A striking example that I found in my recent trip was the appearance of Anna Lo’s face on an election poster. You’d never have seen her before not because there was discrimination against non-whites here but rather because there weren’t any non-whites. Yet another welcome indication of the settling in of peace.