Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

Seeing as SuperFrenchie thinks I’m “just” anti-French, I thought I’d redress the balance a little and point out one area where the UK is anti-European too.

I was in getting my driving license renewed last week which is something of a hit and miss affair as the explanatory leaflet leaves a LOT to be desired in clarity. Even though the thing was in English and, one would assume therefore that I’d understand it, the opening paragraph on what proof of ID was required was totally incomprehensible and appeared to be totally wrong too.

It opens by saying that if you have a colour photograph on your existing driving license then you don’t need to have someone certify your photograph nor to present a passport. Except, that when my father presented his renewal application complete with his old driving license with colour photo, they wouldn’t renew it without his passport.

It then goes on to say that you always need to have your photo certified yet they happily renewed mine with only my passport.

Then it says “digital photographs are not acceptable” yet they DO accept them, mainly because all of the photobooth machines only produce digital photos these days.

The best bit is perhaps their definition of residency. Despite living in France for three years, I still qualify for a Northern Ireland driving license as, according to their definition, I am still resident there!

However, none of that’s anti-European….

Whilst we were there, one of the increasing number of Polish immigrants arrived to exchange his license for a Northern Ireland one. In theory, he doesn’t actually need to change it at all but the lady in the office reckoned that he had to change it within six months (anti-European point 1). He presented his Polish ID card. Not acceptable: we need a passport (anti-European point 2) which isn’t actually what it says on their website. What she said he needed was to have his photo certified by someone in Northern Ireland who knew him for two years.

Emmm, so he MUST change his driving license within six months and, because you won’t take his valid ID card, he must find someone in Northern Ireland who knew him 18 months before he arrived?

Although Bayrou appears to be in third place, the peculiarities of the two stage electoral process in France mean that he’s the candidate with the greatest potential majority in the second stage, assuming that he gets through the first stage of course. It seems that the candidates in France have had a similar analysis of the voting possibilities to our own and are adjusting their approaches accordingly.

As reported in the Financial Times, this has already had a considerable impact on socialist thinking with an unsigned manifesto in Le Point calling for quite a radical rethinking of socialist policies. In effect, this would represent the realignment of socialism in France that happened with socialism elsewhere in Europe some years ago. Will that realignment happen this time around? I suspect not as there seems very little time before the election now and I can’t really see such a change being one that the electorate would believe.

To an outsider Sarkozy doesn’t seem to need that radical shift in ideology required by Segolene in that he runs what appears to be a very modern party with equally up to date policies. A few weeks ago I thought that his approach would be a little too radical for France at this time but apparently not if the polls are to believed. It does seem though that it’s now even more important that he aims to knock Bayrou out of the race at this point.

What about Bayrou in all this? In many ways it seems as though he is likely to win not so much as a positive statement by the electorate but rather as a vote against the other two candidates which is, of course, exactly what happened last time around when Chriac came up against Le Pen in the second round. The difference this time around is that Bayrou seems to be a realistic possibility in the eyes of the electorate and perhaps we will be referring to him as President Bayrou in just a few months time. If they’re lucky perhaps he will even deliver that “third way” that the French often seem so keen on having but have never quite managed.

The French presidential election is a two stage process which creates almost a horse race approach to the presentation of statistics from the various polls.

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.