‘I want Sarkozy to be right’
31 March 2007
Theodore Dalrymple, who lives in France, says that the presidential frontrunner faces an awesome range of problems — unsettlingly similar to those that will confront the Prime Minister unlucky enough succeed Gordon Brown
Les Vans
During the height of the Dreyfus affair, a cartoon appeared depicting the setting of a bourgeois dinner party before and after it had taken place. Afterwards, the room was wrecked, as if a platoon of marauding soldiers had passed through it. The problem was that the guests had talked about the affair.
The current French election is a little like this. The word Sarko is enough to raise the temperature and the heart rate at any family gathering. He is the best of men; he is the worst of men. He is a true patriot; he is an unscrupulous opportunist. He is the only hope; he is a dictator in the wings.
The word Ségolène, on the other hand, has the opposite effect, a little like the tranquillisers that the French take in larger doses than any other nation in the world. Everyone, even those intending to vote for her, agrees that she is a nonentity, with not an idea in her head, even if she is an ambitious nonentity. These days, and not only in France, ideas and ambition are incompatible.
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