PARIS - Energized French voters chose Nicolas Sarkozy as their new president on Sunday, giving the U.S.-friendly conservative a comfortable margin for victory and a mandate for change, result projections from four polling agencies showed. His Socialist opponent conceded minutes after polls closed.- Polls: Sarkozy elected French president
I think my favorite line about the election (from another article) was one where Sarkozy was quoted as calling Iraq a “mistake” whereas Royal called it a “disaster.” The French idea of conservative is certainly already less far right than that of in the states*. That being said, from what little I knew of the election (mostly via Snoow), I was definitely crossing my fingers for Royal. Apparently, crossing my fingers had little effect.
* The French apparently typically refer to the US’s political parties as the right and the far right.
6 comments:
Let's say that with Sarkozy a strong right (the one who's flirting with the far right) won… It is the first time in France that such a right wins… And for me or for snoow (I guess…) it is a strong desillusion…
My feeling tonight is a mix of sadness and anxiety…
We have polls in one month to elect our representants, but with little hope it changes anything… And then, Sarkozy and his friends will have the country for themselves for 5 years…
5 difficult years I think, with strikes, perhaps riots (some people are already fighting the police tonight, as I write…).
A night like this one, I'm not really proud and happy to be french : more than half of the people voted for "him", for a man who wants to destroy anything that has been won for 60 years… He's not conservative, he is worse
Fear encourages people to vote more conservatively. Conservative politicians have long been aware of this.
You are so right…
Sarkozy describes Frane as a country stuck in a huge crisis (moral, economic, national), threatened by hords of people who want to illegly immigrate, like an invsion. His solutions ? To restrain personnal freedoms for the citizen, to prevent immigration (a thing never done here… ) and reactivate protectionnism.
He always plays with the fear of the future. In a way, he offers himself, no, he sacrifices himself, for the country. He's like a "Super Daddy" and it works. It makes me mad !
And the harder : we had this opportunity to really give a chance to a new wy to make poitics. Sarkozy's opponent, Ségolène Royal tried to make things differently. She believed in a more direct democracy, in which the citizen could express himself, she believed that every politician should give accounts for his actions in front of "popular jurys", she believed France was a welcoming and opened country…
The fact that she was a woman was a sign of modernity : never in all the french history a woman could be elected President. The way it is seen here : France and the president are like a couple. The France is the bride and the prresident the husband… The women have the right to vote since 1945 only, we only had one woman as prime minister for 9 months and very few women have strong responsability positions.
I'll stop here, I'm so disgusted, but have to go to work (life goes on, as they say…)
But USA should rejoice : Bush and his gang had won a strong friend in Western Europe, one who wont have turned an offer of assistance to invade Irak…
I'm becoming ironical, am I not ?
A very sad thing just happened to France.
- Hate and fear of the other will be our new motto.
- Our great tradition of secularity and separation of state and church will be dismantled.
- Our foreign policy will be a catastrophy (especially on the middle east and also on Africa)
- We will no longer have any public services (The number of civil workers will be divided by 2)
- The rich will have their taxes diminished while nothing will change for lower classes.
The good news is that I leave France next year for the UK.
I'm really sorry to hear about the elections... your reactions sound so similar to those that I had when Bush was elected (both times).
In a way, we have just elected out Bush, our Berlusconi, our Aznar, our Thatcher…
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