11February
Prospect Magazine has begun an English-language blog on the presidential elections. To summarise the events this week:
* The candidates are out of touch.
* Is Bayrou profiting from disillusionment with the Parisian ruling class? Sarko and Ségo are irrelevant: with 11 weeks still to run, already they cease to surprise.
* Ségolène talks about her cleavage, and satire writers across the world say, Who? Such are the problems of being a candidate for French president, against the puppet head of the terrorist regime across the pond. One is a responsible job that very efficiently kills people (Mitterand, Pompidou Centre) or drives them scatty (de Gaulle, Chirac) through over-work; the other is only held by people who were already two baguettes short of a boulangerie.
Er, back to the actual speech, and Mme. Royal (for it is she) is trying to propose a Second Way, cleaving to the old, left-versus-right nonsense.
* Le Pen, Bové told to go. An opinion poll suggests that the FN and Radical Green candidates should not stand, allowing the contest to reduce to its logical three corners: the red, the mad, and the man in the middle.
Mme. Royal will explain exactly what she stands for in a speech this afternoon. Don't expect to see more than a few highlights on the domestic news programmes. Instead, far more attention is being paid to the posturing of Mr. Barack Obama, a career politician from the Illinois province. In the bizarre nomenclature of that part of the world, Mr. Obama - born in Hawaii, educated in Indonesia, representing Chicagou - describes himself as African, believing that he can inherit this from his Kenyan-born father. We will contend no such claim, and point out that the first African-American to live at 1600 Pennsylvania-avenue is Mrs. Theresa Heinz-Kerry, the Mozambique-born wife of the current resident.
