Even if there still is a lot to do, you guys are at least pushing things in the right direction, rolling back, slowly, the worst excesses of the Bush presidency. Here in France, we're moving exactly in the opposite direction, with our President apparently keen to imitate the most spectacular excesses of the Bush administration, supported by an even more partial mass media.
It's sickening and it's all déja vu I guess the only hope is that the implosion of the regime will take a bit less time, and will cause slightly less collateral damage.
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First, a word on our media scene. It's even worse than in the US:
- the main TV channel, TF1, (which still captures one third of total audience every day, via a steady diet of reality TV and sports) is owned by Bouygues, France's biggest construction group, controlled by Martin Bouygues, an intimate friend of Sarkozy. TF1 has been systematically pushing a rightwing agenda in its much watched news programmes, including a lot of fearmongering. Bouygues was implicated (like most construction companies) in illegal political financing scandals in the 80s and 90s, and is regularly in the news in corruption probes, anti-cartel busts and similar news. In a country with centralised government keen on big infrasturcture, Bouygues gets a disproportionate of these and takes pain not to piss off anyone in power. Bouygues is keen to buy Areva, the currently State-owned nuclear construction group, and Sarkozy is said to be favorable to that;
- the main press group in France is Lagardère, controlled by Arnaud Lagardère, another intimate friend of Sarkozy (he calls him "my brother"), whose other big business activity is EADS - the aerospace and military company - yet another company living off the public purse. Lagardère controls a huge chunk of the publishing world, many regional papers, and has a stake in Le Monde, the French equivalent to the NYT; in the past year, Lagardère sacked the editor of Paris-Match for putting the picture of Sarkozy's wife with her lover on the front pager of that news magazine, and censored le Journal du Dimanche, another of his papers, when it got the scoop that Cécilia Sarkozy did not vote for the second round of the presidential election in May;
- the other big press group is that of Le Figaro, the main conservative daily. It is owned by Dassault, controlled by the Dassault family and proud maker of all the planes in the French airforce and other jets. They own huge chunks of the (influential) regional press, and Serge Dassault, who is a MP in Sarkozy's UMP, explicitly and openly meddles in his papers' editorial line;
- another newcomer in the sector, with a growing empire of free city papers is Vincent Bolloré, another swashbuckling raider (whose yacht welcomed Sarkozy off Malta in the week after his election last May). Bolloré is said to be keen to take over TF1 should Bouygues sell to focus on Areva.
- the two business dailies are owned one by the Financial Times, the other by Bernard Arnaud, both of luxury godds group LVMH and yet another friend of Sarkozy.
- the only big leftwing daily, Libération, is struggling financially, and was recently bailed out by Edouard de Rothschild (yes, from the eponymous bank, and yes, also a friend of Sarkozy) against the loss by the journalists of a veto right on big editorial and business decisions;
- the other big TV channels are state-owned and are not very hostile to Sarkozy (although they take their journalism a bit more seriously than TF1).
So the media is owned by billionaires friends of Sarkozy, who like to meddle in their press empires and are all heavily dependent on State orders. And Sarkozy is known to tell journalists that he'll talk to their bosses if they write up nasty stuff. There are a few independent voices, but they are not very loud.
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That said, here's how it goes.
- Sarkozy says he's going to do something populist (note: in the European meaning of the word - maybe "righteous" would be more understandable to US ears here) (yet more tightening of the laws against all sexual offenders, and talk of castrating them) or reactionary (kick immigrants out), neoliberal (cut taxes for the rich) or insane (support Bush inconditionally over Iraq or Iran) and explicitly spins it as being a straight talker (he actually loves to say things like 'let me tell it like it is' or 'you know I don't mince word', etc...);
- the press ooohs and aahs that it is so refreshing to see a man of action, willing to say unpopular things and stand by them - he is so brave, a man of conviction, etc... As usual, a focus on process rather than on the actual substance;
- quite frequently, reality intrudes and forces him to backpedal as either facts go against him, or protests call him up on his shit. For instance, the law on sexual predators has been toughened 7 times in the past 5 years of rightwing government, either directly or indirectly by him (he was minister of the interior for 4 of the past 5 years), and the measures he promises now are already on the books - except that the promulgating decrees have never been published and thus the law is not in force, or are in force but are unfunded ; recently, the Constitutional Council declared his heavily-slanted-to-the-rich tax cuts (tax deduction of interest on mortage payments for existing mortgages, not just new ones) unconstitutional ; his various diplomatic speeches have created diplomatic incidents in Africa, about Iraq's government, about the Libyan nurses where he claimed credit for European Union diplomatic efforts, with Germany for selling a nuke plant to Gaddafi without even telling them, etc...); in various instances his own ministers have said that what he was proposing was unfeasible, only to be forced to eat their own words humiliatingly;
- he then sounds off outraged that he was not elected to remain inactive, and that he will fuflill his promises, "whatever it takes", because that "what ethical politics are about" and what he is about, and he struts off yet more press conferences to announce that his word will be kept;
- the press oooohs and aaahs yet again, because it's so refreshing to see a politician caring about fulfilling his promises (forgetting that they are insane or reactionary), and enthusing about his incredible energy and presence.
Thus populist and reactionary policies become "dynamic, ground breaking and a new way to do politics". Obstacles (i.e. the real world intruding and showing how full of shit he is) are just ways for him to show that he is a fighter annd a man of principles. And the press goes along.
If this sounds like 2002 or 2003 in the USA, well, it is. Which is not flattering for us, but goes on to show that man without scruples can easily abuse democratic systems that don't expect it.
In our case, though, we don't even have the excuse of a traumatic event like 9/11 to rally the population around the President.
As an extenuating factor, one can note the permanent neoliberal economic discourse, which is structurally anti-French and anti-European (but is repeated by our own business elites in our media), and the financial bubble running amok and temporarily making London apeear to be the hottest place around (for millionaires) and France apparently stagnant and full of losers, but still, it's pretty depressing to see the same patterns happen.
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Of course, you might want to believe the George Will version:
In Mr. Sarkozy's book "Testimony," he notes that 30 years ago Britain had a GDP 25 percent lower than that of France. Now Britain's is 10 percent higher. What happened? Margaret Thatcher did. But although Mr. Sarkozy vows a "rupture" with the past, he is not bold enough to affirm an affinity with her and to seriously challenge the consensus at the root of France's social sclerosis: Both left and right reject economic liberalism, the left because of its regnant socialism, the right because it regards statism as a prerequisite for national greatness.