Symptomatic of this French decline is the big new Chinese investment into the car maker, Peugeot. Without this Chinese money, Peugeot could be heading for the exit door. French money and know-how alone has been unable to save Peugeot. A further symptom of this decline comes with the continuing turmoil at Libération, the left wing daily newspaper. The man who had been its most recent editor, for the past three years, Nicholas Demorand, has now resigned. It’s generally admitted the paper is in deep crisis; whether it survives is anyone’s guess. When he resigned, Demorand said that several times during his tenure of office, he thought the paper would have to close because of falling sales.
Now there are reports that Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, is going to Berlin on February 28th for a secret meeting with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. Why they are meeting is anyone’s guess, but the popular money is on Sarkozy trying to get back into the French presidency in 2017. Meanwhile, Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, who is held in something approaching esteem and affection by many in the electorate who are still wondering why on earth they elected Francois Hollande president, is back in hospital. This time, it’s gout, and he’s in the American Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine.
The current mood in France is so downbeat that it’ll be interesting to see the outcome of the municipal elections on March 23rd and 30th. The odds are still on the Front Nationale coming out as top dog, causing an upset similar to the recent one in Switzerland, where voters narrowly voted in favour of tighter controls on people from the EU coming to live and work in their country. And talking of EU matters, I suspect that the referendum outcome in Scotland in September, on whether or not the country is going to become independent, is far closer that anyone suspects. It’s a fascinating contest that shows all the signs of becoming ever more heated over the next few months. The mere fact that many big businesses, like Tesco, are dead against Scotland becoming independent, will encourage many people to vote in favour of independence.
Apart from the French municipal elections, there’s much interest in the contest at the same time for the mayor of Paris. For the first time, the contest is between two women candidates, excellent news in the generally febrile all male atmosphere of French politics. The Socialist Party candidate is Anne Hildalgo, who is 54 and who should be a run-in for the job, as she’s already a deputy mayor. She’s up against a much younger candidate, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, conveniently known for short as NKM, who’s 14 years younger, at 40. But she represents the right wing UMP or Union for a Popular Movement party. Whether Parisian voters want to move right rather than left is a very moot point, so it’ll be interesting to see the outcome. Current polls suggest that Hollande is fast losing ground to those who are to the left of him. But whoever wins, it will be a breath of very fresh air to see a woman running the great city of Paris.
Such is the antagonism in political debate these days that recently, a politician struck a new low when describing a political journalist. Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, president of the Debout de le République party, called Frédéric Haziza “une merde integrale”. Nothing like being called an integrated shit!
But at least, there’s something coming up in Paris that should generate a lot of public interest. The Petit Palais, officially the Paris Museum of Fine Arts, is staging a big exhibition from the beginning of April until August, commemorating Paris in the year 1900, the year of the Exposition Universelle. It may have been a mere 14 years before the start of the First World War, but Paris in 1900 was abuzz with strong cultural vibes and creativity, in contrast to the dulled down Paris of 2014.
Down south, two traditional events are well under way, the 130th Carnival in Nice, which this year has actor Gérard Depardieu as the very fitting king of the carnival, while in Menton, the annual lemon festival is under way. The Cote d’Azur is getting over its recent exceptional spell of bad weather. But that bad weather in France over the past year or two, helped by plentiful pesticides, has meant a huge drop in the bee population. Nearly 20 years ago, 33,000 tonnes of honey was being produced annually in France, while by last year, that figure had dropped to 15,000.
Here in Ireland, the dreadful weather in recent weeks has resulted in severe flooding in many communities in the west, south and south-east of Ireland, with the usual government response showing all the zest of a constipated elephant. On the Birr Castle estate in the Irish midlands, a 200 year old grey poplar tree, that had just been nominated as Ireland’s entry for the 2014 European tree of the year, contest, blew down in all the gales.
There’s also much concern about the fate of the Paris Bakery in Moore Street in central Dublin. Moore Street is where fresh food has long been sold by street vendors, whose patois is part of Dublin’s cultural fabric. The bakery in question has built up to the point where it’s aregular supplier to Starbucks and employs 70 people. But now it looks as if the building it’s in is going to be knocked down to help make way for some ridiculous Celtic Tiger era shopping mall and the official response to the closure of the bakery and the loss of those jobs is pathetic to say the least. No-one in officialdom seems to be making the slightest effort to put matters right and the government, which trumpets every new factory or office setting up, seems totally indifferent to job caused caused by developments taking place with the help of Nama, an official body set up to deal with Ireland’s toxic property investment market.
I suspect that politicians right across Europe, faced with political indifference by the established parties,to the many woes the continent faces,are going to get a very rude awakening in the elections over the next few months, including the municipal elections in France next month, the general election in Hungary in April, the onward and upward progress of UKIP in the UK and the European parliament elections in May. Rough times lie ahead and I’m not just talking about the weather!