He has handled this major crisis in French life brilliantly and simply hasn’t put a foot wrong. All his speeches have struck exactly the right note. And all this is reflected in the political ratings. His approval ratings have shot up, doubling over the past two weeks to around 40 per cent, while one poll said that 79 per cent of the French people approved of the way in which he had handled the crisis.
Mind you, long term concerns such as the high level of unemployment in France and practically non- existent economic growth have been temporarily obscured by the current crisis. That shows no signs of abating. It’s now emerged that in the attacks a fortnight ago, the Yaguel Yaacov Jewish school in Montrouge in the south of Paris was the real target, rather than the kosher supermarket, and if that had happened, events could have been a whole lot worse.
This week has seen the arrest of five Russians of Chechen descent, in the Montpellier area, and the impounding of the considerable arsenal they had; at about the same time, the French police are said to have foiled a terrorist attack in the Lyon area. So as the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, says, the city will never be the same again. The city of Paris is also reportedly going to sue Fox News in the US for saying that Paris has Muslim no-go areas.
One outcome of the recent attacks in Paris was the the man from Mali, Lassana Bathily, who saved a number of people’s lives in the siege at the kosher supermarket, was granted French citizenship at the Interior Ministry in Paris yesterday. Meanwhile, John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, has been in Paris to apologise in person for the US non- show at the big unity rally in the city nearly a fortnight ago.
While all this has been going on, President Hollande was down in Toulon to see the aircraft carrier named after General de Gaulle, set sail for a mission in the Middle East, as part of the French anti- ISIS effort. In the Middle East, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the next big regional conflict is going to be between Israel and the Lebanese- based Hezbollah group, which of course is very active in Syria in support of the Assad regime. The Israelis managed to kill an Iranian general in Syria the other day and the mere fact that they said they hadn’t meant to kill him, won’t make much difference.
Overall, it seems that the Belgian intelligence services and police are more efficient that their French counterparts, judging by the counter- terrorism operations in Belgium over the past week. And in Algeria, nearly six months after he was murdered, the body was found of Hervé Gourdel, the mountain guide from Nice. With all this talk of terrorism and attacks, the murder of a French- Armenian teenager in Marseilles the other day has gone almost unnoticed. The 16 year old, Michael Assaturyan, was an exemplary student, who had managed to get into a row over something trivial and he ended up being murdered outside the school where he studied. The Armenian community in Marseilles came together in big numbers for his funeral. Talking of Armenia, a shocking incident there the other day has gone almost totally unreported in this part of the world. A Russian soldier, serving on a Russian base in Armenia, went missing the other day; it turned out that he had shot dead six members of an Armenian family for no reason at all. A big legal tussle is going on as to whether the Russians should try him or the Armenians.
One pattern that’ s emerged from the attacks in Paris over the past fortnight is how adept the extremists are at using the latest technology. At the end of last week, the websites of a number of leading French news providers had been hacked and shut down, while another 20, 000 websites in France were also hacked and closed down. The extremists are very skilled at using social media and the Internet generally. In the meantime, the final print run on last week’ s special issue of Charlie Hebdo came to seven million. I couldn’t help but smile at the man in London who queued diligently for his copy of Charlie Hebdo and then when he got it, complained it was in French! What did he expect?
These days, many tourists report that Paris looks more like a warzone, with all the police and Army patrols. However, that shouldn’t deter visitors to France this year. There’s a simple solution - head for La France profonde, deepest rural France, where life continues uninterrupted and peaceful despite the major crisis that has assailed Paris. I noticed on Monday of this week that the new blockade of traffic by hauliers, that started on Sunday night, had led to 600 kms of traffic tailbacks. That just means France getting back to normal!
Outside France, the crisis in eastern Ukraine is being steadily ratcheted up and looks like getting a lot worse. Hardly anyone has mentioned in this part of the world that Russia has cut off the supplies of gas transiting through Ukraine, which has meant that half a dozen countries in eastern Europe have had their gas supply severed. It’s nearly a year since Russia took over the Crimea, and it’ s amazing that people in the Crimea seem oblivious to the fact that since the Russian takeover, tourism in the region has collapsed by 60 per cent, while the price of many staple food commodities has rocketed by the same amount.
Over in the US, the Mexican telecoms billionaire, Carlos Slim, has become the biggest shareholder in the New York Times- how this will affect the operations of the daily newspaper and its website remains to be seen. In the UK, several national papers, the Daily and Sunday Express, as well as the Star, seem under threat of extinction as the main interest of the management seems to be to cut costs as much as possible, rather than make any investment in editorial.
Also in the UK, there’ s been lots of coverage about the little boy in Cornwall sent a bill because he didn’t turn up for the birthday party of a school friend. The whole episode is both sad and hilarious; there was a very funny piece on Radio 4 about it the other day, when someone suggested how the birthday invitation could be rewritten to cover all the legal angles. Not quite so funny is the impending general election in the UK; one prominent forecaster the other day said that the country could end up with a three party coalition, a sure fire recipe for chaos.
Here in Ireland, the fact that the Minister for Health came out on radio the other day as gay has generated huge coverage. All things being equal, it’s something that shouldn’t have raised any interest at all. After all, it’s 22 years since homosexuality was decriminalised in Ireland but it’ s taken this long for a government minister to reveal that he’ s gay. No big deal at all, and fortunately, the public reaction was overwhelmingly positive. The Minister has a more pressing problem to deal with- the current flu vaccine being used in Ireland and elsewhere doesn’t take the current strain of flu into account, which means that the vaccine is only 25 per cent effective.
If there is good news, it tends to be swamped. The big Green Week food and agriculture fair has been on in Berlin and one of the annual rituals connected with it is the protest march. This year’s attracted some 50, 000 people, but not a word about it in this part of the world. The protesters were protesting against factory farming and the fact that the planned US/ EU free trade agreement will only intensify factory farming; that seems a very sensible debate, but like many other environmental debates, including climate change, it’ s being washed out of existence by the current news agenda.
It was very interesting to hear an audio clip the other day of the then US president, Woodrow Wilson, addressing the Paris peace conference in 1919, designed to sort out the mess left by the first world war. It did nothing of the kind, since the great powers failed to recognise the emergence of extremism in Germany or take effective action to halt its spread. All the 1919 peace conference did was lay the ground for the outbreak of the second world war a mere 20 years later. Whether anyone learned any lessons from 1919 is a very good question indeed.