FRENCH ELECTION: HOLLANDAISE
Posted by Anthony Lane

What was self-evident, as he took the stage last night, buoyant with smiles, was not that François Hollande needs more iron in his soul. He needs an iron. Has there ever been a baggier head of state? The tie was loosened at the top; the white shirt looked like an aerial view of the Alps.

(...)

You could hardly blame Hollande, on an evening officially set aside for love and joy, if he neglected to mention, except in passing, the large and extremely fractious gorilla, better known as the public debt, that is clinging to France's back. To do so would have been in poor taste. Wiser and more soothing, surely, to do what the French do more efficiently than all peoples, and float heavenward in a mood of rare abstraction. "Austerity cannot be a fatality," the new President said, poising between a principle and a pledge. But nicety can be an enormity, and what is rippling through Europe right now is the apprehension that France, with a novice at the helm, will veer aside from the stringent course laid down by the governments of the Eurozone; in short, that Hollande will boost and bolster where others have struggled to pare, and perhaps, in so doing, set a continental trend. For campaigning purposes, such beneficence was ideal. Sixty thousand new teaching posts to be created, for example: who could argue with that? If you were a parent, perturbed by the size of your child's class at school, why would you not vote for such a program? The only possible comeback must be offered, sotto voce, by a killjoy: "Who will pay?"

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 Best of all was his stated ambition to "reach budgetary equilibrium by the horizon of 2017." That's the great thing about horizons: the nearer you get, the further they recede, into the endless mist.
Hollande did not stay long. He looked brave and pale, as you would if you had just looked in your diary and realized that your first major appointment was with Angela Merkel.

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Then there is Martine Aubry, who may well be Hollande's choice for Prime Minister and who, in 2010, openly compared Sarkozy, in his handling of the public finances, to Bernie Madoff. Has there been, in the astonishing chorale of vituperation directed at Sarkozy--at his unabashed pro-Americanism, his enjoyment of the Presidential trappings, his perceived otherness, or un-Frenchness--a reedy note of anti-Semitism? (One of his grandparents was Jewish.) Hard to pin down; what can be said, at least, is that some of the vocabulary in which it was couched would have sat all too easily in the mouths of anti-Dreyfusards, in 1899.
And what of the forty-eight per cent of French people who did vote for Sarkozy--the losers, the sober, and the believers in what he liked to call "real work?"

Barf.
And that's supposed to be witty, I guess.

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