In three weeks, the French go to the polls.
Has everything been said that needs to be said in this campaign? Are Sarkozy, Segolene, Bayrou or anyone else going to do something that will really surprise us and change the equation?
It's hard to imagine. And the headlines in the French press are beginning to look a bit tired... I'm even tired.
The three leaders have pretty much run all over the ideology map. Extreme and combative one moment, moderate and cosy the next. As soon as an opening is made, the other candidate is immediately there to meet it.
In other words (and I hope you're sitting down), it's very much an "American" campaign.
Because no matter what anyone says, there is no ideology guiding this one. It's a personality contest, a referendum on who is going to lead France into the great unknown. A Berlusconi-lite in Sarkozy or a modern Anne d'Autriche in Segolene Royal.
So which one will it be?
Pepsi, Coke (or maybe RC Cola)?
It's pretty ironic that the day that Jean_Louis Borloo, the architect of right-wing social policy of the heart, is to 'officialise' and maximize his support for Sarkozy, the riot breaks out in Gare de Nord, all but erasing the impact of the endorsement.
With all due respect to the commuters and shop-keepers of Paris' busiest train station who got stuck in the middle of the usual cat-and-mouse game, its just as well that this event happened. French media culture has an uncanny way of not addressing the events of November 2005, most likely because it seems so intractable. Now it is here in the day's ether and the electorate can do with it as they like.
But what seems to blow back every time, is that the problem with violence in working class neighborhoods is above all a policing one. Whether you look at the amateur video of the school round-ups last week, or the riots yesterday, the cops always seem to be stuck between freezing in place or going totally ape-shit.
The cops seem conflicted and the hoodlum kids take perfect advantage of them every time. If this is in fact true, it doesn't mean that Sarkozy's troops (until two days ago when he resigned his Minister post) are either too harsh or too timid, it just means that they're poorly trained and a little lost, which means something altogether else regarding Sarkozy.
On France Inter's lunchtime news today, a security scholar said as much. Policing in France suffers from a lack of quality, he said, not quantity.
After the French election, Senator Barak Obama should give Segolene a little phone call.
There's nothing quite like getting slammed by a veteran journalist as a rookie plagued with beginner mistakes.
The article, ridden with 'to be sures' and other such equivocating, reads like an excuse to just justify that headline, and in my mind at least, doesn't succeed. Mike Allen, the journalist, is often pilloried for such a thing.
Similarly, all through February, Segolene Royal was accused of making gaffes, and her polling numbers were brought down to earth. In hindsight, none of the accusations have stuck particularly, and she plods on her with a consistent 26 percent (the same as Mitterand got in 1981).
Barry Hussein should watch closely and see what happens.
A recent column by Roger Cohen in the Herald Tribune (sub required) ends with a quote:
"The French are tired of conventional politics," said Philippe Labro, a political commentator. "This is now about a man or a woman, about choosing who are you going to sleep with every night at 8 p.m. when the evening news begins."
It's a little pithy, but it does help address the oft-posed question for now left unanswered: What is this election really about?
In 1995, it was about the social divide, say the opinion makers. In 2002, it was about crime. What about 2007?
More than anything, (and in a way agreeing with Labro and Cohen), this election seems to be about casting. Who out of these three electables (Sego, Sarko and Bayrou), should lead the country into the great unknown.
Cohen seems to believe that the winner will take the torch and continue to reperesent 'La France" in that gaulliste, chiraquien style that makes all the world wince. Maybe so.
If Sarko wins, yes, he will make a go of it. He'll try to redo the Chirac, grandeur thing in his own image. But he's so divisive here, that legions of detractors will do everything to undermine any follies of greatness. 'La France', as Cohen calls it, will end in the blaze of battle.
Sego, if she squeaks through, will (intentionally or not) completely scramble the whole grandeur thing. The role is so tailored for a tall man in a big suit (see photo), that her very being there will be, symbolically at least, revolutionary. Segolene, whether she cops to it or not, will be the end the fifth republic, the very moment she takes office.
Bayrou? Who knows. But something tells me that Simone Veil loathes Bayrou as she does because she suspects that he's a man who could easily get lost in the whole president thing. Christophe Barbier floated it out there recently on his blog. Is there a classic Chiraquien lurking somewhere in the Bayrou phenomenon? Can that grandeur, that providentially tinged arrogance, make its way into the Centrist insurgency?
(And if you want an idea of what that arrogance may read like from the other side, the grandiloquent Simone Gbagbo, first lady of Cote d'Ivoire, has put it in a new book, where, she writes, Chirac "tried too hard to play the role of pater familias".
The Tony Soprano of francophone Africa? Who of the candidates will turn that that role down?)