Chacun a son vie

By Carl 

Here is the difference between the U.S. and France in a nutshell:

French President Francois Hollande has said he is experiencing a "difficult moment" in his private life, following claims of an affair with an actress. 

But he refused to answer questions over the report, saying "private matters should be dealt with privately". 

Mr Hollande was speaking at his first news conference since the allegations in the magazine Closer last week. 

He said he would clarify whether Valerie Trierweiler was still first lady before a February trip to the US. 

Can you imagine if Bill Clinton had said that as president? He did say something similar – while still denying the allegations of an affair with Gennifer Flowers – as a candidate but that was when he was barely a blip on the primary calendar in 1992.  

The stereotype of a successful Frenchman having at least one mistress in a pied-à-terre overlooking the Seine is legendary, and mostly accepted by the French with good humor. After all, this is a nation with a long history of monarchs and nobility with legendary prowess at bedding women, most notably the exploits of Casanova. 

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Vive la France! Down with Texas!

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Progress is on the march. In countries like Portugal and, of course, France:

France's president has signed into law a controversial bill making the country the ninth in Europe, and 14th globally, to legalise gay marriage.

On Friday, the Constitutional Council rejected a challenge by the right-wing opposition, clearing the way for Francois Hollande to sign the bill.

He said: "I have taken [the decision]; now it is time to respect the law of the Republic."

It wasn't easy:

Mr Hollande and his ruling Socialist Party have made the legislation their flagship social reform since being elected a year ago.

After a tortured debate, the same-sex marriage and adoption bill was adopted by France's Senate and National Assembly last month.

The bill was quickly challenged on constitutional grounds by the main right-wing opposition UMP party of former president Nicolas Sarkozy.

But the Constitutional Council ruled on Friday that same-sex marriage "did not run contrary to any constitutional principles," and that it did not infringe on "basic rights or liberties or national sovereignty".

Indeed, while France is a generally progressive country (e.g., on health care), the right is still very strong, with conservatives well to the right of Sarkozy, and issues like gay rights and immigration prove to be deeply divisive.

Still, it's done, a victory for liberty and equality (and, for that matter, fraternity), and that's more than you can say about the U.S., which includes retrograde states like Texas:

A Republican Texas Judge has ordered a lesbian couple to live apart or give up custody of their children. According to Think Progress, Judge John Roach of McKinney, Texas has given Page Price 30 days to move out of the home she shares with Carolyn Compton and Compton's two children from a previous marriage because he does not approve of Compton and Price's "lifestyle."

Roach has placed a "morality clause" in Compton's divorce papers, which forbids Compton from having anyone she is not related to "by blood or marriage" in her home past 9:00 p.m. if the children are present. Same sex marriage is illegal in Texas, so by law, Compton cannot live with Price if she wishes to retain custody of her children.

That's not Saudi Arabia, that's Texas. And that's right, this bigot of a judge, reinforcing the bigotry of that state, is denying this woman her liberty and her equality (and, for that matter, her fraternity).

Truly, utterly shameful.

What to expect from François Hollande

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As you know, François Hollande won the French presidency yesterday with a second-round run-off win over incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy.

It was close. Hollande received the most votes in the first round, held on April 21-22, but fell well short of a majority, winning 28.63 percent of the vote. Sarkozy was second with 27.18, followed by National Front leader Marine le Pen with 17.90. Fourth was leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon with 11.10, fifth was right-leaning centrist François Bayrou with 9.13. Five other candidates received at least 0.25 percent of the vote. (Check out the map, color-coded by commune winner, here.)

(I was actually in France on holiday on April 21-22. It didn't feel like an election was going on, maybe because everyone was expected a run-off. Very low-key, some small billboards here and there with the faces of the major candidates.)

Basically, the right won more votes than the left in the first round, but while most of the left coalesced behind Hollande, Sarkozy didn't pick up enough of le Pen's support to put him over the top. (To be fair, it was a tough task for the president, as he had to move right in a hurry to appeal to the fascists while also trying to secure more of the center from Bayrou.) The second-round result was Hollande 51.67, Sarkozy 48.33.

Now... Sarkozy is center-right, both pro-American and pro-German, and generally supportive of the austerity measures that are supposed to solve Europe's fiscal crisis, while Hollande is a socialist. So what can we expect from the new president? What will change?

As the Times reports, "Hollande campaigned on a gentler and more inclusive France, but his victory will also be seen as a challenge to the German-dominated vision of economic austerity as a way out of the euro crisis." That's certainly the case, and the vote was very much a repudiation of Sarkozy on a number of fronts (objections to his fiscal conservatism, to his pro-American and pro-German views, and to him personally) to his efforts to appeal to the far right), and what we'll likely see in Hollande at least early on is more of a counterweight to Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel (and the elite banking community that is driving the European fiscal policy that so many, and not just the Greeks, find so loathsome). France will also see some major policy changes: "Domestically, he has promised to raise taxes on big corporations and raise the tax rate to 75 percent for those earning more than one million euros a year."

But let's be clear. There's only so much Hollande can do, and only so much he'll be willing to do. He's no Sarkozy-Merkel conservative, of course, but he's still an advocate for fiscal restraint, campaigning on a pledge to balance the budget within five years. And ultimately the bankers still run Europe, just as they do the United States. Hollande will have to strike some sort of delicate balance between his base and the economic elite if he hopes to hold on to power. He did, after all, only win 51.67 percent of the national vote.

Whatever the case, it was clearly time for Sarkozy to go, and in voting for Hollande the French people, while divided, have joined the growing chorus of opposition to the right-wing fiscal and economic policies that have dominated Europe in recent years. It's not clear if Hollande can bring meaningful, lasting change even to his own country, let alone the EU, nor is it clear what such change would even mean (though more progressive taxation would be a good start), but one can at least be hopeful at the dawn of what we hope is a new era in French and hopefully European politics.

This Is What A Socialist Looks Like

By Carl 

Francois Hollande scratched out a victory over Nikolas Sarkozy yesterday in the French elections.

I say "scratched out," because a three point victory over a wildly unpopular president is not exactly a drubbing, but it's also not exactly a close call.

Elected, Sarkozy showed himself to be a canny political card player. There was, for example, “l'ouverture” – Sarkozy's carefully-targeted effort to dismantle the Socialist Party by recruiting some of its brightest lights into Sarkozy's new right-wing government as ministers and senior officials. This cut the Socialist Party's leadership off at the knees, demoralized its membership, appropriated some of its best talent, reframed Sarkozy as a big-tent president who would govern for all the French – and left him perfectly free to pursue his policies exactly as he intended to do, validated by some of his most dangerous opponents. Demonstrating, as has occurred many times in politics in many countries before and since (in Britain, in the fate of the Liberal Democrats, for example), that weaving opponents into your team is an excellent way to defeat them.

However, the collapse of the world financial bubble and then the socialization of its losses (one of the greatest transfers of wealth from the poor to the rich in world history) removed the raison d’être of the Sarkozy presidency. In this, it can be said that France dodged a bullet. The country was lucky that it elected Sarkozy relatively late in the era of the madness of the rentiers. He didn't have time to turn France into, say, Ireland or Iceland. And so France was spared the worst. Sarkozy then attempted to reframe himself as the opposite of himself, but it never rang true. He was never a credible "social market" builder. 

Despite his best efforts, Sarkozy could not wheel France around into a mini-America fast enough before the people realized what happened. Vive la France et les Francais.

Sarkozy leaves behind a mess of xeonophobia, of angry workers and young people, and at best a muddled political party with a flimsy and loosely-knit message to oppose the Socialists.

This sentiment has repercussions far beyond the French borders, of course. As a member of the EU and with Sarkozy one of the most influential figures in that Union, the anti-austerity forces can now point to France as a main reason why attempts to shore up flagging economies by imposing "order and discipline" (read that as tax cuts for the rich and services cuts for everyone else).

Indeed, the concurrent elections in Greece, which brutalized the political center, reinforce this perception. 

Que la France va, ainsi va l'Europe. And as Europe goes, so goes America. Think about it. 

After all, it was the French Revolution that truly brought power to the people (the American Revolution brought power to the people who were wealthy white land owners, but that changed after the French Revolution filtered through Europe) which toppled dynasties and empires up and down the continent (eventually) and it was Europe's reaction to the Great Depression that eventually saw America get Social Security and other social programs designed specifically for the working classes. 

It's a clear signal to the world that the left has stirred and is beginning to flex its muscles, en masse. The election of Barack Obama as a reaction to the conservatism of the Bush administration -- it's no surprise conservatives abandoned Bush in 2008 -- Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and now the first real round of elections in Europe since the economic crisis concretized have shown that people are tired of conservatives bleatings of lower taxes and less for the people.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)