Copé and Fillon get a severe dressing down from a VERY angry journalist

Photo credit Lionel Bonaventure for AFP

Have you ever heard of Olivier Mazerolle? No? That's not surprising because until a couple of days ago he was a relatively anonymous political journalist at the French TV rolling news station BFMTV. They have modeled their presentation on Anglophone stations such as BBC World or CNN, although they are hardly known outside France.

Anyway, there he was live on BFMTV with a couple of other journalists recently and they were discussing - what else - the vaudeville political farce which is the aftermath of the UMP's election designed to designate a new party president. Copé and Fillon have accused each other via a viewer-hungry media of cheating, vote-rigging and everything else short of eating babies.

The whole country is sick of it and nobody understands all the underhand shenanigans which underpin this fight to the death, although they know full well that it's a total disgrace and a disaster for the already appalling image of French politics both at home and abroad.

Mazerolle has also had it up to here, and that explains his sudden and blistering attack on both belligerents, some of which I have translated below.

"Let's stop mucking about shall we. There's a major political problem. Nobody understands anything about that (UMP) party and nobody trusts anyone else in that party. So there's a man who says 'me I'm a former UMP General Secretary, I'm a former UMP president, I'm a former PM and I want everyoine to agree but only on the condition that you let me get on with the job and I have sufficient authority and I won't let myself be manipulated' he says. That's it, that's how it is now. Ok, right. Stop it! No I mean it, put a sock in it! Because I'm fed up to the back teeth of all this two-bit cheap French politics! I'm a journalist too and I'm tired of it all just like anybody else and I'm sick and tired of being obliged to report on all this nonsense and that's all there is to it."

Right on the button! I have often been highly critical of the French press' tendancy to kow-tow to politicians but BFMTV isn't too bad because it is much less dependent on state aid than are the state-controlled major TV stations and the big three newspapers.

So put yer' mitts together and let's have a big round of applause for the only person who has said anything worth listening to about the Copé-Fillon fight. How about if we flew them both to Corsica where we wouldn't have to listen to them any more and while we're about it - and to please Corsican independentists - we could then cut the mooring ropes and allow Corsica and its politically-toxic cargo to drift out into a Mediterranean sunset. Good riddance to bad rubbish I say...