Gérard Depardieu isn't the only 'shabby' individual in France

"Who art the shabbiest Sire, ye or I?"

Gérard Depardieu is (was?) one of France's best-paid actors. His long career has seen him perform in 170 films and pick up two Césars for best actor as well as a Goden Globe for best actor and many other awards at film festivals around the world. The other side of the coin is his fiery personality and reputation as a heavy drinker, which have often led to some rather unflattering headlines along the lines of 'Depardieu urinates on floor in airliner/punches a photographer/crashes his scooter whilst drunk.' In other words, he is a rather singular man.

Enter the Hollande administration with its promises to tax the rich at 75%, introduce stiff new taxes for businesses and adopt a populist anti-rich stance, all of which were designed to extend Hollande's 'honeymoon period' after being elected. This policy has resulted in an exodus of wealthy French businessmen and others, who have left for kinder economic climes, taking their money with them and thus rendering the whole exercise relatively self-defeating. But no matter, the hunt for the rich is on and the government hopes that the public will notice and approve of its actions.

Depardieu joined the long queue to leave and eventually bought a house in a small town in Belgium just next to the French border. His decision resulted in a barrage of criticism from the government which reached boiling point last week when PM Jean-Marc Ayrault called his actions 'rather shabby', and incensed Socialists are now calling for people like Depardieu who leave the country for tax reasons to be stripped of their French nationality and made to pay a hefty 'exit tax.' Hollande has even gone so far as to bully his smaller Belgian neighbour and ask it to start taxing its rich residents more heavily.

Depardieu finally responded to the heavy flak today in an irony-laden open letter in the French press in which he denounces Ayrault's remarks, says that the government's anti-rich policies are punishing "success, creation and talent" in France and angrily declares that  he's sending his French passport back to the government in protest, giving up his French nationality, and forfeiting his rights to Social Security aid.

Now I am no fan of Depardieu believe you me, be it his acting or his personality, and his actions do indeed remind one of 'rats leaving the sinking ship' but this affair does at least have the merit of cristallising the ugly undercurrent of venimous class sentiment which has begun to permeate French society over the last year or so.

Things were bad enough under Sarkozy, when the country almost had a nervous breakdown so obssessed were the French about the polarising effect he was believed to be having on the country. This is why the French didn't so much elect Hollande as evict Sarkozy. They would have voted for your alcoholic neighbour as long as he or she was anti-Sarkozy.

But the atmosphere has become even worse since, and the current administration seems to be intent on using the rich as their whipping boy, their scapegoat for all that is wrong with the country. Of  course the rich deserve some stiff scriticism as well as more taxes and stricter laws on finance - after all, we're all paying more so why not them? - but the current and heavy-handed clumsy witch-hunt approach is not working, the public knows it, and it won't extend Hollande's honeymoon for long.

Take the vindictive words of the government's class-warfare militant and Minister for Industrial Renewal Arnaud Montebourg who, during the recent negotiations over the future of the Florange Steelworks and its jobs, acrimoniously declared that the company who owns them, Mittal, "was not welcome in France", that it "lied" habitually, that it owed "astronomical' sums of money to the taxman (without offering any evidence for either) and that "we don't want Mittal in France any more." He went on to unilaterally announce that the government would renationalise the site.

Montebourg and other ministers have shown a similar disdain for other large companies and rich individuals recently, but Montebourg's latest cack-handed outburst proved to be too much even for this government and president, who disowned his words for fear of a negative backlash from foreign investors, both current and potential.

The last thing France needs right now is to scare off investors by declaring full-scale war on them and the rich in general. This shabby rabble-rousing tactic is already blowing up in their faces and the government will regret it before next summer.

So where's the opposition, whose job it is to act as a democratic counterbalance to government? They are nowhere to be seen of course because their actions are just as shabby as those of their opponents.

The UMP has been hijacked by Jean-François Copé, its self-proclaimed leader who only sits in the party president's chair because of a blatant fraud perpetrated by his henchmen during the recent internal party presidential election. This man is arrogantly defying the wishes of the 80% of his party members and about the same percentage of the public who are demanding a rerun of the election. He is a political bandit whose banana-republic mentality is a disgrace not only to his party but to French politics as a whole.

Not that the Socialists can criticise them too loudly of course (and they have been wise enough not to moreover), because their own party leader was not even 'elected.' He was quite simply parachuted in as the head of the party by a troika of top Socialists who designated him during an hour-long secret meeting in some office or another in the parliament building. No internal election, no opportunity for rank-and-file members to express their preferences. If that's not shabby behaviour I don't know what is.

But perhaps the most illustrative example of boorish behaviour in French politics during this government's tenure came on the very first day of the new parliament, a day upon which all elected parliamentarians are held to respect the parliamentary tradition which demands that they all shake the hand of all first-time députés during a special welcoming ceremony. But they shamefully refused to follow this tradition of common courtesy and refused to shake the hands of the only two Front National députés in parliament, both of whom had been elected for the first time.

That was a disgrace. Make no mistake, I have no truck for the hateful policies of this, an extreme-right wing party, but whether we like it or not these two French citizens were given their parliamentary mandates by other French citizens in a free and open election, and all politicians in any civilised parliament owe it to those who voted for them them to respect the democratically-expressed decision of the people and refrain from ostracising legally-elected political opponents in such an insulting manner.

Yes, Depardieu's behaviour is reprehensible in some respects, and yes, tighter fiscal laws and control for the rich and big business must be introduced, and quickly, but when one looks at who is giving them lessons on civilised and respectful behaviour the only word which comes to mind is 'hypocrisy.'

The French word for 'shabby', or 'pathetic' is 'minable', and I can't begin to count the number of times I have discussed French politics, multinational business practice and tax-exiling rich elites with friends and others only to hear 'minable' used to describe them.

No wonder then that just under 80% of French citizens declare in polls that they are sick to death of the behaviour of their political and other elites, and no wonder either that the Hollande-Ayrault tandem has reached the lowest level of popularity of any administration since the beginning of the 5th Republic.

'Minable'? They all are, the whole lot of 'em, and I wouldn't trust any of 'em as far as I could chuck 'em.....

France and its political shenanigans 'à la république bananière'

François Fillon (L) and Jean-François Copé (R)

Call me a glutton for punishment if you will, but unlike the quasi-totality of people in France I am still fascinated by the ongoing political saga involving Fillon and Copé and their dispute over the UMP party presidential election which was won by Copé. Just to quickly bring you up to date with the essentials (I wrote a more detailed piece here) Fillon immediately declared that he wanted another election quickly because, he said, Copé had cheated because the Copé-controlled election commission charged with counting the votes forgot to include about 1000 votes from three god-forsaken island colonies somewhere which would have made him, Fillon, the winner, Copé refused to hold another election, so Fillon threatened to take the issue to the courts and the UMP then splintered into two parliamentary factions. The UMP had thus deliberately weakened their political clout as an opposition party, which was sacrificed on the pious altar of a personal spat.

Those events took us up to last week and Copé has been clinging on to power ever since, much to the disgust of the vast majority of UMP supporters and that of the population as a whole. The belligerants have been meeting regularly behind closed doors over the last few days. Nothing or nearly is filtering out and there are no flies on the wall. No progress has been made. Still, the growing rumour of the moment says that they are planning a sneaky deal which will suit them both but will not suit the party. In order words, we seem to be heading towards a cosy arrangement between two conniving cheats.

Today brings a bombshell however, and it may yet upset their dastardly plans. It transpires that the president of the election commission, Patrice Gélard, is pisse... not a happy bunny.

He has come clean to say that he doesn't understand why his staff didn't send him the vote tallies from the three overseas departments, and reminds us that the staff who compiled the figures were Copé supporters. He says he asked for these results twice and was fobbed off with a "no problem, because they are contained in the global figures for overseas territories." But they weren't....

The person who gave him that erroneous information also turned out to be a Copé supporter.

So the question now being asked is 'was this an innocent error during the vote-counting? Or was it a deliberate act of fraud? If so, it would be obvious to all that Copé and his merry band of mendacious minions were behind it.

Even more suspicious, he says, is the 'flash message' email sent in all urgency to party leaders just two days before the election. It decreed that the rules of the election were being changed and that checks to ensure that all voting party members were up to date on their party subscription fees and could thus vote were being scrapped for technical reasons. It is being said that this move suited Copé.

The problem with that message though is that it had Gélard's signature at the bottom, and Gélard says that he did not sign it. He says "I don't know anything about [the message]. That email has nothing to do with me. No, I didn't sign anything at all [on the day it was sent] because I wasn't in Paris, I was at Le Havre.

So who forged his signature? Nobody knows.

I mean, you couldn't make it up could you. This laughable excuse for a democratic political party is making a mockery not only of itself, but of French politics in general. The Socialists are just as undemocratic as these two UMP clowns in their internal dealings vis-à-vis their rank and file members, who are also ignored, and all this explains why, year after year, France is ranked very low indeed in international and OECD studies which assess the democratic quotient of political life in OECD countries.

My personal take on all this is that although France's democratic practices sometimes have more in common with banana republics in other parts of the world than they do with other, highly-developed, countries, this is just the way things work in France and always have done. Political corruption is relatively rife here but oh well, the country still muddles through one way or another.

Besides, I do love a good old soap story from time to time.....

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...

The real winners and losers of the farcical Copé-Fillon UMP leadership elections

Photo credit Lionel Bonaventure for AFP

The UMP's Jean-François Copé and François Fillon remind me of two drunken clowns running around a minefield, and as any child will tell you drunken clowns who run around minefields invariably end up stepping on a mine and blowing themselves to smithereens.

France is fond of proclaiming 'the French exception' when it comes to protecting its interests, and that maxim certainly applies here because the current and still-undecided battle for the leadership of the UMP is, well, as exceptional as it gets. This ongoing farce of an election saw both Copé and Fillon declare themselves as having won late last night as vote-counting began to draw to a close after yesterday's vote by party members.

Once rumours began to circulate of possible vote-rigging however, they instantly changed their tune and began to accuse each other of fraud and ballot-stuffing. A depressed and weary France finally went to bed at about 3am with the announcement that no winner would be declared until today and that the vote had been so close that enquiries would have to be made into the allegations.

As I write this it is becoming clear that the results will not be known before late this evening at the earliest. Accusations of cheating have to be investigated, recounts will be needed in many places and confusion reigns. But the result, whatever it is, will prove to be totally irrelevant.

The press, the public and members of all political parties including the UMP are sickened by this spectacle. The Nouvelobs did a tour of the regional papers and found epithets such as 'grotesque', 'pitiful', 'surreal' 'theatrical', 'fratricidal' and the heavily ironic 'politics in all its splendour' to describe this amateurish imbroglio. The French word 'politique', which already has a highly negative image here, will surely be classified as a filthy swear word when this is all (thankfully) over.

However, the world being as it is there's always one idiot who puts his foot in it and cuts dinner conversation dead by asking his host how his gran is only to be sharply reminded that, as he had been informed last week, poor old granny fell under a bus the week before and is thus now in a non-ongoing existing situation.

The self-designated nitwit this time was hapless and one-time-short-lived-stopgap-expendable Prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin who came out with the totally inept and inaccurate assertion that all closely-fought elections lead to problems before going on to quote the Bush-Gore election as being an example. He had obviously forgotten (wasn't aware?) that whereas Bush-Gore was an election pitting two political parties against each other, the UMP débacle has been manufactured in-house. Also, you can bet your beret that, unlike for Bush and Gore, neither Fillon nor Copé will graciously accept defeat.

And therein may lie their future downfall. These primaries - the UMP's first - remind everyone here of the unseemly bitchfest between rival candidates Ségolène Royal and Martine Aubry after voting ended at the Socialist primaries in 2008. They accused each other of cheating and fraud and Royal and her lieutenant Manual Valls even announced that they would open legal proceedings to challenge the legality of the procedure. They finally stopped short of doing so however and the result was that although Aubry was eventually declared the winner, neither she nor Royal was designated as presidential candidate or candidate for party leader this year, and both have since slipped off the radar.

Both Copé and Fillon have lost pocketfuls of Brownie points since yesterday and whoever wins this fight will be faced off against the other in an ugly and party-splitting battle which will render the UMP even less efficient as an opposition party then they are already. As a result it is by no means certain that either will be endorsed as the 2017 UMP presidential candidate, and to understand why let's go back to the minefield analogy.

Their suicidal antics have been contemplated with hand-rubbing glee by their enemies, who have been standing on the sidelines and are taking great delight in watching them do a passable imitation of clumsy suicide bombers who blow themselves up without killing their intended victims. Their enemies shall thus live on to fight another day from an ever stronger position. Who are they?

The most obvious beneficiaries are François Hollande and his government. Their reaction has been wisely discreet up until now, given that the result is still uncertain, but they know that from now on they will be faced with a divided and weakened opposition which will have no more lessons to give in the future about the executive's right hand not knowing what its left hand is doing. The Front National on the other hand has lost no time in ridiculising this excuse for a democratic internal election and have every reason to be optimistic about picking up disgruntled right-of-centre UMP votes in future elections.

But the prize for the biggest cheshire-cat grin on the block goes to Nicolas Sarkozy, the man for whom the UMP was created. He hasn't said a single word about this disaster yet, but it can be safely assumed that his shadenfreude knows no bounds and that there there is sure to be a major uptick in the number of impassioned appeals by UMP politicians and rank-and-file party members for him to return as the Messiah who shall save the UMP from being banished to the political wilderness.

All of this however supposes that the UMP will survive this crisis. But both Fillon and Copé are already being exhorted to form their own parties if they lose, and that would weaken each of them even further in terms of electoral appeal.

The Socialists, the Front National and Nicolas Sarkozy haven't had to fire a single shot yet they have still won a major victory. All three are delighted with the disastrous picture these primaries have painted of the UMP as a credible opposition party and their victory is already total after watching Fillon and Copé condemn themselves to a hellish future, whoever is declared to have won this lamentable and irrelevant primary 'election.'

Copé's shabby "anti-white racism" jibe

Copé opts for an insincere 'I'm a serious person' pose for the camera.

France has been feverishly debating leading UMP member Jean-François Copé's declaration that "anti-white racism" is a reality in France and that it is to be condemned just as anti-anyone-else racism is to be condemned. His remark was widely believed to target Muslims and blacks as he alleged that anti-white racism was common in 'les cités' - large council housing estates, mostly on the outskirts of French cities, which are heavily populated by Muslims and blacks.

He is right on the face of it of course. Anti-white sentiment does exist within those communities, even if it only concerns a small minority of their members, and I have experienced it myself as have many other white-skinned people. But Copé's declaration is highly misleading as it deliberately implies that whites suffer from the same racism as those of immigrant origin do.

Copé has obviously taken a leaf out of the far-right Front National's official policy handbook, which tries to minimise anti-immigrant racism by saying that it has its equivalent in the form of anti-white racism.

But who has ever heard of a white person who was refused a job interview because of his name or colour? When was a white person ever refused entry to a night club because he was white? Whoever refused to rent an apartment to a white person on grounds of racial origin? And I have never heard of houseowners refusing to sell their property to white people either. How many white people get stopped and searched by the police?

France has a population of around 6 million  immigrant-origin inhabitants - both legal and illegal - representing just under 10% of the total population. But they are almost non-existent in the French parliament, in boardrooms and management, in banks and finance, and they are highly unlikely to be found in the upper ranks of the police, the legal profession and many more.

The plain fact is that these population groups are far more likely to be poor and unemployed, or in badly-paid jobs, and many of them live in poor quality housing. Yet successive governments of both the right and left have done little to tackle anti-immigrant sentiment, let alone the endemic anti-immigrant discrimination which exists in many sections of French society and bars immigrants from many jobs and opportunities.

Jean-François Copé is a highly experienced politician, having served as a government spokesman under Jean-Pierre Raffarin and others before going on to do a stint as Budget minister and being the UMP's parliamentary spokesman. As such, he must have known that his slanted statement would make the headlines.

Most senior members of the UMP have, however, been very circumspect when asked for comment, and none has given him a clear thumbs-up, indicating that they consider that supporting Copé would lose them support amongst rank-and-file UMP members who shall shortly be asked to vote for their next president. The candidates are François Fillon and Copé himself, but his ill-advised anti-white racism comment may well turn out to be the nail that closed the coffin on any hopes he may have had of winning.

I think Copé seriously miscalulated the effect that his words would have on his near-term political future. All his declaration has done is to move his wing of the UMP further towards the extreme right, inflame public sentiment and throw oil on the fire of France's racial tensions. He shall surely, and quite deservedly, be made to pay for it.