Saturday, April 14, 2007

The French Elections

"France has difficulty in deciding where to go next, partly because it avoids talking honestly to itself about where it is now."
Jacques Marseille,
French historian and political scientist.

The Independent is running an interesting piece titled France: A nation in crisis?

Interesting because what France chooses intrigues me. John Lichfield writes of the voting public and how much change they can stand: They are nervous about the kind of radical change that M. Sarkozy appears (sometimes) to threaten. They are unconvinced that Mme Royal offers any coherent change at all. Hence the attraction to the centrist candidate, François Bayrou, who talks of pragmatic, consensual reform but is probably the most traditional and cautious of the front-runners.

1 comment:

Anil P said...

When has it ever been easy to let go of the familiar, as in faces, culture, and even the landscapes.

And when has it ever been easy to assimilate once you've grown up, as in with new neighbours, in a new work place, and even in a new city.

So why would anyone think it's easy to accomodate a 'country' that is not your own, nor the one you've grown up in or whose language you cannot understand, and now represented by their people right next to you.

But then I suppose humans are resilient, and eventually come to accept another, unless the 'another' does not want to be accepted.

And therein lies the challenge to 'modern' society. If it succeeds it will break away from the old, and if it doesn't it still won't go back to the country of the old, and it is in the latter that seeds of apprehension take root strengthened by the distress of not being able to revisit one's roots without seeing cultural landscapes that're as foreign as any one ever dreamt of.

And then it is election time.