Jacques Faizant would have captured it perfectly! Were the great cartoonist still with us – and had he deigned to turn his talent to yet another presidential campaign, having covered them all since the inception of the Fifth French Republic in 1958 – he might well have depicted his impish ‘Marianne’ bikini-clad in the pose of a seaside siren on the Côte d’Argent, contemplating the waves while a lovelorn lifeguard bearing a strong resemblance to Nicolas Sarkozy gently but persistently puts the question: ‘What’s it to be then, sweetheart?’
In a democracy, every election is a moment of truth for a nation. Despite what too many candidates, most of the pollsters and much of the press might think, an election is by no means a beauty contest: it is about choosing a pilot. And what lies ahead on the flight we are about to board is not exactly a clear blue sky.
Entre nous it’s time to tell it like it is. We have fallen behind. We have squabbled and we have prevaricated. We have seized on the first available pretext for failing to respond to developments. The world is changing before our eyes and all we can say is ‘Hang on a minute. Don’t harass us!’ In the face of rising unemployment, some bright spark came up with the idea of paying ourselves more for less work, so of course we gave it a go! The USA and the UK are out-performing us but it’s all down to nasty Anglo-Saxon ultra-liberalism and we don’t want any of that, thank you very much! As for the Chinese economic boom – well, what do you expect if they pay their workers peanuts?
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