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February 18th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
In April France goes to the polls in an election that will define not only its
immediate and long term future, but its relationship with Europe and its
attitude towards Britain and Germany.
The choice — even allowing for a surge by France’s far Right — is most likely
to come down to Mr Sarkozy or Mr Hollande, two men not just from opposite
sides of the political divide but, as their differing responses to the same
question revealed, men with very different characters and drive.
Will France stick with the manically ambitious but deeply unpopular Nicolas
Sarkozy who promised reform and a renovation, but whose five year term in
office has been defined by what the Italians would call “braggadocio”, and
bling?
Or will France make a leap of faith with François Hollande, a man with a
30-year career in left wing politics, but no ministerial or international
experience; a man viewed as sincere but perhaps a little staid, even bland?
If it does vote Hollande, it will throw a just impediment into the betrothal
of France and Germany and France’s relationship with Europe: Mr Sarkozy may
have agreed a new stability pact with German Chancellor Angela Merkel which
will rein in public spending, but Mr Hollande does not like it. The pact, he
says, threatens France’s sovereignty and he will not ratify it. Instead, he
intends to renegotiate it.
The election will also impact on France’s relations with Britain. While Mr
Sarkozy and David Cameron were publicly celebrating their “Entente Amicale”
in Paris on Friday, the prime minister is still smarting from the moment
last October when the diminutive French leader told him he had “missed a
good opportunity to shut up”.
Mr Hollande, however, has been holding out an olive branch to Britain,
stressing the importance of its return to the European family (while at the
same time stressing the need for regulating the financial markets, which
Britain opposes). He will visit London at the end of the month when as well
as meeting Labour leader Ed Miliband, he told journalists he was keen to see
the prime minister and deputy PM Nick Clegg, neither of whom he has
previously met.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s popularity crept up a percentage point after he officially
declared he would run for a second term in office last Wednesday, but he
remains deeply unloved in France.
He has trailed behind his socialist challenger by between 10 and 20 points for
several months, and unless he makes a rapid recovery is also in danger of
being eclipsed by Marine Le Pen of the Front National in the first round of
voting – which would eliminate him from the contest without a second glance.
To make matters worse, a handful of other candidates including Dominique de
Villepin, the imperious former prime minister, are vying for the votes of
the centre-Right that Mr Sarkozy desperately needs to win back.
Many find it hard to forgive mistakes in the early days of his 2007 election
victory when he dined at one of Paris’ most expensive restaurants then,
instead of retreating to a monastery to reflect on his vision for France as
he had promised, holidayed on the luxury yacht of a billionaire friend.
He was tagged “President for the Rich” and it stuck, as have accusations of a
do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do to his approach to the country’s necessary
belt-tightening and the fact he has presided over a 12-year high in
unemployment, unpopular austerity plans and the loss of France’s coveted
triple A credit rating.
Promises of crackdowns on immigration and a recent proposal to withdraw
benefits from the jobless if they refuse work are viewed by many as
dangerous flirting with the far Right.
“Who still believes in Sarkozy?” asked Le Monde newspaper, before the
president launched his official election campaign.
To distract from his domestic image he is selling himself to the French as the
country’s action man, the only person capable of saving the nation, Europe
and the world. He hopes his international stature will convince the French
that they may not like him but they need him.
Mr Hollande, by contrast, is selling himself simply as himself: Mr Normal, the
man who would no more flaunt a Rolex watch and holiday on a billionaire
business friend’s private yacht than he would fly to the moon.
The opinion polls seem to suggest that in the maelstrom of an economic crisis,
and after years of presidential hyperactivity at the Elysée Palace, the
French want “normal”.
And so, after nearly three decades in politics, François Gérard Georges
Hollande, 57, has finally stepped out of the shadows.
There was little in his childhood to suggest this son of a doctor and a social
worker, who grew up in the north western French town of Rouen, would one day
become the French Left’s great hope after 17 years in the political
scrublands.
His father stood twice in local elections as an extreme-right candidate, and
reportedly uprooted the family to the chic Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine
— where Mr Sarkozy would later become mayor — fearing the Soviets were about
to invade in the wake of the May 1968 student riots.
Like most of France’s political and administrative class — with the notable
exception of Mr Sarkozy — Mr Hollande is a graduate of the Ecole National
d’Administration. It was here he met Ségolène Royal, the mother of his three
children, and a presidential candidate herself in 2007.
His political has been long, but his CV is modest: he is an MP and the local
council leader for Corrèze in south central France, and was the Socialist
Party’s first secretary for 11 years, during which it time lost two
presidential elections.
After the blow in 2002 when socialist candidate Lionel Jospin was knocked out
of the first round by the Front National candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen,
Hollande continued as party secretary. But 2009 brought another personal and
political low: he split from Royal, lost his job as party secretary and his
mother Nicole, to whom he was extremely close, died.
Friends and colleagues say getting through this troubled period showed the
steeliness at the core of the man critics nickname Mr Flanby, after a wobbly
French pudding.
“When you no longer have a job, your partner has been the candidate and not
you, your friends have dropped you and your mother dies, there’s a moment
when there’s nothing left,” said his friend and party colleague Michel Sapin.
“He (Hollande) showed the psychological strength to get through this alone.
That was when I saw him as a head of state.”
He was not even the Socialist Party’s first choice, this time around.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund
was expected to be the Left’s “homme providentiel”, until forced to stand
down after having sex with a New York hotel chambermaid in May.
Since then, following a dramatic make-over — he lost weight, dumped his usual
heavy framed glasses and smartened up his wardrobe – François Hollande has
emerged blinking into the political spotlight and shaken off the mantle of
candidate by default, to the surprise — and considerable concern — of his
opponent.
The newspaper Libération described the transformation as “Le Hollande 2.0”.
“He’s trying to be the exact opposite of Sarkozy — a statesman, sober, low
profile, a man who gathers everyone around him,” one supporter of Mr
Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party said.
Evidence of this came on Thursday, when just a few hours after announcing his
own candidacy, Mr Sarkozy laid into his rival accusing him of “lying from
morning to night”. Mr Hollande, who had told British and American
journalists he expected the campaign to be hard and “trashy”, refused to
rise to the bait that evening in a live television interview.
The two candidates diverge ideologically along largely traditional left-right
lines, over how to handle France’s — and Europe’s — economic woes. Mr
Sarkozy believes in public sector job cuts and austerity measures to bring
down the country’s deficit; Mr Hollande plans to tax the rich at 45 per
cent, and impose higher levies on large companies to fund, among other
things, the hiring of 60,000 new teachers and measures to increase youth
employment.
He is not, however, proposing a quick fix for the working classes, or offering
the carrot of higher wages, unfettered social welfare, or a return to
retirement at 60 for all (just some).
Keeping everyone on the diverse French Left happy and avoiding the damaging
internecine squabbles for which the party has past form, is not easy. Mr
Hollande has positioned himself near the centre of his party, hovering
around liberal/social democrat territory, as his praise of Tony Blair – a
man widely reviled by the French left for his devotion to the free-market –
revealed. To some this is proof that he is not of the Left at all.
Others particularly outside France, as one American journalist pointed out
last week, still see him as a “Red”; a throwback to French socialism of the
1980s when socialist president François Mitterrand had four members of the
French Communist Party in his government and when, as Mr Hollande put it,
“people feared there would be Soviet tanks in Place de la Concorde”.
Mr Hollande laughs at the thought. “At least I’m regarded ‘Red’ somewhere,
because I’m certainly not regarded as a ‘Red’ in France.”
With two months to go to the first round of the presidential election, French
political analysts say Mr Sarkozy could still pull off a victory. In his
book Le Choix de Marianne, Pascal Perrineau, a director of research at
Sciences Po, says Mr Sarkozy is very much “still in the game”.
“In the polls there are still a large number of electors who say they could
still change their minds… nothing is decided,” he says.
Other analysts warn that Mr Sarkozy is planning a short, sharp “kamikaze”
attack on his rival’s programme.
“The trouble is that Hollande has become a moving target meaning there are
more skirmishes. He is both the hare and the tortoise at the same time, “
writes Serge Raffy in Le Nouvel Observateur.
In person, Mr Hollande is indeed both quick-witted and thoughtful, as well as
affable, funny and, for the time being, quite “normal”.
The charisma? That, says the candidate with a smile, will come if he is
elected.
“Everyone says François Mitterrand had charisma. But before he was president
they used to call him old, archaic, badly dressed, and say he knew nothing
about the economy… until the day he was elected. It’s called universal
suffrage; when you are the person that embodies France that changes
everything.”
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