Salut!

Salut! to Sarko's aid

Contrary to belief, this is not the site of the official opposition to Nicolas Sarkozy.

Nor, despite this being the second occasion in three days that Salut! has raced to his assistance, are we going soft.

He gets no help from here on the holiday row. At the very least, his judgment deserted him when he accepted a free luxury yachting break for his family off Malta from a billionaire media tycoon, Vincent Bolloré.

If the suggestion contained within Le Canard Enchainé's version of the affair is to be believed, it followed another freebie, an election night stay in Fouquet's on the Champs Elysées.

No one objects to a man celebrating a great success in style. Nor am I surprised that he should wish to relax in the sunshine with his family after the strains, if we put it delicately, that his campaign will have placed upon domestic life.

The French press and socialist politicians have had their say about the wisdom or otherwise of the president-elect accepting such largesse.

My main point, in writing about it at the Guardian's Comment is Free site, was to raise the question of whether those rabidly pro-Sarko columnists and pundits across the Channel would now be as hard on his acceptance of a rich man's treats as they have always been on Tony Blair for similar conduct.

For that, one or two readers suggested I was scraping the barrel for material; an odd view of what should and should not attract reporting and comment, but absolutely their right to believe.

My support for Sarko today is on another score. It concerns la racaille.

Nowt so queer as folk

Gradually, bits of Salut! are being privatised.

Cara Dillon at Cambridge Folk Festival
Picture: ice.in.the.cider

Sunderland has gone, of course, except when I cannot contain myself. Now it's the turn of folk music.

I have launched Salut! Live which will slowly, very slowly I suspect, build into another flourishing outpost of the Salut! empire - and spare readers of the main site being reminded of my obscure musical tastes.

You are naturally welcome over there. But it's a good place to avoid if you share the outlook of the burglars who stole all my valuables (that wouldn't have got them far), and even a rack of very uncool ties but left all the CDs.

Everyone at work understood the burglars.

No mystery

So Sarko goes off for a break before getting down to work, Ségo wrestles with embittered old losers from the Parti Socialiste and we are days from the departure of Jacques Chirac from the Elysée.

The thumping great turnout was a magnificent tribute to the serious and civic-minded qualities of the French. Hands up the English journalist who predicted before round one that they would abstain in droves.

It would be wrong to underestimate the potential for trouble on the streets in response to Nicolas Sarkozy's victory. When you hear the venom with which educated, middle class people speak of him, it is small wonder that no-hope youths from the estates are already proving restless.

But the violence last night was relatively low-key, involving for the most part the usual suspects who regard any public event as an excuse to behave like hard-of-thinking racaille.

We shall see what happens when Sarkozy begins the reforms that will actually cause discomfort and anger to this or that vested interest.

Assuming his UMP is triumphant in the second part of the 2007 election season, retaining a majority in the Assemblée Nationale, the challenges to worn-out features of le modèle français could start with la rentrée in September.

That, despite all the rooting I did for Ségo, is when her her adversary may well be able to count on my support.

I loathe the idea that each and every single grievance can somehow be said to justify a day, days or weeks of disruption to everyone else's lives.

That is not because people have forfeited the right to protest, or indeed to withdraw labour, but because too many in France seem to believe that this right extends to being able to inflict the most appalling inconvenience or damage, or both, with impunity.

Logically, you could end up with wall to wall disruption 365 days a year, with each union or asssociation of disgruntled people taking turns to try and bring France to a standstill.

Part of the deal you get when you sign up to a democracy, especially when votes are cast in such great numbers as shown by 85 per cent polls recorded in the French presidential elections, is that you have to accept that votes sometimes go against you.

Monsieur le President

Nicolas Sarkozy is the new president of France.

Sarkozy: new French president
Picture: Fi's Space

By a margin almost as comfortable as the pollsters had predicted - roughly 53 per cent to 47 - the leader of the centre-Right UMP was swept into office to succeed Jacques Chirac and start the job of remodelling French society.

It was another bumper poll. Reports put the turnout at around 85 per cent, about the same level as for the excellent first round a couple of weeks ago.

Sarkozy's victory speech, delivered to supporters in a Paris concert hall, was dignified and impressive. He ignored catcalls at mention of Ségolène Royal's name to urge respect for her, and for the millions of French people who voted for her, and these words drew warm applause from a large majority of his admirers.

The French, he said, had chosen the path of change. But he promised that his presidency would be inclusive and reach out even to those who opposed him in the election.

He also, as Richard of Orléans points out below, devoted a good slice of his speech to foreign policy - it seemed almost as much as either candidate had said about issues beyond French borders in the entire campaign.

Clearly, too, he is currently popular enough to get away unscathed with news of congratulatory phone calls from President Bush and Tony Blair.

Royal was also in conciliatory mood after a sometimes fiery campaign, culminating in acrimonious exchanges during and after the two candidates fought out a marathon debating duel on live television.

"I hope that the next president of the Republic will accomplish his mission at the service of all the French people," she said.

Who? But who else........

We all think we know. Unofficially, as Richard of Orléans points out, it's Nicolas Sarkozy and by a clear margin though not, as things look just now (though that could still change a little) quite as clear as was suggested in those earlier reports.

Pretty soon, we will have it confirmed.

The premature celebrations of Sarko supporters tell their own story and I am sure the French couple who e-mailed me today to say they were just heading off the the Lycée in South Kensington to do their bit "to make France a better place" will be happy tonight.

In their assessment, President Sarkozy was the only candidate committed to starting the reforms needed to achieve that goal. President Royal, which doesn't sound right in any case, would have ensured, they feared, more of the same.

I was fairly quick off the mark with the first round result, once we had firm and publishable word of the exit polls, which are based on actual votes cast, not the interrogation of voters by pollsters, and constantly updated as additonal information came my way.

Salut! is not a news agency and has no real deadlines to meet, beyond ones to do with personal pride, but will offer news and views as the night wears on.

Which means I have to go easy on the celebrations - those that have nothing to do with French politics. As Bill Shankly might have said, football isn't a matter of life or death, it's more important than that and much more important than an overseas presidential election.

Frogs, Rosbifs and two-way traffic

Out of the blue, I was asked to interrupt the daily bout of political analysis and all those weighty reflections on whether my suddenly high achieving football team would snatch the Championship title today. THEY DID!!!!!

Would I return to a theme that has produced lively discussion at that Other Place where my old blog languishes in a remote outpost for the discarded and forgotten called Archived Bloggers?

The subject: all those young French men and women who put balance into the exchange of Frogs and Rosbifs by flocking to Britain in search of the jobs beyond their reach at home.

I am not sure for how long that link to the online version of my Daily Express article will remain operative.

But in any case, while the presidential decider add a little spice to the recipe, the ingredients are familair enough to readers of Salut!.

Craig McGinty, who runs This French Life among other sites about expat life, gave me his thoughts during the preparation of my piece.

He thought it was the former prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin who once summed it up as France getting our oldies in return for sending its youngsters to Britain (I haven't yet been able to dig out the original quote).

AFS-070266.jpg
Picture: Alex Segre

Poll axed

Salut! being responsible and fair, the nifty little poll that has graced the left-hand column since the first round of the French presidential elections will disappear today.

When I looked a minute ago, it said 65 per cent to Ségolène Royal and 35 per cent to Nicolas Sarkozy.

Update: just as he was taking down the poll from this site - allowing me my self-indulgent new headline - Salut!'s web magician Craig McGinty let me know that the final score was 64.7 per cent for Royal, 35.3 per cent for Sarkozy from a total of 323 votes, a respectable sample one third the size of those used by proper pollsters.

Respectable or not, as an exercise involving two other sites - This French Life and Ivy Paris - it had little or nothing to do with the French electorate, as Craig points out at his own place.

Those real polls, which on April 22 did get things more or less right, tell a rather different story: 53-47 or 54.5-45.5 in Sarkozy's favour, suggesting that Ségo made no new friends with her performance in the TV debate.

That goes against the pockets of anecdotal evidence I have picked up in my neck of the woods. My wife's unflattering appraisal of Sarko, mentioned yesterday, was shared by all the women she works out with at the gym.

Someone I spoke to in London said he and his colleagues thought Ségo had won the debate hands down. That was way off beam. But as ThomasR pointed out in a response to yesterday's posting, the media simply couldn't agree on the outcome.

The polls must go down by midnight according to French election law, and then there's the one that matters. It looks very much as if Royal is beaten. Today's warning from her that a Sarko win would spark "violence and brutalities" across France smacked of desperation.

But she has fought a good second round, after such a disappointing earlier campaign, and deserves to emerge on Sunday, if not the winner that Salut! would greatly prefer, a very close second. But whither the French left in the wake of either of the likelier scenarios, heavy or light defeat?

High scoring draw

So how did it go? Ask the parties and you get the response you deserve: "We won."

Put the same question to ostensibly neutral observers and the consensus is that Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy played out a hard-fought draw.

But two-and-a-half hours of political debate is a marathon by any standards, and it is natural that the advantage should have changed hands more than once. And that, essentially, is how I saw it.

Last chance saloon

If the polls are right - and they are too emphatic to disregard - Nicolas Sarkozy is romping to victory.

Your stars tonight
BatMinh

Salut! is not happy about that. But the slight improvement in Ségolène Royal's showing, up one point to 48 per cent in the latest BVA-Orange-Var Matin survey, merely confirms that she still needs a dramatic turnaround in voting intentions to have any hope of winning.

And tonight, on French TV, she gets her chance.

"Sarkozy and Royal head to head at last," declares the page one headline in Le Figaro. A record audience - and don't forget we've had records already, set successively by each of the round two contenders - is expected as the pair take part in a live debate for two hours starting at 9pm French time.

The duel will appear simultaneously on the private TF1 and state-owned France 2 channels.

It may not be Ségo's final opportunity to impress the public before Sunday, but it is certainly the most important one left to her. She has to win points, seem capable, resist provocation and present herself as a woman in whom the French can comfortably trust.

The measure of her task is that Sarko just needs to avoid banana skins, hold his own. And it doesn't matter what the fun poll to your left says.

Hamida did ghofar

The story of Hamida Ghafour has little to do with France.

True, she used to accuse me of speaking French with a grating accent, but then she was probably right, since I also speak English with a grating accent.

And I did once set her up with a brilliant interpreter when she was asked to write a report from the post-riots Parisian banlieues, only for her to fall ill on the way back to London.

We are great friends all the same, which makes it impossible and improper for me to offer an objective view of her newly published book, The Sleeping Buddha. I can, however, tell you a little about it, and about her.

The book traces, with great emotion and compelling narrative, a remarkable journey undertaken by a young woman who was brought up in Toronto - not to be confused with the County Durham one - and sounds Canadian, has overwhelmingly western values and adopts thoroughly modern ways.

This was Hamida's journey back to the war-torn land of her birth.