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Uber Member
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Reading
Posts: 3,486
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Dont laugh...
A top notch article, I almost feel sorry for them:-
Quote:
July 24, 2005
Investigation
The rotting Republic
By Brian Moynahan
The British love France — as a holiday destination. But its famous joie de vivre
is being eroded by rising unemployment, a faltering economy and political
scandals. And the country's president, Jacques Chirac, is at the heart of the
mess
For anyone going to France over the summer holidays, the heart still has reason
to leap. There's the cheap beer, wine and cigarettes at Calais for the booze
cruisers, of course, and beyond lies the world's favourite destination, with the
British alone making 12m visits a year. Trains get better and faster, with
double-decker TGVs eating up the 460 miles from Paris to Marseilles in three
hours. Better, that is, provided they are not on strike. The roads are as superb
as ever. The once awful accident rate has been slashed by the Raffarin campaign
against speeding and drink driving. Drivers touring by car will notice fewer
road hogs — and more police with radar guns and Breathalysers at the ready.
Jean-Pierre Raffarin himself, however, has gone, brutally sacked as prime
minister by Jacques Chirac last month.
Those with second homes in France — 500,000 British, and one French family in
four — have reason to be smug. Country-home values went up by 14% last year, and
in the past eight years the average rise has been 95%, with 150% in sun- (and
snow-) drenched Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur.
That all is well in la France profonde, the country's rural heart, seems
confirmed by rising land prices. The value of the average hectare has risen by
almost one-third to €4,790 over the past decade. But life is no longer as
satisfying or simple as it once was. Between the well-ordered plane trees,
beneath the white curtain of crisp linen napery, something has gone wrong. There
is something rotten in the state of France.
It shows in little things. Respect for the grandeur of the office made it rare
for the French to slag off their president in front of a foreigner they did not
know well. Chirac lost that protection with his humiliation in the May EU
referendum. "Il est foutu," they say, unprompted. "He's done for." His choice of
Dominique de Villepin to replace the luckless Raffarin draws the same bitter
scorn: the courtiers as well as the emperor are seen to have no clothes. Small
wonder.
The non vote in May was a savage rejection of the country's elite. The
silver-maned, poetry-writing new leader is — like eight of his ministers — an
unelected functionary who personifies it. He opened himself to ridicule from the
off with Napoleonic references to his first 100 days in power. "Has the man not
heard of Waterloo?" they growl in the bars.
Warning signs of crisis multiply. Even in small towns, men in their twenties
hang about the streets during working hours, a faintly menacing presence and a
sign that unemployment among the young has reached 25% and will not budge. On
city outskirts, the groups of aimless youths are denser and the threat more
palpable.
Discuss a future trip by public transport, and a fatalistic shrug and a murmured
". . . et les syndicats?" follows, a reference to "the unions" and their promise
of "mass mobilisation" if anyone meddles with their working practices.
Chat with a small farmer at a market, and the complaints go beyond the weather
and the price of diesel to a real sense of disillusion with the nature of life
here. In 10 years, agricultural income has fallen by 20%. Our own idea of the
French farm as a couple of fields, worked by an aproned maman and a
Gauloise-smoking papa, is more fanciful than ever. The average farm is half as
large again as it was a few years back. Beef and grain barons, their "farms"
highly mechanised, dominate the industry, which trousers one-quarter of
common-agricultural-policy money.
The paysans — a proud word meaning "countrymen" more than "peasant" — have seen
their numbers plummet to 600,000; at the beginning of the 1990s they still
mustered 1m. José Bové, an Asterix-moustached former student activist turned
part-time goat's-cheese maker and self-proclaimed protector of paysans, vows to
prevent any further decline. He first gained fame when he trashed a McDonald's
restaurant. The wine makers of Languedoc have taken to the shotgun, crowbar and
dynamite stick to protest that the dusky grapes ripening in the Midi sun will
fetch as little as €1 a litre when they are made INTO phpbb_wine. Snapping up Mouton
Rothschild, Latour and Margot can mean burnt fingers. Values of the 2004 vintage
are down 30% and even more for 2003. In the Bordelais and Gironde regions, there
is talk of subsidies for distilling wine INTO phpbb_pharmaceutical alcohol, and
grubbing up the vineyards.
Land prices have stayed firm only because of development potential. They are
high where the town French and foreigners want to be — the Haute Savoie, the
Gironde, the British enclave of the Dordogne — and low where they don't, such as
the Loire and Franche-Comté.
The resentment of "townies" is growing. The British are not flavour of the month
with Bretons — nor, as we shall see, with Chirac — who protested at St-Brieuc on
Brittany's Armor coast, where they buy one in three of the houses put on the
market. The problem, though, is general to much of France. "The 'countryside' is
becoming more and more a residential area," says André Thévenot, president of a
federation of rural associations, "and tensions between agriculture, tourism and
residential use are increasing."
Pollution of idyllic landscapes, by pesticides and people, is growing too. The
famous oyster beds of the Arcachon basin were closed owing to suspected
pollution. Some resorts, unhappy with the tough criteria needed for a pavillon
bleu, a coveted blue flag that covers sanitation, rubbish treatment and beach as
well as water quality, are going for an easier, water-only fanion bleu, or blue
pennant, instead. And what about the other foundations of French life?
Country people always knew and trusted their neighbours, left their doors
unlocked and their roadside fruit stalls unmanned but for an honesty box, until
much more recently than in Britain. Crime was a mostly urban affair, at its
worst in the drab, high-rise housing estates on the rim of the big cities, where
jobless, alienated young blacks and Arabs, sauvageons or "little savages" to the
law-abiding, fight each other and the police. Prisons are full, at 116% of
capacity.
But theft, if not violence, has moved out to the villages. As second-home owners
in particular know, the new breed of housebreaker has become exactly that,
smashing through roofs to bypass windows guarded by metal blinds.
The countryside is going through a crisis of identity, of fear of change and
loss of prosperity, that mirrors that of France as a whole. It has a particular
hold on the French imagination. Farm produce, the agricultural minister wrote,
is "more than marketable goods". It is the "fruit of love", sustained by many
devoted generations of farmers, who must not be allowed to fall victim to "a
dehumanised and standardised world".
That is the rub. The world, dehumanised or not, will have its way. French
farmers must change. The wine growers will be bankrupted — the market for
vineyards in Roussillon has already begun to collapse — unless reforms sweep
away the social charges and over-regulation that make their wine too expensive
to sell. The French "social model", hugely expensive and restrictive, no longer
creates jobs and growth, nor pays its way.
But real change is almost possible. Painful surgery is needed to restore the
country to health, but it will not deliver itself to a knife wielded by a
political class, and a president, mired in scandal and plump with perks, who
search not for remedies but for scapegoats.
The Fifth Republic was created by General de Gaulle in 1958 to do away with the
weak, vacillating, short-lived regimes of the Fourth. Its linchpin is the
president, his finger on the nuclear button, the maker and breaker of cabinets
as well as garden-party host in the resplendent grounds of his Elysée Palace.
The old system saw four governments fall in a year.
The general brought stability. At 72, Chirac is the oldest leader among the
western heavyweights, and sensitive about it: he gave his ecology minister a
dressing down for revealing he wears a hearing aid. Together, he and François
Mitterrand, whom he succeeded as head of state in 1995, have ruled France for
the past 24 years.
But the "non" in the May referendum — the "child of fear and despair", the
historian Nicolas Baverez has written in Le Monde — marks the onset of "the
death of Gaullist France, corrupted by Mitterrand and then ruined by Chirac".
Those are terrible words, all the more so because they are applied in the most
serious, sober newspaper to a Gaullist like Chirac. They have, alas, the ring of
truth.
This summer most of us travelling to France will pay handsomely for our lodgings
— hotel or villa. So, in general, do the French. Not, however, the elite, whose
self-serving shenanigans have done so much to undermine Gaullist France.
Chirac has lived in the great palaces of state for so long — a few months aside,
he has held the office of prime minister, mayor of Paris or president without a
break since 1974, when Edward Heath was packing up to leave Downing Street —
that he is known as " the Resident of the Republic". He has every reason to
stand for another presidential term in 2007, for he is, the wags say, "condemned
to perpetual re-election". The moment he leaves the Elysée Palace, he loses the
presidential immunity that has prevented magistrates questioning him in cases of
alleged corruption and abuse dating from his years as mayor of Paris.
Respect for public life has been corroded by the constant drip-drip of
corruption in high places for the best part of two decades. Housing is a case in
point. Several hundred splendid apartments belonging to the Bank of France are
let on privileged terms to bigwigs who have no connection with it. The city of
Paris was equally generous in renting to Chirac, his close colleague Alain Juppé
and Juppé's son, and to the children of Jean Tiberi, his successor as mayor of
Paris.
"Liberty, Equality, Impunity," cynics say of the establishment's motto. Times
are hard: the economy sluggish, jobs hard to find, drift and backbiting the
political order of the day. The malaise runs deep. It comes out in the sullen
bloody-mindedness that the French call morosité. It can be spotted by a slight
curl of the upper lip accompanying the classic Gallic shoulder shrug.
Chirac's personal morosité is largely aimed across the Channel. Tony Blair,
safely re-elected, saved from the Euro-hook by Chirac's very impaling, is a
maddeningly smug figure viewed from the Elysée. "Never has Albion seemed more
perfidious," notes Le Monde, "nor so lucky." And this was before London beat
Paris in the battle to host the 2012 Olympic Games. Chirac has reacted so
angrily that the columnist Georges-Marc Benamou has accused him of "brandishing
the Anglo-Saxon model" as a "sort of Antichrist". Both the political right and
left, Benamou says, display the same "Pavlovian reaction" and treat Anglo-Saxons
with the "same sneering disgust".
British visitors can draw comfort that this is seen as a mere smokescreen.
Benamou reminded his readers that "Anglo-Saxon" also embraces low unemployment,
Charles Dickens, and the forces who landed in Normandy in 1944. Some of the
fewish chuckles being raised this summer are from Deux Siècles d'Humour
Anglo-Saxon, by Jean-Loup Chiflet, or John Wolf Whistle, whose jokes, such as
George Best's remark that he had stopped drinking, at least while asleep, have
added elegance in French : "J'ai arr?té de boire, mais seulement quand je dors."
Implicit in political Anglophobia is fear and rejection of the outside world,
and Benamou warns that the split between the "so-called elites" and the people
is widening dramatically. The level of dissatisfaction is mounting, he says,
adding the most chilling of French phrases: "La rue menacera un jour" — the
street beckons.
Sympathy over the London bombings was heartfelt. "We are all Londoniens," they
said, and Bastille Day celebrations were interrupted. But a tetchy defensiveness
extends to French itself. The language is a glory, of course, whose rude good
health matters to the world, and it is natural the French should wish to
preserve and perfect it. The Académie Française was set up by Cardinal Richelieu
in 1635 to do just that. The 40 "immortals" who make up its current membership,
however, are showing signs of Anglophobia. One, Angelo Rinaldi, when urging
people to vote against it, said that the European constitution would "destroy
the last means of defending the French language". It was a "burst of the
accelerator" on the way to an Anglophone Europe. "We are already far enough down
that road," the venerable immortal added gloomily.
The then culture minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, spoke of the fight to protect
the language from "the tyranny of uniformity" — longhand for "from English". He
is now the foreign minister. A government body, the Commissariat Général de la
Langue Française, busies itself with deporting Anglicisms.
It coins French substitutes for English phrases, publishes them in the official
Journal of the Republic, and polices their use in advertising and entertainment
as well as official documents.
"Hot money" is out, replaced by "capitaux fébriles". "Tanker" has been sunk by
the term "navire-citerne" and, in cyberculture, "arrosage" has done for "spam"
and "bogue" for "bug".
Chirac is so sensitive to the dominance of Google on the web that he asked his
culture minister to create a home-grown search engine to rival it. Criticism of
Google is said to rest on its supposed vulgarity in classifying its results by
popularity, but few doubt that its Anglo-Saxon origins are to blame. Jean-No‘l
Jeanneney, head of the Bibliothèque Nationale, notes snootily that Google is
"the expression of the American system in which the law of the market is king".
Also upsetting the president is the power of the English-language satellite
broadcasters CNN, Fox, Sky and BBC World. He noted their influence in what he
calls the "war of images and airwaves" during the Iraq invasion, and vowed to
set up a French satellite news station to challenge them. A commission was duly
appointed, and a name agreed on. CII, for Chaîne d'Information Internationale,
was due to start up last year. Cost has kept it on the drawing board.
Real shock at losing the Olympic bid is accompanied by fretting at the national
decline captured by the title of Nicolas Baverez's bestseller, La France Qui
Tombe. Baverez says that aversion to change, "incoherent regulation" from
Brussels, and organised deflation in Euroland have reduced the continent to a
"wasteland" without growth, jobs or innovation. Europeans are being
"pauperised"; their buying power, four-fifths that of Americans in 1990, is now
less than two-thirds, he says, and Chirac is no more than "euthanasia" for new
ideas.
In a recent case of strangling red tape, the tycoon François Pinault abandoned
plans to create a €150m rival to London's Tate Modern on the island in the Seine
that once housed Renault's Paris plant. Instead, he has bought the Palazzo
Grassi in Venice to display his art collection, citing bureaucratic meddling and
delay for abandoning France.
In another much-read book, Adieu â la France Qui S'en Va, Jean-Marie Rouart bade
a nostalgic goodbye to the France that has gone, and the sense of honour and
spirituality that have gone with it. The French fret at the slump in the number
of bars and cafes, down from 150,000 to 60,000 in 15 years. It worries them that
Disneyland Paris draws twice as many visitors as the Eiffel Tower, and seven
times the number who go to the Asterix fun park. They rail at "McDo's", but they
eat there, in such numbers that France is now McDonald's best overseas market.
Pride in national cuisine has taken other body blows. Jamie Oliver and his show
Le Chef Nu emerged as a big television hit, to the disgust of diehards who
sniffed about the "adolescent" from the "land of mint sauce". The Michelin guide
has been in trouble. A former inspector claimed that understaffing meant that
some restaurants were not visited every year. Worse, the patron of a famous
restaurant has handed in his three Michelin stars, which he had held for 28
years. Alain Senderens, of Lucas Carton in Paris, says the guide pays so much
attention to "tralala" — decor, service, surroundings — that he cannot do a bit
of honest turbot for under €100.
Visitors may get through August without too many problems. Strikers go on
holiday too, and the strike season traditionally starts after the schools go
back in early September. The trouble, when it begins, will likely be spearheaded
by the cheminots, the 175,000 workers of the state railway, SNCF, who are set
against any prospect of competition. Three hundred of them managed to delay the
first dent in SNCF's 70-year-old monopoly last month. They blocked the track in
front of the inaugural private freight train, operated by Connex, for five hours
before gendarmes were able to move them. A series of strikes is planned against
the so-called Fillon reforms, which would pluck some of the feathers from their
bedding.
French railways, when they run, are the best in the world. SNCF still has 18,000
miles of network, and its regional services reach small towns of the sort that
lost their stations and track when Dr Beeching wielded his axe in Britain back
in the 1960s. Its commuter trains are modern, comfortable and clean. Its TGV,
the 185mph-plus train â grande vitesse, makes snails of other country's
expresses. So healthy is demand for its jet-busting services that double-decker
carriages have been built to cope.
It is a matter of particular pride that this pioneering brilliance is the
product not of an Anglo-Saxon free market, but of state enterprise. The
inaugural TGV service, from Paris to Lyons in 1981, was seen as a triumph for
the French system and its tradition of state guidance.
That was then, at the start of the Mitterrand era. The world has moved on, the
French economy has stagnated, but the railways remain, in their pomp and at
constantly escalating cost, with frightening unfunded pension liabilities. Over
the Mitterrand-Chirac years, the unions have extracted perks galore: the 35-hour
week, bonuses, retirement at 50 for drivers, full pensions after 32½ years'
service.
Under the Fillon reforms, public-sector staff would work for 371/2 years before
getting a full pension, with a 40-year stint needed in the private sector. But
the cheminots regard their short hours and short working life as non-negotiable.
These are acquis sociaux, acquired rights that
are an inalienable part of the social order. To ask them to work longer for
reduced pensions is seen as a slap in the face for all France stands for.
"Should we accept that?" they ask their fellow countrymen. "Would you?"
The health service is in a similar crisis of unsustainable excellence. NHS
survivors taken ill in France have good reason for gratitude: indeed, as well as
inflating property prices, not speaking French, and bringing "their cement and
tattooed workmen with them on the ferry" to avoid using French workmen, the
French (probably rightly) suspect that some British come to France precisely to
be ill.
Waiting lists are often short enough for same-day appointments. Doctors still
make home visits. Patients can flit from one doctor to another to find the one
who is the most agreeable. Specialists can be consulted without referral.
Hospital patients often have their own room, and mothers stay in for five days
after giving birth.
Patients pay upfront, but almost all costs are reimbursable, by public-health
insurance topped up by the state or private insurance and mutuals. Given such
largesse, the French have naturally become pill-popping hypochondriacs,
supporting a profusion of pharmacists — monopolists who are fighting a legal
battle to stop supermarkets selling even vitamin pills and herbal remedies — at
crippling cost to the state.
The deficit in public-health insurance soared from €2 billion in 2001 to reach
€13 billion last year. The population is ageing, treatments are ever more
sophisticated and expensive, and demand is rampant. Bankruptcy looms.
Doctors are well aware the system is moribund (Douste-Blazy, a cardiologist
before he was foreign minister, memorably described it as "mad") but they have
also taken to protesting, ingeniously crossing the Channel so as to be noticed
in the general furore.
A group of 300 surgeons went to the Pontin's holiday camp at Camber Sands in
East Sussex earlier this year to protest at low pay, long hours and skyrocketing
liability-insurance premiums.
"We have so many strikes in France," explained Philippe Cuq, their president,
"that we thought we could get more coverage if we went INTO phpbb_exile in England."
Plenty of remedies are available. Patients could be charged a small,
nonreimbursable amount for each consultation. The CSG social contribution could
be raised. Health care and insurance could be opened to competition. But the
latter smacks of Anglo-Saxon liberalism, and the government fears the howls of
protest that increased charges would surely bring.
That something has to give is not in doubt. The French often refer slightingly
to the lack of job security in Britain. But in France, 23% of under-25s and 40%
of immigrants have no jobs at all. Those who are employed work less and less.
The number of hours worked, which has been climbing in Britain and America for
20 years, is still falling in France. And, where over half of 55- to
64-year-olds are still at work in Britain, the figure in France is 37%.
Overprotection, with employers faced with high social charges and tight
redundancy rules, makes companies loath to take on permanent staff. The result
is that 19% of the hours worked, and three-quarters of newly created jobs, are
in emplois instables, for staff hired on contracts of less than a year. The
young and unskilled are trapped at the bottom of this two-tier job market.
Initiative is sapped by a system where the state soaks up almost 55% of GDP
(gross domestic product). An opinion poll revealed that half the young wish to
join the civil service: why work for the persecuted entrepreneur when you can do
the persecuting, sometimes for as little as 32 hours a week, with a safe pension
to come? The so-called "Ashford effect" drains the most dynamic from France to
Kent. Over 300,000 now work in England. Employers look increasingly at
"delocalisation", moving parts of their business abroad.
At Varages in the Var in southern France, the mayor has been on hunger strike to
draw attention to the collapse of the local earthenware industry. It has been
hit hard by manufacturers transferring production to Tunisia. In the textile
towns of the Vosges, the talk is of a "tsunami". Chinese quotas ended on January
1, 2005, and imports of Chinese pullovers are up fivefold since then, trousers
four times, and shirts by 168%. Four factories shut within 10 days in the early
summer, with production lines for medical textiles — such as sterile bandages —
relocated to the Czech Republic. The town of Thiers, which makes 70% of French
cutlery, has also been devastated by Chinese imports. In its golden age, the
industry employed 12,000. That is now down to 2,000, and it continues to bleed
jobs. Surviving firms have already begun subcontracting production to China,
which offers a five-to-one cost advantage. It is feared that Chinese companies
will buy up local firms for their technical and logistical
expertise, and use them to distribute made-in-China cutlery.
"Labour in France costs me €22 an hour," says Bertrand Ballu, a businessman in
Normandy who has begun manufacturing in Slovakia. "Over there, I pay €4 an hour.
And there's less red tape, less bureaucracy, less tax. I'm badly viewed here for
giving work to people who aren't French. But a business can't grow under French
conditions." He points out that each €10 he pays to an employee in France costs
him a further €4.50 in social charges, and that, after tax, the employee gets
only €8.50. Slovakia has no asset-based professional tax, unlike France, and
company taxes are 19%, against 37%.
There is talk of adopting the Danish "flexsecurity" system. Employers are free
to hire and fire, but workers are protected by generous unemployment pay,
provided they undergo compulsory training if needed, and accept suitable jobs
when offered. Nobody expects a radical overhaul, however, and the same
stagnation affects social issues.
Le Pen's relative success in 2002 showed the tensions that surround immigration.
Exactly how many immigrants there are in France — and how many of those are
Muslim — is not known. Figures of up to 5m are bandied about, but it is taboo in
a secular republic to collect racial and religious statistics.
"Our ancestors the Gauls", in theory at least, applies to Algerians and Malians
as well as the white français de souche, born and bred. To distinguish between
them, it is feared, leads to communautarisme on Anglo-Saxon lines. Chirac has
firmly put down suggestions of "positive discrimination". All French people were
equal before the law, he said. France did not recognise ethnic minorities, and
"to appoint people because of their origins is not acceptable".
Evidence suggests that Muslims, though many are now second or third generation,
are becoming less rather than more French. An increasing number, now 85%, say
they only eat halal meat. Headscarves, once rare, are now commonplace, at least
out of school. Many immigrant areas are virtual ghettos, dangerous for visitors
to stray into, disfigured by high unemployment, violent graffiti, Aids, crime
and a rampant drugs culture. "Little by little," a priest said of one high-rise
estate, "everyone feels caught up in this return to a savage state."
The satellite dishes that pepper the balconies are tuned to African and Arab
stations. Here the French are the foreigners: babtou to Africans, gaori and
gouère to Arabs, roum to gypsies.
While washing his father's car recently, Sidi Ahmed, an 11-year-old boy, was
shot and killed by crossfire in a gang war at La Courneuve, in the outer Paris
suburbs. "We are not Chicago," the mayor said, but drug-trafficking is rife in
what is now a crumbling estate but was a showcase when it was built in the
1960s.
This summer has also seen murder and mayhem between gypsies and Arabs in
Perpignan. But France has had no race riots on the scale of American or British
cities. To its credit, the government has dealt firmly but tactfully with the
issue of radical Islam. It set up the French Council of the Muslim Faith as an
official body to allow Islam a public voice, while changing the law so as to
deport jihad-preaching imams. Plans were announced this month to bear down on
illegal immigrants, and to restrict legal inflow to those with needed skills.
Firmness has largely seen off the issue of Islamic headscarves in state schools.
The consciously secular republic has forbidden religious symbols since the early
1900s. It could hardly concede to Islam what was denied to Catholics. In the
event, only 47 pupils, three Sikhs included, have been excluded from school. The
struggle centred on Strasbourg. Just 17 of the 500 girls who were veiled a year
ago have persisted.
That France still has talent by the bucketful is not in question. Anyone in the
Toulouse area may catch a glimpse of a giant A380 overhead, the new flagship of
Airbus, the French-inspired saviour of Europe's airline industry. The French
have always had a strange affection for Rover, and greeted its demise with real
sadness, but Peugeot has done its fair share to save a slice of British car
manufacture. The French have world-class companies in rocketry, insurance,
hotels, drinks, food and cosmetics. They remain a dominant force in fashion,
design, architecture and engineering. Their quality of life is close to
unbeatable. That's why so many foreigners go there.
What has gone wrong, the wellspring of morosité, lies in the Elysée and in
public life. It is rarely obvious on the surface — surly waiters and
out-of-sorts garage mechanics have always been with us — but get into
conversation, and dissatisfaction bubbles up. During the Mitterrand-Chirac
years, the mayors of great cities — Nice, Grenoble, Lyons, Cannes, Bordeaux —
have left under a cloud. In Paris, multiple allegations have accompanied
Chirac's long tenure as mayor. His chosen heir, and former deputy mayor, Alain
Juppé, is currently barred from holding public office.
Elf, the state oil company, has been plundered of €305m. The highest-profile
figure to be prosecuted was Roland Dumas, Mitterrand's foreign minister and
later president of the constitutional council, the body that granted Chirac his
controversial immunity. Dumas' conviction for receiving misappropriated public
funds was lifted on appeal. The former head of Elf claimed that Mitterrand, who
was his golfing partner, agreed to fund his €5m divorce from secret funds, and
that Mitterrand ordered Elf to pay $15m to Helmut Kohl's Christian Democrat
party in Germany.
Some of the fallout has been hilarious. Elf's go-between in the Helmut Kohl
affair was known as Dédé la Sardine; a suspect swallowed his mobile-phone chip
when authorities caught up with him in the Philippines; and a helicopter was
chartered to search the Himalayas for a vacationing judge to block proceedings
INTO phpbb_a payment made to the wife of Jean Tiberi, Chirac's successor as Paris
mayor. But tears mingle with the public laughter.
The payment of kickbacks by building contractors to the main parties, of the
left, right and centre, was so commonplace under Mitterrand that parliament
twice voted its members blanket amnesties. Public life was suborned, the
president himself leading the way with illegal phone taps, and having his
mistress and illegitimate daughter housed at taxpayers' expense. A close friend
was alleged to be involved in a big insider scandal. His prime minister, Pierre
Bérégovoy, committed suicide after an undeclared loan was made public. His
minister for urban affairs, the businessman Bernard Tapie, was convicted of tax
evasion. So was Mitterrand's son, Jean-Christophe, who acted as his father's
adviser on African affairs; he was given a suspended sentence last December.
Mitterrand was at pains to protect his reputation beyond the grave. At the last
gasp of his presidency, he had the official Archives de France sign away its
rights to his presidential papers for 60 years in a secret protocol. Access can
only be granted by his chosen trustee, and the Archives had no oversight to
ensure that state papers were not transferred INTO phpbb_his personal archive, of
which his daughter, Mazarine, is the gatekeeper.
Chirac, however, will be open to questioning the day he ceases to be president.
Allegations of misdeeds at the time he was mayor include vote-rigging, the
employment of staff in his RPR party at municipal expense, and kickbacks to
party funds on public housing and school-refurbishment contracts. In a video
cassette released after his death, Jean-Claude Méry, a businessman, gave details
of kickback schemes, and said he delivered Fr5m in cash to Chirac.
The present mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delano‘, has filed a complaint that at
least €700,000 of work was carried out by city gardening services to beautify
the homes of individuals close to the RPR. In the frais de bouche (dining
expenses), Fr14m is alleged to have been drawn for private meals over an
eight-year period, with a further Fr2.4m in cash being drawn for aircraft
flights.
At the same time, the economy has drifted. Mitterrand started off in 1981 with a
call for a "clean break with capitalism", nationalising banks, insurance and big
industrial groups, at a time when the rest of the world was starting to
privatise and deregulate. Reality intervened in the form of inflation,
devaluation and deficits. Unabashed, Mitterrand enthroned indecision and inertia
in the formula "Ni... ni..." — neither fresh nationalisations nor
privatisations.
Jacques Chirac muffed the chance to carry out much-needed surgery when he first
came to power in 1995. He set out ambitious plans for deregulation and a
flexible labour market, but backed down when they aroused union fury. He called
early parliamentary elections after two years, lost them, and found himself
locked in a five-year cohabitation with a socialist prime minister, Lionel
Jospin, who happily introduced the 35-hour week.
He beat Jospin in 2002, but has drifted away from market reforms and towards the
social model, pouring the scorn he once reserved for socialists on "Anglo-Saxon
liberalism". His "neo-Gaullism" means little now, beyond a hunger for national
grandeur, and mistrust of Americans.
The French note a joie maligne in London's attitude to their discomfiture. It
has no place. France matters. At a time when Europe is undergoing its own
identity crisis, it matters more than ever. The vigorous self-examination bodes
well. The French are asking questions, of Europe, of their leaders and
themselves, with fresh openness and candour.
To mention corruption used to invite the lift of a lofty eyebrow, and a remark
of how prim and unworldly were the British. The investigating magistrate in the
Elf case was Scandinavian-born Eva Joly. "I've never understood these immense
cases which drag on for ever," a tribunal president told her. "I imagine you
chose fraud because you're a Norwegian Protestant."
No more. Times are getting bleaker for those involved. Christine
Deviers-Joncour, Roland Dumas' former mistress and the self-styled "Whore of the
Republic" in the affair, has put her Paris flat up for sale, to help pay off €1m
in back taxes, and €3.5m in restitution to Elf. It is no longer heresy to be
Eurosceptic.
Before things really recover, however, and the années fric — the years of easy
money — are laid to rest, Chirac has to see out the rest of his wounded
presidency. And every sign is, that, as he has before — to Valéry Giscard
d'Estaing, to Raymond Barre, to ƒdouard Balladur — he will spend most of his
energies on doing down his rival on the right, the vigorous if relentlessly
self-publicising interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy. Chirac would do better to
look around at the country INTO phpbb_which so many of us are being decanted on
holiday. He, more than anyone, has the opportunity to go out and fix France.
KICKING UP A STINK
The French press has an endless supply of stories about the alleged shortcomings
of the elite — including Chirac himself. Nepotism, phone-tapping, back-handers,
grace-and-favour accommodation: throughout the Mitterrand-and-Chirac years,
successive French governments have been mired in scandal.
ALLEGATIONS
Fraudulent voter registration.
Illegal kickbacks on public-housing projects and the building or repair of
schools in ële-de-France.
The abuse of city-of-Paris gardening services for private purposes, with public
losses estimated to at least d700,000.
The use of cash to pay for food and drink, and airline tickets for Chirac and
his family.
BOGUS
Gérard Colé, whose salary was paid by Air France while he was an adviser to
Mitterrand, has said: 'Everyone employed in the cabinet who wasn't a civil
servant had fake jobs with Air France, Air Inter, the RATP [Paris transport],
the postal service, the railways, banks or insurance companies.'
FAMILY AFFAIRS
Mitterrand employed his son Jean-Christophe as his Africa adviser. His son was
fined and given a suspended sentence for tax evasion last year. At pains to
prevent various revelations, Mitterrand also appointed his illegitimate
daughter, Mazarine, as guardian of his private archive.
THE ELF
Money from the state-owned Elf oil company was allegedly used to pay CFA Fr100m
(the currency of 14 African nations) to Omar Bongo, the president of Gabon — in
cash.
About Fr1.1 billion passed through the accounts of Alfred Sirven, who handled
Elf's black funds. On arrest, he swallowed his mobile phone's Sim card, so his
calls could not be traced. At his trial, he said: "I know enough to bring down
the republic 20 times," but he kept quiet. Given five years in prison, he was
released on bail.
PHONE
Mitterrand set up an anti-terrorist unit at the Elysée Palace, which illegally
tapped the telephones of about 200 people, including judges, politicians,
lawyers, journalists and the actress Carole Bouquet. Attempts were made to hush
this up as 'secret défense', but documents exist bearing the word 'vu', or
'seen', in Mitterrand's handwriting.
Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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IF THE EU WAS THE ANSWER, IT MUST HAVE BEEN A STUPID QUESTION!
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24-07-2005, 10:58 PM
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