Sarkozy on “Charlie Rose” Wednesday night
Programming alert in the U.S.: Nicolas Sarkozy will be on “Charlie Rose” Wednesday night to talk about Segolene Royal, Jacques Chirac, Iraq, immigration, the 2005 Paris riots, Turkey’s EU bid, U.S.-French relations, and his “multipolar” view of the world today.
One excerpt:
Nicolas Sarkozy: Madame Royal is promising people that they’ll work less. What I’m saying, this is my — I’m saying is that it’s my commitment, my undertaking that’s going to win more. Charlie Rose: They’ll work more. Nicolas Sarkozy: Bien Sur Charlie Rose: No more 35-hour week. Nicolas Sarkozy: Yes, yes. That would be minimum. Not the maximum, a minimum. If people want to work 35 hours, okay, fine. But if people want to work more to earn more, then why not? It’s strange, the socialists. They’re not shocked that people should arrive late, provided that everyone’s late. I want everyone to be on time. I want everyone to be able to promote their own families. For me, it doesn’t mean that everyone has to do the same job and earn the same thing, and we all live in exactly the same apartments and we have the same history. Life is not that. Life is constructing, is acting, creating, guaranteeing the social promotion of one’s own children, doing something with your life. What sort of philosophy do you have if you do nothing but sit and wait? What are you waiting for? Why are you waiting? To do what? What sort of meaning do you have in your life? We all have something that’s unique and fragile. Life. We have to do something with it. I want us to do something with it. And I say to people, the people who suffer the most severe handicaps, well, these are people that I want to help upwards, not let them sink down. The socialists want there to be a minimum revenue, minimum income. But that’s not enough to live on. You survive, no more. I want more than that for people.
Also worth noting today is Roger Cohen’s column in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune, “United States as the Anti-France” (registration required).
Being the anti- France, the United States, it often seems, cannot be seen for what it is. So freighted is America with meaning, it ceases to be visible. It becomes an abstraction shaped by prejudice rather than a country intelligible through experience. It serves a purpose at the price of being severed from itself. These reflections stirred on reading an eloquent example of Gallic delusion: the statement just published by Ségolène Royal’s Socialist Party about Nicolas Sarkozy, her chief opponent in the French presidential election. This 87-page work amounts to a relentless exercise in Sarkozy-bashing through his depiction as that incarnation of menace: a card-carrying crypto-American. Entitled “The Worrying ‘Quiet Rupture’ of Mr. Sarkozy,” and displayed on Parti-socialiste.fr, the party’s home page, the work begins by asking: “Is France ready to vote in 2007 for an American neo-conservative carrying a French passport?”
February 2nd, 2007 at 4:34 am
About Roger Cohen’s column in the NYT and IHT : the pamphlet issued by the French Socialist Party should be looked primarly at as a weapon against Nicolas Sarkozy. Viewed in such a light, it does not deserve any special attention or treatment since it is a classical campaigning tool. Now, beyond this very political dimension, the pamphlet also reveals, and this is both more interesting and worrying, the way a large section of French socialists look at the US and transatlantic relations. The level of ignorance, ideology and aggressivity displayed in this document not only about Bush but about the so-called American system and way of life is just amazing. No one knows actually who wrote the chapter on Sarkozy and the US since it has been written under a pseudo (an other very courageous way of doing things), but it absolutely fits the doctrine of anti-globalisation/anti-US you find in the French extreme left and also within the Socialist party.
Now, the official socialist candidate never spellled such an anti-US policy out, and I bet she won’t. But she will have to make her own position clear at some point