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| 1 |
ID:
113174
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
PARIS-We are eight at a long, leisurely lunch in the charming 14th arrondissement apartment just off the Place Denfert-Rocherot. Our host is a Le Monde journalist whose long career has taken him from Cambodia in the last days of the Indochina wars and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge to John Major's London and to Washington, straddling Clinton and Bush. The afternoon begins with a fabulous hard yellow cheese and a rich white wine from Catalonia down by the Pyrenees separating France from Spain where our hosts have their country cabin. The dishes are passed around, the wine glasses filled and refilled, the main course, a succulent cassoulet de canard and all the trimmings. But the centerpiece, as is the case these days when any two or more Europeans gather, is the Presidentielles-the national elections for the first new President de la Republique in five years. The first round will be held in just 11 weeks. This watershed vote comes amidst another downward spiral in a French economy already battered by the three-year global recession. These two all but inseparable subjects, fused into a complexity only the French can master, continue to mesmerize this nation that, even in the best of times, never takes its politics in stride.
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| 2 |
ID:
119400
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Long gone . . . is the inbred elite connivance between Paris and the francophone capitals in Africa.
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| 3 |
ID:
119346
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| 4 |
ID:
130252
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| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Few world leaders in recent years have been subject to the level of derision faced by President François Hollande of France. Even before a Paris tabloid exposed his late-night dalliances with actress Julie Gayet-sending Hollande's then-companion and France's now former first lady Valérie Trierweiler to hospitalization for severe depression, and making the improbable Lothario the primary target of comedians on both sides of the Atlantic-Hollande was the most unpopular president in the history of France. Since then, things have gotten worse.
An inelegant man who never served as government minister, a leader lacking the physical presence and political stature of his predecessors, Hollande is an accidental president who came to power as the most palatable replacement for the man who was to be the Socialist Party's standard bearer in 2012: the brilliant former finance minister and IMF president Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Strauss-Kahn abruptly quit politics after being arrested, though the charges were later dismissed, in connection with the rape of a chambermaid at the Sofitel hotel in New York in May 2011. Hollande, in fact, campaigned as an Everyman, a candidate with middle-class tastes (he prided himself on not even owning a car) who would be a "normal president"-the antithesis of incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, whose term as president was partly overshadowed by the drama of his own personal life and numerous friendships with the ultra-wealthy.
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| 5 |
ID:
119306
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| 6 |
ID:
125205
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
When newly elected French President François Hollande squarely denounced the brutality and injustice of the whole era of French colonialism before the Algerian Parliament on December 20, 2012, he created headlines on both shores of the Mediterranean. Some found in Hollande's words vindication for the evil of European imperialism, while others saw an indiscriminate betrayal of French and Western civilizing values. That was the result Hollande intended. The polarization he created bolstered both the French and Algerian governments in trying times.
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