The majority of the French pols returned from their hols over the weekend and the presidential hopefuls launched their campaigns in earnest. Ségolène Royal - definitely the best looking candidate in a bikini - also turned up at the top of the opinion polls. Not only does she beat all the other socialist hopefuls, something she has been doing for a while now, she is also ahead of her right-wing rival Nicolas Sarkozy. Sego has also been claiming the mantle of "heir to Mitterand", which is not, personally, a mantle that I think she ought to be claiming. Mitterand was a Nazi collaborator, a corrupt president and an extravagent builder of architectural follies and it is hard for me to see why she would want to identify herself with such a dinosaur of the traditional French political establishment.
According to the Wapping Liar (story also receiving coverage in the French press), while Sego and non-hubby François Hollande (or is it Françoise Holland?), were sunning themselves on the Côte d'Azur, some people were ransacking their home. Nothing seems to have been stolen leading to the suspicion that some part of France's secret service and/or her political rivals were behind the event. Sego very carefully did not blame Sarko for the incident - but one gets the feeling that this was in a sort of damning with faint praise - and certainly some of Sarko's supporters rushed to his defense in a way which one suspects Sarko might have wished they did not (good summary article - machine translation).
Sarko meanwhile was getting the fireman vote by attending the funeral of 3 fireman killed recently in the Var in an accident related to fighting a forest fire. To be fair, Sarko has been a very conscientous minister of the interior and did much the same to some others killed last year so this isn't special election year posing. Of course his current boss, l'Escroc, also showed up a couple of days ago too at the same fire station, in the hope perhaps of distracting attention from his Lebanese adventures.
Actually on that note, I suspect that l'Escroc's lebanese adventure is going to be a total disaster for him and may end up torpedoing the right in next year's election. He thought he could somehow do better that the damnyankees but I'm fairly sure he's going to end up getting a large number of UN troops to show up just in time to be live spectators of the second half of the Hezboillah-Israel war. One suspects that the French military agrees with my position and hence why they have only agreed to send 200 troops and 10 officers. As this disaster unfolds expect Sarko to disassociate himself from the government and concentrate on a zillion and one photo-opspolicies on immigrattion, crime etc.
We can also expect the Clearstream affair to rear its head again, and if Sarko does things well, he will tie that into the Sego "intrusion" event and find a convenient rogue intelligence agent (or agency) that he can publically chastise/arrest for both. Thereby proving that he is
pure as driven snow
impartially investigating all crimes
competant
Personally I reckon 3 is completely correct. 1 and 2 are only true up to a point.
Anyway we have some 8 months of fun, fun, fun until the election and the race has only just begun so there is plenty of time for me to see if I can become the Murray Walker of the French political scene.
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