Debunking Jean-Francois Copé's Ramadan pain au chocolat tale

The campaign for the presidency of the centre-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Popular Movement, UMP) has taken a decided turn to the right in recent days.

At least for one of the candidates still left in the race, Jean-Francois Copé, the party's current secretary general.

If he runs out the winner against former prime minister François Fillon in November, the chances are the UMP will be able to drop any pretence of being a centre-right one.

The signs are there.

First up there's his aptly entitled "Manifesto pour une droite décomplexée", extracts of which you can read in Le Figaro and which illustrate how Copé believes there's an "anti-white discrimination" in some areas of France.

And presumably that so-called discrimination can be found, if you follow Copé's line of thinking, in the very same areas as the ones quoted in a campaign speech he gave last Friday in the southeastern town of Draguignan.

Jean--François Copé in Draguignan (screenshot from i>Télé report)

Apart from banging on about the current government's mishandling of the country which is, after all, what a party in opposition is supposed to do, Copé also revealed a little more of what we might expect from the UMP with him at the head.


You see, apparently he can "understand the exasperation of some people who return home from work in the evening to learn that their son has had his pain au chocolate taken from him, just as he was leaving school, by thugs who explained to him that Ramadan means fasting."

Take a listen to the clip.



Right. Yes definitely an "uninhibited Right" and not a direction some other leading UMP figures  would share, as former finance minister François Baroin was clear to point out at the weekend.

Quite apart from the offensive and inflammatory nature of Copé's remark with its obvious undertones which surely don't need to be spellt out (but have been nonetheless by many over the past couple of days in what the French almost lovingly refer to as a "polemic") there's also an essential problem with his little anecdote.

Timing.

When was the example quoted by Copé as leading to his enlightened understanding of some parents' annoyance supposed to have taken place exactly?

2012? Impossible as many have since pointed out because Ramadan fell during the school holidays

2011? Equally unfeasible for exactly the same reason.

So that leaves the most recent possible date for such a  act 2010
So in other words, poor old Copé has been waiting two whole years to bring the plight of that child to the public's attention and to show just how in tune he is with the thinking of M. et Madame Average French citizen?

Yes M. Copé, let the French eat their pain au chocolat.

Incomplete political faction - and what if there were a Royal coup within the UMP?

Have you noticed how much the centre-right opposition Union pour un Mouvement Populaire
(Union for a Popular Movement, UMP) is coming to resemble the Socialist party of just a few years ago.

Ségolène Royal (screenshot from TV report after Socialist party primaries)

The reference is not of course to political ideology but in terms of the internal power struggle which is set to heat up.

There's a race for the vacant position of party president, due to be elected in November, and already a slew of candidates - former ministers in the main - have let it be known they're interested in the post either as a way of uniting the party or making a stab at a run for the 2017 presidential elections - or both.

(With former positions in brackets) the front runners are likely to be François Fillon (prime minister) who has already declared he's a candidate, and the party's current secretary-general Jean-François Copé, who's not yet officially announced his decision but has already begun campaigning.

At the weekend Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet (ecology) said she would be a candidate joining Bruno Le Maire (agriculture) in the hunt for the 8,000 party signatories necessary to be eligible to stand.

The mayor of Nice and most definitely orange-faced one, Christian Estrosi (industry) is "not excluding" the possibility and neither is Rachida Dati (justice) who, even though she supports Copé and can't stand Fillon, has mooted the idea of a possible trio of women sharing the post.

Xavier Bertrand (employment) is apparently giving himself until the autumn before he comes up with a decision and François Baroin is also reportedly contemplating more than his just navel.

And if the choice for party activists were not already difficult enough, word on the grapevine is that they'll have a perhaps royally unwelcome presence among the starters.

Because a veteran of past battles ingloriously lost is thought to be considering entering the fray.

Yes you've guessed it. Some have suggested that Ségolène Royal will make a stab at yet another political office - a move which could very well put the proverbial cat among the pigeons and see UMP activists rally behind anyone who might save the party from a fate worse than the recent two electoral defeats.

Seggers to run? Surely a joke - you might be thinking.

Well it might be something of a stretch, but take a look at her record of campaigning and the idea doesn't sound so ridiculous, does it?

In 2007 she was the Socialist party's candidate in the presidential elections of that year, having, against all odds, secured the support of a majority of the party's rank and file members.

Sadly (or not) the party apparatchiks weren't so enthusiastic (and nor was the electorate at large it transpired) lobbing the political equivalent of a Molotov cocktail at every turn in the form a none-too discreet "Tout sauf Ségolène" campaign - an element that was to become something of a leitmotif within the party.

Never one to lie down after defeat, Seggers turned her attention towards the leadership of the Socialist party a year later, leading a bitter campaign against the eventual winner, Martine Aubry, whom she accused of having won an election characterised by "fraud and cheating."

Ho hum.

An attempt to secure the party's nomination as its candidate in this year's presidential elections ended in tears as Seggers finished a distant fourth after the first round with just 6.5 per cent of the vote.



And most recently there have of course been yet more tears as she struggled to put on the bravest of faces after coming under the Tweet-powered attack from the minister of jealousy, Valérie Trierweiler, during her unsuccessful attempt to land a seat in the national assembly.

Yes Seggers is battle-hardened but far from weary and surely ready for anything the UMP might be able to throw at her, including a former ally and advisor, Éric Besson.

He was on her 2007 campaign team but "defected" to the other side just a few months before the election having decided that her economic programme was flawed and the (Socialist) party not ready for power.

Ah yes, the beauty of French politics; Besson once an advisor to Royal and a member of the Socialist party, changed camps, joined the party of Nicolas Sarkozy, and became immigration minister to a man whom he had once described as "a US neocon with a French passport”

So who's to say that an unsubstantiated rumour about Segger's intents couldn't in fact become reality?

Stranger things have happened.

Just for the record, although there is a certain amount of "fact" in this piece, there is also a(n) (un)healthy dollop of "fiction".

Much like French politics really.

France's ambassador to Tunisia, Boris "Sarko boy" Boillon, apologises for his insulting behaviour

It can't be easy starting a new job, upsetting your host country, and then having to go on national television to issue an apology.

But that's exactly what has happened over the past week to France's new ambassador to Tunisia, Boris Boillon.

Boris Boillon (screenshot from BFMTV report)

During his first press conference since taking up his post on February 16, "Sarko boy", as Boillon is dubbed by some of the French media, insulted a journalist.

His style during the conference was friendly and relaxed to begin with, but it changed when faced with questions about France's reaction when the Jasmine revolution began.

He was dismissive and aggressive in both French and Arabic towards one journalist and for many (both in France and Tunisia) it was behaviour reminiscent of his mentor, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy.



Inevitably perhaps it didn't go down well with Tunisians.

A video of the meeting soon made it on to the Net and the people who had so effectively used social networking sites to topple the former leader Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali resorted to the same tactics to call for protests and his resignation outside the French embassy in Tunis on Friday.

A day later it was "damage control" from Boillon who went on national television to apologise.

"I say I am sorry, I regret my words, I was stupid," Boillon said.

"I ask for the forgiveness of all Tunisians."

After Sarkozy admitted that the French government had "misjudged" the strength of popular feeling which brought about the downfall of Ben Ali, he replaced the former ambassador, Pierre Menat, with Boillon.

His remit, as described by the weekly news magazine L'Express was to "reconnect with the Tunisian society, after decades of French complacency towards a hated regime."

And the French government spokesman, François Baroin, said of Boillon when the appointment was announced that, "He has all the natural sensitivity to match the new era now in Franco-Tunisian relations."

Last week's incident and the follow-up apology was not exactly the most auspicious of starts to the job of building bridges for the 41-year-old who has already completed a stint as France's Man in Baghdad and is the country's youngest serving ambassador.

Perhaps he'll now be discouraged from trying too hard to fashion himself in the mould of Sarkozy.

But somehow, for the moment, he looks like the most undiplomatic of diplomats - and has had a photo on his personal page of the French social networking site Copains d'avant to prove it: one which shows him wearing only in a pair of trunks...and a smile.

French "help" for Ben Ali stuck at Paris airport

Equipment to "maintain law and order" including police uniforms and tear gas, destined to be delivered to Tunisia before the fall of its former president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali has been stuck at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport since last Friday.

But there are conflicting explanations as to why it was never dispatched.

On Wednesday the French government's official spokesman, François Baroin, confirmed that an order, placed by the former Tunisian president with a private company in France, had been prevented from leaving Paris shortly before his fall from power.

"Ben Ali placed an order directly with the company supplying the equipment," he said.

"Customs officials did their job correctly and it never left," he added without, as the weekly news magazine Nouvel Observateur pointed out, wanting to elaborate on what role (if any) the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, had played in the decision.

As far as the French website Rue89 is concerned the load, containing as much as seven tonnes of tear gas, was held up because of "technical rather than political" problems.

Tear gas for Tunisia (screenshot from Rue89 video)

Customs officials authorised the export of the equipment, it says, but red tape and in particular the "need for it to be inspected" got in the way.

The journalist Jean-Dominique Merchet, who specialises in military and defence topics, offers up a different explanation though.

On his blog for the magazine Marianne, Merchet wrote that the 'plane carrying the cargo was due to leave late on Friday morning but customs officials "suddenly became very picky."

Soon afterwards, according to Merchet, the head of Sofexi, the group supplying the equipment, received a call from the "highest authority at the Elysée informing him that delivery was out of the question."

Such contradictory explanations are perhaps only to be expected from a country which the BBC described as having been "in a fluster over the Tunisian crisis"; a reaction that still seems to prevail perhaps as illustrated by Rue89's unsuccessful attempts to discover what will now happen to the equipment held at Roissy.

When it contacted the ministry of defence it was referred to the interior ministry, which then referred it to the Elysée which in turn referred it to the ministry of foreign affairs, from which it is still waiting for a reply...



Du gaz lacrymogène bloqué à Roissy
envoyé par rue89. - L'info video en direct.