Jean-Pierre who?

Veteran journalist Jean-Pierre Elkabbach is pretty well known to the French.

He has been around for seemingly donkey's years and has held several high profile posts in the French media including president of France Télévisions (December 1993 - June 1996), president of the parliamentary TV channel Public Sénat (December 1999 - April 2009) and directeur général (April 2005) and later president (until June 2008) of Europe 1 radio.

At 75 years of age, Elkabbach is still going strong and shows no signs of losing his tenacity and combativity as a journalist.

He currently has two programmes on Europe 1.

Firstly there's the Sunday morning "Le Grand Rendez-vous" in which he heads a team of four journalists who grill (in the nicest possible manner of course because this, after all, is France) an invited guest (usually, but not always, a politician) on the most pressing matters of the day or the past week.

And then there's his daily 10-minute slot starting at around 8.20 am on the station's morning show when he gets to go head-to-head with a "mover and a shaker" - again most often a politician.

The list of his most recent guests reads like a who's who of the French political stage: Ségolène Royal (no introductions necessary), Laurence Parisot (the still-head, but not for much longer, of the French employers' union MEDEF), the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso (all right so he's not exactly French) and the interior minister Manuel Valls are just a few of those who've faced Elkabbach so far this month.

On Tuesday it was the turn of Delphine Batho, France's (deep breath please) minister of ecology, sustainable development, and energy.

Jean-Pierre Elkabbach and Delphine Batho (screenshot Europe 1 radio)

Now Batho doesn't have a huge amount of experience of politics at a national level. Well she wouldn't really, as she's still only 40.

And although she has been an elected member of parliament since 2007 (taking over incidentally the seat previously held by Royal) her current job is her first big one in government.

That's unless you count the couple of weeks she spent as a junior minister in the justice ministry before the prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault had a mini reshuffle shortly after June 2012 parliamentary elections.

Perhaps then, it was that lack of experience that had Batho flummoxed on Tuesday morning.

There again, maybe she had been out partying the previous working-non-working public holiday mess that is  lundi de Pentecôte.

Or it could just have been one of those moments that happens to all of us from time to time, because Batho didn't seem to be able to figure out who exactly was facing her in the studio.

As you can hear from the exchange in the accompanying video, she seemed convinced at times, that interviewing her was another Jean-Pierre - the Socialist party politician, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, a former minister under both François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac and one year younger (as if it had anything to do with it) than his, on this occasion, apparently first-named mix-up, Elkabbach.

"Global warming is no longer speculation Jean-Pierre Chevènement, it's now a fact to be witnessed in several countries," said Batho.

"Who is Jean-Pierre Chevènement," asked Elkabbach, eliciting an immediate apology and correction from Batho.

Only for exactly the same thing to happen to her moments later.

Elkabbach gave as good as he got, deliberately borrowing names of ministers present (that of health, Marisol Touraine) and past (budget and higher education, Valérie Pécresse) to come up with two new "Delphines" during the course of the interview.

The pair seemed to enjoy the joshing around, but the initial confusion was most probably down to that irritating habit journalists and those being interviewed (in France) have of repeating the name of the person they're talking to several times throughout a conversation.

It's either a confrontational technique or one meant to play for time or avoid the pitfall of forgetting the other person's name (in which case, it doesn't always work), but how much easier and more entertaining it might be, if they just all called each other "darling" instead - well just for one day at least.


Delphine Batho confond Jean-Pierre Elkabbach et... par LeLab_E1

Christmas return home unlikely for French tourists in Brazil plane row

There seems to be little hope that three French citizens detained earlier this month by Brazilian authorities for causing a disturbance on a 'plane, will be home in time for Christmas.

On Monday their families had hoped to have a private audience with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, but all they managed to do was to hand in a letter asking him to intervene on their behalf.

So what's the story all about and how come two retired French men, Michel Ilinskas aged 61 and Antonio Nascimento aged 64 ans, along with Emilie Camus, a 54-year-old hospital worker from the Parisian suburbs are still in Brazil and being held under house arrest?

Well, what happened to them perhaps needs to be seen in the light of the Air France flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris which crashed into the Atlantic in June killing all 216 passengers and 12 crew members and the fears that has understandably engendered to many taking to the skies.

The three were among a group of French tourists who had been on a two-week cruise and were due to return home from São Paulo on December 6 aboard a flight operated by the Brazilian airline TAM.

Their 'plane was reportedly held on the tarmac for three hours because of a malfunction in the aircraft's computer system.

Explanations from the flight crew as to the cause of the delay were apparently only offered in Portuguese and English, and although Camus, who speaks Portuguese, was able to translate, some passengers, among them the three who were later arrested, panicked and requested to be allowed to disembark and take another flight.

That request was refused and somehow "talk of rebellion" reached the cockpit and the police were called in to detain the "ringleaders" and escort them from the 'plane.

As can be seen from the accompanying amateur video, they weren't exactly treated with kid gloves.

Ilinskas and Nascimento were held on suspicion of being the main "rabble rousers" and Camus, was also arrested accused of having "incited violence" through her translations.

On Monday the families of the three and their supporters rallied outside the Elysée palace in Paris, the official residence of the French president, hoping they would be able to persuade him in person to intervene with Brazilian authorities on their behalf.

But all they managed was to hand in a letter, and they hold little hope of seeing their loved ones before the holiday season starts.

"The only hope I have is an intervention at the highest level," Muriel Ilinskas, the wife of one of those detained, told French news.

"It's a complete nightmare and I don't see an end to it."

French motorcyclist fined for wearing contact lenses

All right the headline is a little misleading as will become clear. But in essence it's what happened.

Once again it's time to say "road users in France beware".

After the recent case of a motorist being fined (€22) for smoking behind the wheel of his car, comes the story of a motorcyclist being pulled over for not "having glasses about his person" - to put it in good "police speak".

It happened last Tuesday on the streets of the French capital as Jérôme, an engineer, set out on his motor scooter to an appointment at the dentist.

At one point on his journey he ran a traffic light as it turned amber to "avoid braking too suddenly". But as (bad) luck would have it a couple of police officers saw him and he was stopped.

Now, what would have been a standard infraction with a possible €22 fine quickly escalated to something a little more absurd as he was asked for his papers, which the 37-year-old duly handed over.

Jérôme you see is near-sighted and as such required by law to wear glasses, or at least have them somewhere in the vehicle when driving, although the language on his licence puts it in a more gobbledygook fashion than that.

At least that's how the officers on duty interpreted the law.

Well he wasn't wearing glasses, but he was wearing contact lenses, which you might be thinking would have conformed with the sense of what was actually written on his licence.

Er....think again.

Because he didn't have a supplementary pair of glasses with him, one of the police officers handed Jérôme a €90 fine and lopped three points from him for "driving a vehicle without respecting the restrictions mentioned on his licence."

What's more he also advised him to "read the highway code again."

And that's exactly what Jérôme did, but he couldn't find the exact text to which the officer was referring and has decided to contest the fine.

"I don't consider it to be justified," he said.

"I'm not a danger to society and besides without lenses I don't see anything."

He's not alone in thinking the officer overreacted and has of Jean-Baptiste Iosca, a lawyer specialising in the rules of the road and traffic contraventions.

"The law requiring all drivers to carry a pair of glasses in the glove compartment of the vehicle was repealed in 1997," he said.

"I dealt with a similar case in May this year and my client was not charged."

Um. Who should it be Jérôme rereading the highway code?

French prepare to go to the polls

On Wednesday around 19 million French will have the chance to vote.

Oh not another election in France, you may well be screaming.

Sorry folks, afraid so. Following last year's presidential and parliamentary election here, and then the two rounds of local elections in March this year, the French are being called to the ballot box once again.

Around 19 million of them to be precise.

Hang about. You might be wondering how come so few. After all in a country of around 64 million people, surely there are more registered voters than that.

And you would be right in terms of the other national elections, for which there are in fact just over 44 million registered voters.

Furthermore astute France-watchers (oh come on there has to be at least one out there) will have noticed that tomorrow's election falls on a weekday, rather than on a Sunday as is traditional in this country.

Ah, well here's the short answer.

This time around it's a national election for sure, but of quite a different sort - namely for the country's prud'hommes.

If you've just had to reach for the dictionary - here's a simple explanation which will give you (hopefully ) a much clearer understanding of what they do and why they're important.

They're the people who serve on France's 210 private sector joint industrial tribunals.

There are 14,512 elected prud'hommes serving for five years up and down the country on 210 tribunals, and their job is to resolve industrial - or more accurately perhaps, employment - disputes between employer and employee.

Of the 200,000 or so cases the tribunals hear each year, around 50 per cent concern alleged unfair dismissal and compensation claims, with another 40 per cent involving overtime and bonus disputes.

In around 70 per cent of cases, the tribunal rules in favour of the employee.

Wednesday's vote is open to all private sector employees as well as those from state-run commercial companies such as SNCF (railways) and EDF (electricity).

The government has been criticised in the run-up to the election, in particular by Laurence Parisot, the president of MEDEF (Mouvement des Entreprises de France or Movement of the French Enterprises).

She's on record as having recently called the government's approach and to the organisation of the vote "a shambles".

Trade unions meanwhile, have been campaigning heavily among private sector employees.

For Bernard Thibault, the general secretary of the Confédération générale du travail (General Confederation of Labour, CGT) the largest of France's five main trade unions, Wednesday's vote is also a clear test of government employment policy.

"We want there to be true national consultation and this is a chance to send a clear message to the government as to employees' expectations in this period of (economic) crisis,"he said.

Even though government and trades unions agree that the role of the prud'hommes is a vital one, there has been a marked decrease in participation among those eligible to vote in recent elections. In 1979, turnout was at 63.2 per cent but last time around (2002) only 32.7 per cent voted.

The signs are that Wednesday's vote will be follow a similar pattern with a poll published on Tuesday revealing that 70 per cent of those surveyed saying they would abstain, vote blank or spoil their ballot papers.

"That's the paradox of the prud'hommes," Xavier Bertrand, the minister of employment is reported as saying in the national daily Le Figaro.

"If 90 per cent of those involved in the private sector agree that they (the tribunals) serve a function and are indispensable, only 30 per cent of those eligible actually vote."