Government Changes

A Change

Holland has been promising changes and we got the first of these on Sunday: himself as President. Since his electoral programme called for change without specifying what, when, how or where, we have to wait to see what other changes there will be. He has precious little room for manoeuvre and Merkel is already making noises to the effect that the agreed fiscal straightjacket is sacrosanct, so they are likely to be minimal. No doubt there will be some small concessions to be made as a thank-you to the electorate but the only large change I've seen suggested (from outside France), freeing up sections of the economy from government ownership/control, is completely alien to the French psyche.

Whatever measures Hollande decides on he will probably be able to enact quite easily. Parliamentary elections are due in a month and the polls point to a sizable majority for the centre-left parties. The Senate (equivalent to the House of Lords) already has a centre-left majority. Members of the Senate, incidentally, are all elected, by people who hold elected positions (mayors, councillors, etc). Now there's a thought for House of Lords reformists.

It turned out there were enough people who simply wanted to get rid of Sarkozy to do just that, just: a majority of a mere ~3%. Sarkozy's crime was not his handling of the economy, which generally met with favourable comments, nor his despicable swerve towards extreme right racism when the polls turned against him. It was rather his lack of taste. Outside France it is difficult to appreciate just how important “le bon goût” is to the French. It pervades the whole of life. Perceptions of food, drink, dress, relationships, public behaviour and just about everything else are governed by it. What matters is not so much what you eat or drink but always taking a little at a time, not piling up your plate or overfilling your glass. It is not what you wear but the cut of it, not whether you are faithful domestically or have a string of lovers but how you go about it. Style is all and Sakozy lacked style. He was generally perceived as brash and vulgar. He might have got away with it in more affluent times, if the economy had been booming and there was little unemployment. But ostentatious displays of enjoying a celebrity life-style when most of the population was having to tighten belts wasn't a bright move by any standards. However, it was the perceived vulgarity of his life-style that seems to have done for him. It is no accident that the “modesty” of Hollande's celebrations of his victory has been highlighted in the press.

Language

It wasn't necessary to know much French to follow what was going on pre-election. There were a number of “interviews” and we also had “le talk” and "un talk-show", in particular about the possibility of the socialists making “un come-back”.


 Which takes me more humorously to names.  I have to admit not being able to repress a giggle when my attention was drawn to an actor playing in a musical in Paris called Yvan Le Bolloc'h.  The French get their own back, of course, with Sean Connery (connerie = stupidity).

Moving Department

Mollans administratively is a kind of peninsula at the lower end of the Drôme Department, surrounded on most sides by the Vaucluse. The road signs have always amused me in that going almost anywhere means leaving the Drôme (Merci de votre visite), going into the Vaucluse (Bienvenu) and then coming back into the Drôme (Bienvenu again). Well, that's about to change.

For one thing, Departments, which have been a major part of the French administrative infrastructure for some 200 years, are being phased out. Within Departments there have been “communities of communes”, collectives that pool the resources of several communes to provide services that it doesn't make sense for communes to provide individually. Garbage collection, water and school facilities are examples. In future, these collectives will assume many of the powers currently invested in Departments.

Well, Mollans village council has decided to jump ship, leaving a collective centred on Buis (in the Drôme) and joining one centred on Vaison (in the Vaucluse). The main difference I can discern is that the former collective had a more or less low-rates, low-spend ethic and the new one has the opposite. The obvious attraction for village council is that it will get a bigger budget but there is some dissent among villagers at the prospect of garbage collection and water bills rising. It's probably the cost of changing all the road signs.