Good Morning, France
// The price of the question
How different they were – her reserved, cold, almost affectless, but quick to smile. He is hyperactive, he gesticulates, slaps people on the back and shakes hands. Sometimes it seems to me that Sarkozy and Royal would make a good couple. She would tone him down a little, and he would brighten her up. Today they will miss the battle of opposition, the game of nerves, the drive that France has felt for the past few months as it tried to cope with its past and present and choose its future.
“Read Nietzsche again and you will understand everything about France,” my friend Andre told me. “Apollo and Dionysus, optimism and pessimism, overcoming and suffering, brains and soul. We are on the inside of those scissors,' and the pendulum swings from one side to the other.” Exactly. Even when they want change, that is, they choose to be pragmatic, the French have an unrestrained fear of losing their “exclusivity,” which one of my colleagues compared with a comfortable old bed – a convenient social construct, the triumph of the collective over the individual. That is what separates them from the Anglo-Saxon countries, and they are proud of it. And it is the cause of the sleepiness that has lain over the country for the past few years. The French want to move forward, but they are afraid to throw off the baggage that hinders them. They want Apollo's body and Dionysus's soul and, of course, they are afraid that they won't get either.
That is why the presidential election was so “centrist.” That is why the extreme left and extreme right were marginal. That is why you can predict with reasonable certainty that centrists will form the basis of the opposition in the next parliament, elections to which take place in June.
That duality of the French is an unfunny joke. Any president of France succeeding 74-year-old Jacques Chirac, whose term ends on May 16, is simply doomed to be a reformer. But the inner duality of the French, even as it gives a mandate to a new reformer president, will, I fear, lead to a burst of dissatisfaction at the first attempt to rouse them from their comfortable old bed. That is the danger of Sarkozy, who has attained human glory without mincing words. Many people have told me that they are worried that Sarkozy, unlike Royal, will make sudden moves that could bring equally sharp reactions from society. That would complicate the implementation of the programs that, strange as it may seem, many on the left consider most appropriate for the country as well.
“We'll see what's waiting for us now,” a guy of about 25 with somehow sad satisfaction. He has a girl on his arm. I am leaving the polling station in Paris's 14th arrondissement with them.
“Oh well, we'll take to the streets if we have to. You know we know how,” the girl replied. Then she glanced at me and whispered something into the boy's ear. They both laughed.
France is France, and something about it will never change. At least, I hope.
Natalia Gevorkyan
All the Article in Russian as of May 07, 2007
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