Anyone whos read my posts on French politics over the years knows what I think of him. I have said it countless times and will say it yet again: Nicolas Sarkozy is the worst person in the top-tier of French politics. He is despicable and loathsome in ways too numerous to mention in a short blog post, the main one, though, being the 4 Is, which he has made the alpha and omega of his campaign. Some examples of Sarkozys demagogic posturing over the past three months: 1. His call for the banning of the Islamic headscarf from universities and workplaces, despite the manifest unconstitutionality of such measures and the certain rage and resistance they would engender. 2. Riding the wave of the late summers burkini hysteria, his demanding the banning of the offending swimsuit and by constitutional amendment if necessary, how such a fantastical amendment could be possibly be worded not being explicated and the European Convention of Human Rights be damned. 3. Calling for the automatic, indefinite administrative detention, and without judicial oversight, of all persons fiché S, i.e. put on a police watch list for possible links to terrorists but with the persons in question having committed no crime or been charged with anything. In short: Guantánamos à la française, in France, and for French citizens. 4. Suspending family reunification for immigrants legally resident in France, malgré the right to live with ones family being a fundamental human one and contained in declarations and treaties to which France is a signatory, e.g. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the aforementioned European Convention. 5. Demanding the end to alternative meals in school cafeterias, so that if, say, pork is all thats on the menu and a pupil does not want to eat this, he or she has only to ask for a double order of French fries. Honnêtement, it takes a truly perverse, twisted mind to come up with something like thisas well as to thunderously cheer it from an audience. 6. Not so much demagogic as comically laughable: calling on primary schools to teach children, regardless of their actual origins, that their ancestors were the Gauls. Such would be akin to all American studentsof all races, ethnicities, and creedsbeing informed by mandate of the state that they are descended from the pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower. Sarkozy delights in this rhetoric, whipping LR base audiences into a frenzy in stigmatizing a part of the population and with his trademark trash-talking style. À propos, hes fascinated with Trump. The similarities between the two men are indeed strikingthough Trump has more money and higher poll numbers. The hugely unpopular Sarkozy, who is obsessed with avenging his 2012 defeat and determined to vanquish his LR rivals, has never led in a primary poll. He will likely finish second tomorrow. If he somehow wins the 2nd round, it will be an even greater upset than the Nov. 8th one outre-Atlantique.
