Today the French people went to the vote for a new president. They chose between chalk and cheese, right and left, man and woman.
Today 53% of the French people elected chalk/right/man, who goes by the name of Nicholas Sarkozy.
This was, if disappointing for many, not particularly surprising. That said, the vast proportion of the French people I know, including all of the students I've met here in Lyon and many of the people I sing with, were all voting Segolene and were all despairing of those 53%. Although it's irrelevant, all the other English students who are in France this year also seemed to be crossing their fingers for Mme Royal.
Preferences aside, if one thing is sure, it's that over these next five years France will change. The change will be dramatic. The reaction will be dramatic. There will be strikes. There will be riots. There will be good things, and bad.
"Welcome" to what I have named the Sark Ages. It'll be interesting to see what happens next–let's explore them together!
(and thank goodness we don't have to vote for the Queen)
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2 comments:
In Scotland (you'll perhaps have gathered) there's been a lot of fuss because tens of thousands of votes were disqualified because of 'spoiled papers'. The explanation seems to be that people couldn't understand how to do their voting, because they had two different systems for two different elections. If 5% of the population can't read the instructions on the voting paper you wonder how they can have followed the policy debates on which they are being asked to cast judgement in electing their representatives.
Good for Scotland I say. It seems to me that it makes a lot of sense to have a voting system that is incomprehensible if you have an IQ below the level to be able to read and pass judgement intelligently on a sound newspaper article on a political issue of great moment.
Of course the problem is that some people might manage to do the voting paper correctly purely by accident. I take it 5% is only the ones who didn't understand and did it so wrong as to count as spoiled. Doubtless another 5% did it wrong in the sense that they didn't know what to do, but did something that happened to cunt as sound.
Hear hear. I guess at least the 5% who didn't know but got it right deserve some credit for intelligent guesswork.
Here the only voting problems I've heard about are with their electronic machines that seem to manage to gather more votes than there are people. Stupid computers!
As we were saying last night, the problem with democracy is that you let idiots and selfish people vote for you. One of my flatmates is particularly frustrated at this as she counts her family in the former category!
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