By Leanna Pankratz (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: May 23, 2012
Former President Nicolas Sarkozy was defeated during the final election for French presidency, much to the public’s joy. The victor was leftist candidate Francios Hollande, a complete political turnaround for the French people.
“I feel that it is the beginning of a beautiful new political era,” Sacha-Marie Gladeau said, a Montreal resident who was visiting relatives in Paris when the results were announced.
Gladeau could not hide her joy at the outcome. “I am from Quebec, but born in Paris, so I still feel a deep familial bond to France, and each friend or relative I speak to has nothing but good things to say about the future of our country that stems from a new leftist government,” she said.
“Sarkozy was ridiculed by the public, and continuously alienated his own citizens through unintelligent, bigoted statements, and a lavish lifestyle that is not a reality for most Europeans at this time. Any former president who can have a crowd of eager voters on the street begin to chant ‘Sarko en prison!’ has a serious problem,” Gladeau explained.
The excitement of crowds in the streets who cheered wildly when Francois Hollande’s win was announced “speaks for itself,” Gladeau said. “If Hollande’s election can garner such a result, I am very excited for what the future holds.”
The election outcome, dubbed by many as a “Bloodless Revolution” certainly bears some traces of another revolution that occurred in the 1700s. It is a fact of life that the common man does not appreciate outlandish displays of decadence, as King Louis XVI and his consort, Marie Antoinette, discovered. Living a lifestyle completely separate from their citizens, dining on brioche and wine while countrymen scavenged for scraps rings hauntingly similar to the life led by Sarkozy.
The former President was criticized by the public for numerous actions; things such as purchasing 50,000 euro watches for his socialite/model/spare-time-singer wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy (who supposedly once bragged that her and Sarkozy had kept a state official waiting while they finished off a particularly vigorous bedroom session), and checking his Blackberry during an audience with the Pope.
On top of his unrealistic lifestyle, Sarkozy also spoke strongly of tightening immigration laws in his country, displaying anti-Islamic behaviors such as monitoring Mosques, denying Muslim preachers access to France, and stating in a speech that “France will not tolerate ideological indoctrination on its soil.” The French public has simply had enough of the spectacle, the xenophobia, the bigotry, and enough of the fame game displayed by “Sarko” and his wife. Though slightly less grisly than its Baroque counterpart, The French 2012 presidential election was nothing short of a peoples’ revolution.
Francois Hollande, the country’s first Socialist president since the ‘90s, with a citizen-based political agenda, could not only put effort and time into recreating the French financial outlook, but could seriously turn France away from the hyper-right-winged focus set by Sarkozy. “Everyone in France will be treated equally, no child of the Republic will be sidelined, abandoned or discriminated against,” Hollande said.
“The first thing the President of the Republic must do is to assemble and bring people together for the challenges we face,” he stated in his election speech, to the strains of La Vie en Rose, an old French favourite, on accordion.
The outlook for Hollande’s presidency is optimistic. The French need a leader with empathy, with people-oriented passion and with a good understanding of how the modern world turns. This is the kind of figure Hollande promises to be.
