By
RUADHÁN MAC CORMAIC
Politicians in bed with the media
THE DSK-ANNE SINCLAIR marriage is one of the most scrutinised celebrity relationships in French public life, but in the close-knit circles of Parisian power, where politicians and journalists have often been to the same schools and universities, it’s far from being the only such double-act. Both Bernard Kouchner, the recently retired foreign minister, and the centrist leader Jean-Louis Borloo, are also married to prominent TV journalists. The senior socialist Arnaud Montebourg’s long-term partner is a prime-time TV news anchor.
After socialist leader François Hollande and the mother of his four children, Ségolène Royal, split up (just before she ran for the presidency in 2007), Hollande declared he had found the love of his life in the form, naturally, of a TV reporter.
Defence minister Alain Juppé is another whose wife is a former journalist, while a newsreader at the state broadcaster had to step aside during the 2007 presidential election because her partner was François Baroin, the current budget minister known as “Harry Potter” for his youthful, bookish looks.
Perhaps all of this partly explains why French journalists are so squeamish about covering the private lives of politicians. Many of them would be reporting on themselves.
A little wink to Irish sports fans
SHARP-EYED FANS at last weekend’s Ireland v France rugby match in Dublin may have spotted a familiar cartoon villain in the stand. Raymond Domenech, the former French soccer manager, was making his first visit to Ireland since Thierry Henry’s handball. It was a rare public appearance since France’s fiasco at the World Cup in South Africa. So why Dublin, a French journalist asked.
“It’s a little wink,” Domenech replied mischievously, but, as true sports people, the Irish knew that “once it’s over, it’s over”.
Domenech, vilified in France since the World Cup, followed the Dublin trip with his first interviews in almost a year. But his rehabilitation process will take some time. You know you’re not winning when the headline on your interview is: “Domenech: ‘I’m not a moron’.”
Irish writers gain in translation
A RICH season for French fans of Irish fiction. New translations of two novels by John Banville, Infinis (The Infinities)and La Double Vie de Laura Swan (The Silver Swan),the latter written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, reached the bookshops this week, and on Thursday Banville gave a reading from a work in progress to a full house at the Irish Cultural Centre.
The reviews are already in, meanwhile, for the new translation, by Anna Gibson, of Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn, and they're excellent. Tóibín's novel, which one French reviewer suggested was the sort of book that should be given to aspiring novelists as a model of masterly authorial control, has made it on to the bestseller list here.
Maggie Doyle, foreign acquisitions director at Éditions Robert Laffont, which has published both Brooklyn and Infinis, says that as well as the clear strength of their work, Irish authors benefit from a general goodwill towards the country. "The range of publishers publishing Irish fiction is very interesting, from the larger trade houses to smaller houses. It's the mass market to the very literary . . . There's a definite interest."
César selection helps make up for Oscar omission
WITH 11 NOMINATIONS, the powerful Des Hommes et des Dieux (Of Gods and Men)is expected to be the big winner at the César awards – the French Oscars – on Friday night. Directed by Xavier Beauvois and based on the true story of seven French monks who were killed in Algeria in the mid-1990s, the film has been a huge critical and commercial success and has already been watched by more than three million people in France alone and is still showing in Dublin's Light House cinema.
Its selection in categories including Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay compensates somewhat for its inexplicable omission from the shortlist for the “foreign film” Oscar. “I didn’t make the film for the box-office receipts,” said Beauvois this week. “I tried to make the best possible film, believing that the viewer is an intelligent person.”
The picture’s success mirrors the film industry’s. In another strong year, French cinemas sold more than 206 million tickets in 2010, 35 per cent of them for indigenous productions.
Le smoking ban: c’est passé
THERE’S NO shortage of anecdotal evidence that the French are resisting the pressure to give up smoking. In Paris you lose count of how many times someone strikes up a conversation by asking for du feu or une clope (a light or a cigarette, two things French smokers, as a rule, never carry). And it’s not that hard to find a bar where the owner will happily let his regulars puff away in defiance of the smoking ban.
Now we have statistics to prove the stories. Despite price rises, health warnings and a ban in bars and restaurants since January 2008, government figures show that the proportion of smokers rose from 31.8 per cent in 2005 to 33.6 per cent in 2010, the first significant jump since major anti-smoking laws were enacted in 1991. Women and the unemployed account for the biggest increases.
The figures have taken policymakers by surprise. Expect stricter application of the ban, another hefty price rise, and yet more French smokers who don’t buy their own.
Don’t mention the corporation tax rate
NOTHING DRIVES HOME the gulf between the political cultures of Ireland and France quite like corporation tax. The mere mention of Ireland’s 12.5 per cent rate on company profits does strange things to normally reasonable people.
The Frenchman will roll his eyes and mutter about Irish arrogance and the selfishness of neighbours. The Irishman will strike a wounded, indignant pose, as if his French friend has suggested deploying missiles along the Brittany coast and aiming them at every American-owned company in Ireland.
So ingrained are the two countries’ divergent views on the topic – reaching beyond lines of ideology, age, gender and class – that even journalists on both sides take the national stance as their logical starting point. Overall, neither side listens much to the other.
A French senator, Jean-François Humbert , visited Ireland recently to study the crisis and reported that the corporation tax rate was “a taboo subject” in the country. Meanwhile, a member of EU Commissioner Olli Rehn’s entourage told financial newspaper Les Echos that the rate had become “a sort of national icon”.
After Nicolas Sarkozy made hostile noises recently about linking Ireland’s rescue package to tax reform, the Government dispatched the Minister of State for Europe, Dick Roche, to Paris to put Dublin’s case to members of the French assembly and senate. Did he think he had changed many minds, I asked Roche afterwards.
“Very hard to say, to be truthful,” he replied, before returning to Ireland for the election campaign.
DSK vs Sarko: the Parisian parlour game
THE FRENCH CAPITAL’S favourite political parlour game, the long-running quest to divine the innermost thoughts of one Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has gained new momentum thanks to a passing remark by his wife.
For the past year the political class has waited for a signal that the socialist, known as DSK and familiar to readers in Ireland and Greece as managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), plans to return to France to challenge Nicolas Sarkozy for the presidency.
Precluded by his job from speaking about domestic politics, DSK has so far offered nothing but enigmatic smirks and strategic silence. He appears content to watch his poll numbers rise and to leave supporters and journalists feeding on a meagre ration of speculation and third-hand gossip.
But when DSK’s wife, Anne Sinclair (right), told the weekly news magazine Le Point last week that she did not want her husband to accept a second term in Washington, supporters took it as a clear signal of Strauss-Kahn’s candidacy.
Sinclair, a former television journalist, has made timely interventions on her husband’s behalf before: last autumn, when DSK was under attack from opponents for not being sufficiently left-wing, she appeared on TV to press his socialist credentials. It’s inconceivable that her remarks to Le Point were not agreed with her husband in advance.
Although polls show that Strauss-Kahn remains the candidate best placed to defeat Sarkozy in next year’s election, his ratings have been dipping slightly of late, which may explain the timing of Sinclair’s comments.
But Sarkozy’s centre-right party is clearly rattled. When the president supported DSK’s candidacy for the IMF job it was portrayed as a tactical masterstroke.
In one move he had both co-opted a major left-wing figurehead and dispatched one of his most able rivals safely across the Atlantic. Then the financial system began to implode and the IMF suddenly found itself with more heft and prominence than in decades.
The Élysée Palace has been briefing for months that it doesn’t believe the 61-year-old DSK, a famously reticent campaigner, will forsake a second term in his comfortable IMF job to throw himself into a punishing contest for the socialist nomination. He may not, but the latest signal from Washington led to a quick, concerted attack on Sarkozy’s rival.
Christian Jacob, a senior figure in Sarkozy’s UMP party, suggested that Strauss-Kahn, an urbane Parisian with an apartment on the exclusive Place des Vosges, did not represent “the image of France, of rural France, of local France, the one we love”.
Other centre-right politicians questioned Strauss-Kahn’s “Frenchness”, provoking furious reactions from socialists, who suggested the remarks bordered on anti-Semitic (Strauss-Kahn has Jewish antecedents).
The pitch is rising. DSK is due in Paris this weekend and a couple of TV appearances have been arranged. Will he give us more than that inscrutable smile?
Yule et Kim
PRIME MINISTER François Fillon is under pressure after revelations that he spent the New Year break availing of Hosni Mubarak’s hospitality in Egypt. Foreign minister Michèle Alliot-Marie is in trouble because of her Christmas-New Year holiday in Tunisia where, it is claimed, she flew in the private jet of a businessman with alleged links to the country’s deposed president. No wonder, then, that journalists asked every minister to explain where they had spent Christmas.
No doubt they hoped someone would admit to having having been in Pyongyang, sipping cognac with Kim Jong-Il. As it turned out, though, the truth was generally fairly humdrum, and in some cases a little sad. Defence minister Alain Juppé celebrated Christmas in south-west Afghanistan. Higher education minister Valérie Pécresse said, vaguely, that she was “in the mountains”. Meanwhile, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the environment minister, spent December 25th in Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport, where her flight was grounded for two days due to heavy snowfall.
She’s unlikely to have the same problem next year, as Nicolas Sarkozy has told his ministers to take their holidays in France from now on.
