Sunday, May 06, 2007

"Going to war without France is like going deer-hunting without your accordion."
~Norman Schwarzkopf (sp?)

Today are the French elections. So when I was hanging out with one of my French friends this morning, I asked her if she had voted already, and she had. (They do elections here on Sunday, which makes a lot more sense than in the US– they do it at schools, so they don’t interrupt anything. In the States, my high school was a voting place, and every time there was an election, things were crazy.)

Anyway, quick recap in case you didn’t know: in France they do the first round of elections two weeks before the second round. The first round eliminates about a dozen candidates; the second round thus ALWAYS has only two candidates, but no one ever knows what party they will be from.

Everyone here hates Chirac, there is talk of formally censuring him after he gets out of office. I asked my French friend when the new president would take over, and she said, "Well, tomorrow obviously!" I must have looked confused, because she explained a little more: the polls in France are open from this morning to tonight at 8pm. At precisely 8pm, the polls shut down and the results are given. And tomorrow, someone else wakes up in the Elysée, which is the French equivalent of the White House.

She looked at me and said, "isn’t that how they do it in the US?"
"No!" I responded.

I already knew that the ballots themselves are completely different here– I suppose it’s because this right now is the fifth Republic in France, and it’s only been around since about 1960 (DeGaulle’s second term as president, significantly after World War II). I know in the US, the people at the election places (what is the word for this in English??) are usually old women who just sit there and cross your name off a list. Here, though, it’s hardcore soldiers. You sign your name, like in the US, and then you walk along the table and pick up a post-it-sized sheet of paper for each candidate. Each sheet has the name of a candidate already printed on it. You take it into a tiny curtained booth, throw all the ones you don’t want to vote for away, then put the one you like in a matching blue envelope, leave the booth and drop the envelope in a giant clear box. Thus with the unwrapping of the envelopes alone I don’t understand how the results are given so quickly. Because this is Paris, there are, of course, huge lines to vote– but I was watching the news tonight and they interviewed this guy who said "Oh, yeah, I’ve been waiting 40 minutes, but that’s democracy, right? So it’s good, it makes me happy!" Everyone there said the same thing– I guess their Republic is still young enough that they count it good to be able to vote at all. (Women here, PS, didn’t get the right to vote until the 1960s.)

So my French friend looked at me and said, "You don’t do it this way in the US?"
"No!"I said, "we elect them on a Tuesday in November, the results are announced the next day, and they start their term in January."
"But that’s like two months!"
"Yeah?"
"Why do you have such a huge delay?"
"I think it’s because the US is so big that back in the day they had to have that much time to ride the horses around and collect all the votes."
"But now you don’t need that much time."
"I guess not."
"So why not change it?"
"Because that’s how we do it."
"Yeah, but I’m just saying, it seems stupid to not change it if there is not a reason."

Anyone else think this is odd? A FRENCH person, THE PREMIERE NATION of useless un-understood rules, customs, etc. that exist only because they HAVE existed since the year 1200 is criticizing the US for a useless rule we have.

So tomorrow we’ll have a new president, but all day today the news was filled with images from throughout Paris. Perhaps it’s because I’m in the nation’s capital, or maybe it’s just different than in the US, but all over Paris there were huge crowds all day waiting to find out what was going on. Each candidate had three huge outdoor locations where their supporters had gathered– even with the last two American presidential elections, I don’t remember ever seeing anything like this. It looked like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. And the funniest part is that since today is the first Sunday of the month, all the museums are free. Which means the Louvre is always PACKED. And the weather is nice, which means the garden right outside the Louvre (the Tuileries) is PACKED. And what is attached to that garden, and thus the Louvre?
The Place de la Concorde. The biggest political hotspot in Paris. And attached to that? The Elysée.
So there is the Louvre/Tuileries, with its madding crowd of tourists...
And then as soon as you get away from that, the Place de la Concorde, FILLED with politically-aware Parisians dying to know what’s going on.
It’s absolute madness.

Sarkozy won (he’s pro-American). At 19h45 they put a huge countdown up on the news. At 19h59, the anchor stood in front of a green screen with a blurry map of France on it– as the time ticked toward 20h00, the map grew less and less fuzzy until Sarkozy’s picture was clearly visible as the new president, at exactly 20h. Crazy.

THEN he left his office to go to the Elysée and begin being president, and there was footage all over the news of him riding there in an absolutely normal FIAT with the windows down. No armored cars, bulletproof anything in France.
~B

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