When we interviewed the French band Air about their new LP, Pocket Symphony, for the April issue, France’s presidential elections were beginning to heat up. Despite the fact that the band is loathe to discuss politics—and eschew it altogether in their music—they spoke to us a little about the election. With the voting set for a week from Sunday (April 22), we thought we’d share Air’s political commentary.
But first a quick primer on the election: Nicolas Sarkozy, 52, is the main candidate of the French right, the successor of Jacques Chirac as nominee for the ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party. He was Chirac’s interior minister until he resigned to run his campaign full-time. He’s a divisive figure at least in part as a result of his hardline approach to the rioting by disgruntled Muslim immigrants in Paris suburbs in 2005, during which he referred to rioters as “scum” or “rabble,” depending on the translation.
The left’s main candidate is Socialist Segolene Royal, 53 (pictured). She’s currently the equivalent of a governor in Poitou-Charentes, a region just north of Bordeaux along the Atlantic cost, with its capital in Poitiers. The potential spoilers are Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 78-year-old strident nationalist who shocked the world by making the presidential run-off election last time around in 2002, and Francois Bayrou, 55, the centrist candidate for the Union for French Democracy (UDF). Sarkozy’s bona fides on the far right—again, because of his prominence during the riots—look likely to keep Le Pen on the margins this time around; Royal, though, is struggling to stay ahead of centrist Bayrou while taking flack on the left for her “third-way” politics. Sarkozy holds a slight lead in the polls at the moment.
Interestingly, the Air duo—Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel—did not feel the election would have an effect on the arts scene: Whereas here the parties differ significantly in how they fund the arts and in their support for censorship of the arts, Godin and Dunckel did not see either of the leading candidates as having a potentially chilling effect on the arts.But what really interested us was the possibility that France might elect a female head of state. France, like the U.S. has never had a female head of state. (The list of countries that have includes not only Britain and Germany, but also places one might not immediately associate with progressive gender politics, such as Ireland, Turkey and Pakistan.) So given the fact that both of our countries look likely to face this possibility in their current election cycles, we had to ask what Godin and Dunckel thought of Royal. Voila:
Godin: Women are worse than men with power—they feel they must outdo men, like Margaret Thatcher. And despite being a Socialist, Royal is like a conservative as well.
Dunckel: She’s pretty but I don’t like her politics—you get the feeling there are people controlling her behind the scenes. The best politician is a good looking man who is quite clever and sane.
Before you dismiss these statements as indicative of a sort of Gallic machismo, you do have to admit their description of tougher-than-thou women does ring a faint bell: Have you heard the one about the Democratic candidate who doggedly refuses to apologize for her support of the Iraq invasion? Hmmmm…
RSS 2.0
http://www.playboy.com/mt-tb.cgi/1742