There's all the relish you could ever desire in the political casserole bubling away nicely 'just over there'. First of all, you can breath in the delicous odour of sour grapes because the 'Kaiserin' has taken the hump at the Hungarian dwarf changing his mind about her sharing his electoral platform - never trust a smooth-talking Frenchman, dear! Sarkozy suddenly realised, what even a political idiot like me could have told him, that the French people would never take to a German Chancellor interfering in their election. According to Der Spiegel:
Last Wednesday, he made his change in campaign strategy public when he said in a radio interview: "The election campaign is a matter for the French people."
By then, Merkel had already heard he was turning down her help, and she complained to confidants about the Frenchman's erratic behavior. A few days later, she took Sarkozy aside during the EU summit in Brussels at the beginning of March and asked him what was going on. He agreed to hold at least one joint appearance with her.
But sources say that Merkel would now no longer be unhappy if she didn't have to travel to France before the election, because she wants to avoid being associated with Sarkozy's recent right-wing populist statements about foreigners.
Oh dear, isn't it awful when dear friends fall out? You need 'a heart of stone not to fall over laughing'!
But poor little Sarkozy has mounting problems to surmount in his fight for re-election. According to the WSJ, he is facing pressure form the Left, the Right and the Centre! Marine le Pen, leader of the hard Right, is pushing for protectionist policies and abandoning the euro! She has 16% of the poll numbers so far and Sarkozy must hope, because there is no certainty, that most them will come to him in the final run off election. However, observers believe that about one third of the Centre candidate's votes, currently 13%, are likely to switch Left rather than Right in the final showdown.
On the Left there is an even greater threat. François Hollande, a socialist Left-winger already fairly far to the Left is coming under pressure from the 'nutcase wing':
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who leads a hard-left coalition that includes the once-moribund French Communist Party, is gaining traction with calls to reject austerity measures springing from Europe's sovereign debt crisis through "civic uprising."
Mélenchon's hard Left policy proposals has increased his poll numbers :
Mr. Mélenchon's rise in polls—he is now credited with as much as 11% of the vote, compared with half that level two months ago—has forced Mr. Hollande to veer to the left ahead of the April 22 election. In the same poll, Mr. Hollande came in at 27% and Mr. Sarkozy 27.5%.
This pressure from the hard Left has caused Hollande to come out with some very extreme proposals of his own:
In recent weeks, Mr. Hollande has proposed increasing the top income-tax bracket to 75% from 41% for people earning more than €1 million ($1.3 million) a year, and forcing French banks to exit tax havens.
Of course, Sarkozy will hope that with the extremes pushing ever further Right and Left he will be able to march triumphantly through the centre. However, he needs to beware because politics is not formed in a straight line but in a circle where extreme Left and extreme Right join hands:
"The National Front and the Left Front are after the same voters," said Stefan Collignon, a professor at Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy. "In the past weeks, Mr. Mélenchon is the one who has been on the rise."
Mr. Mélenchon's growing appeal to French voters was witnessed by the success of an electoral rally in Paris on Sunday. Tens of thousands of people marched through the city and gathered at Bastille square to listen to his speech.
In the meantime, the 'Kaiserin' sulks in her bunker!
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