So you might have heard there's a presidential election going on here. I must admit I'm a little caught up in it. This poster 
is up all over my Parisian neighborhoods. It's a kind of variation on Julie Andrews: "The walls are alive, with Ségolène..." As I've been toodling along on my bike, I've found myself going a little soft over it, in a way that might not be so far off from the effects that old Sound of Music saw still has on my belly. And this is after an initial period of great hostility towards Madame Royal. Six months ago, I was amusing people at dinner parties by saying that if I ran into Ségolène on the street, I wouldn't hesitate to spit on her. That's because I considered her a symbol of the treason of what to long along little me was a Socialist paradise that played conterpart to my Reagan governed hell. I mean, in some ways, I ended up here because Mittérand was president for such a long time.
Since then, there's been quite a bit of water under the bridge, including an initial grand hostility, on the part of the supposedly left-wing Socialists no less, to the civil union pacte civil de solidarité that allows homos like Titi de Paris and me to have a second class marriage. Of course, it ended up getting passed into law (it's even thanks to it that I have working papers here in France), but it was largely in spite of the Socialists, some of whose card-carrying members and leaders spent a lot of time saying that a family should be led by a man and a woman, and that these things were essential to a child's health, and, even, that civilization was promised an accelerated end were homos to be granted the right to marry. Ségolène Royal, who was Minister of the Family, Childhood, and the Handicapped from 2000 until 2002, was one of the people who joined in that chorus. Six months ago, she was saying that she had changed, and that one of the things she would do would be to open the right to marriage to homos. This, incidentally, has not been much of an election issue, although it does represent a difference between Royal and Sarkozy, who has said that it is his "deep and intimate conviction" (he uses that phrase a lot) that he was born heterosexual, and has nothing against those who were born homosexual, but that a family is made up of a man and a woman. It may have won him some votes, but I haven't seen much evangelical hatred of homos because Royal has supported their rights. That might be a nice thing about living in France. I'm pretty sure I don't want to get hitched, but I'm pretty sure I want to raise a baby with Titi. Because of the way adoption works in this country, that might involved getting married. "I would prefer not to," but the child I might raise might thank me for it if I do.
But before I further consider the bureaucratic advantages of getting married, Royal has to beat Sarkozy. Which brings us back to spit. The goober that I wanted to plant on Ségolène's forehead over six months ago has transmuted into a running fantasy that she actually might have something of her own to spit out at the face of the world. That fantasy formed as a way to get over the trauma of her first intervention after reaching the second round of voting. She took forever to stake the stage in the province where she is an elected deputy -- I mean, like, a couple of hours, whereas Sarkozy had leapt onto his Parisian stage to proclaim that he has "a French dream," in a deliberately demagogic echo of Martin Luther King. His speech was really painful: slick, creepy, arrogant, nationalist... All those things that we sane people over here consider scary about Sarko. So we needed to see how Madame Royal was going to be able to do. And we waited and waited, until she came out to deliver a speech where she came off as brow-beaten and terrified, even though she was on home turf. Rumor has it that she was given drugs to help alleviate her panic over how far the gap separating her from Sarkozy was. If so, that makes me feel a little bit better. And it's not that I didn't feel for her in the moment. Hence the fantasy: she's got something to say, she just needs to spit it out.
Over the course of this week, it seems like she's started to do so. The last two nights she's made two television appearances, and in both, she's been amazingly graceful in walking a very fine line between appealing to the center right voters, who garned 18% of the first round in a bid for their candidate, François Bayrou, while clearly displaying that her presidential project--she calls it a pact--is on the left. She did it well enough on Wednesday to have me on the verge of tears. That was reassuring. And now the walls are alive, with Ségolène...
The news from today that I've watched as it's been unfolding has to do with a debate she proposed to have with François Bayrou. Sarkozy's response to the potential for a parallel debate was no. He has nothing to win from it but the loss of several votes. Royal needs it, perhaps, to win over some of those who voted for Bayrou. It was originally going to happen on Canal+, which is a major cable TV station, but they ended up pulling out at the end, saying that it posed a problem in terms of laws that regulate how much time a television station devotes to each candidate. Sarkozy didn't have to do anything but refuse to appear on Canal+ to stop the debate from happening. But the big news has been that Bayrou, and Royal as well but to a lesser extent, has said publicly that, though he doesn't have proof, he is certain that Sarkozy put undue pressure on the station to keep the debate from happening. This brings up the screen of Berlusconi, who is a pal of Sarkozy's, as someone whose vested interests in the media put pluralism even more in jeopardy than they already are everywhere in the Western world, including in France. That's a good screen to have up right now. I only hope it isn't too early on in what's called the "between two rounds" period for those amongst us who vote to be able to spit a big nasty goober on it that will allow, in the words of Royal's campaign, for France to become présidentE.
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