I forgot to mention one of the best moments of SR's speech. You'd have to have a good knowledge of weird, entirely unworthy elements of contemporary French culture to get the build-up, which began by saying that "André Malraux is not Doc Gynéco [a very spaced-out pop artist who supports Sarkozy], François Mauriac is not Bernard Tapie [a flip-flopping former Minister of Mitterand who supports Sarkozy, has his own soccer teams, was put on trial for corruption charges]," but all of this led to the fantastic line: "Nicolas Sarkozy is not de Gaulle!!!"
[Big cheers from a capacity crowd of 40,000 with 20,000 outside the stadium who couldn't even get in the door]
But there was also, in relation to May '68, "Today, I feel it, there is in France the very same anger waiting to erupt."
And in relation to Sarkozy, who wants to "rehabilitate" the value of work, and who has said that he is the candidate of "the France that wakes up early:" "Work value is not just a rhetorical figure; work value starts by remunerating work at its value...I don't want to see those women lined up along the fences of their closed businesses, the gazes of workers who've been fired without protection. Have those who are philosophizing about "work value" seen those citizens?"
And it's at the limit of demagoguery, but that's a risk worth taking when you've only got a couple of percentage points between you and the absolutely demagogic candidate across the way, at the end of the speech: "Do you want this victory? Then let's come together, take one another by the hand, love one another, start building together. Long live the Republic, and long live France!"
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