THE FRONT NATIONAL won historic gains in the French elections earlier this week, winning a total of eleven cities. The nationalistic, anti-European Union, anti-immigration party is widely identified with its leader, Marine Le Pen. “People want to live like French people in France, not like Saudis or Qatari,” Le Pen said at a campaign rally. There is no major political figure in the United States who could get ahead saying similar things about American culture.
As an aside to the main news, Galliwatch has a post on the second “wife” of the new prime minister, Manuel Valls. In keeping with French fashions in political polygamy, Anne Gravoin replaced the mother of Valls’s four children. Tiberge writes of recent political wives:
They all seem similar. Cecilia Sarkozy, Carla Bruni, Ségolène Royal, Valérie Trierweiler, Julie Gayet, and now Anne Gravoin. Hugely ambitious (Cecilia less so), totally dependent on the man in their life for their own celebrity status, vaguely immoral, “cool” fashionistas, very leftist, antagonistic toward the traditional woman be she Madame De Gaulle, Marine Le Pen or Madame Ayrault, they ply the trade of social climber/courtesan with cold-blooded determination. Unfortunately, I don’t find them interesting.
Read More »