Sacré bleu, or rather, sacré rose. Has President Nicolas Sarkozy gone all soft and squashy and lefty on us? But worst of all, has he gone French on us?
The French President was elected two years ago with the endorsement of the right-wing, never-wrong pundits of the Anglo-Saxon media. Here – enfin! – was a sensible kind of French politician, an anti-Chirac, a French Thatcher. Here was the man who would make France work harder; here was the man who would dismantle the fat and slothful French state; here was the man who would make France more like Britain or the US.
Consternation and mockery, therefore, among the massed ranks of Anglo-Saxon punditry last week. President Sarkozy had suggested that the world should (hee, hee) be more like France. Instead of measuring national well-being and political success wholly in terms of money and growth, Sarko suggested, the world should devise a new "happiness index", an internationally approved barometer of "joie de vivre". How silly. How impractical. How French.
But hang on just a moment. What if Sarko is on to something important?
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