Sacra Bleu! Even if France hocked the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, they still couldn’t pay their debt!
And, those 10,000+ cars torched in the last year left the average multiculturalist Frenchmen clueless. Support for far right leader Le Pen’s National Front – or at least its anti-immigrant ideology – has risen since the riots.
Since the last 10,000 cars went up in flames and recycling centers, carpet stores, schools, car showrooms, police garages, shopping centers, random businesses, etc. joined them, France has seen a surprising drift towards the Right:
THE public mood in France has darkened and veered sharply to the Right in the two months since the Paris riots.
Despite endless political hand-wringing over the failure of the French model of ethnic integration, the country is no closer to a national consensus about how to re-establish the core republican values of fraternity and equality.
Indeed, the political centre of gravity has shifted in favour of Jean-Marie Le Pen, as Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin scramble to head off the lethal challenge from the far Right.
Support for Le Pen’s National Front – or at least its anti-immigrant ideology – has risen since the riots, sparking fears there will be a repeat of the 2002 presidential election, when the wily demagogue trounced the Left and almost snatched the presidency.
According to a survey published in Le Monde newspaper this week, for 30per cent of French voters the National Front does not represent “a danger to democracy”.
But, here is the scary part:
This week, France woke up to a report into its astronomical public debt, which is now higher than E2000 billion ($3210billion), or 200 per cent of GDP.
“Our state is bankrupt,” wrote Pascal Gobry, of the French Institute of Actuaries, in Le Monde.
“Even if it would sell to the Japanese the Palace of Versailles at a high price, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre Museum, all of our patrimony, the French state could not honour her commitments for retirees or salaries. The king is completely nude.”
But then again, you can always look on the bright side. There has not been a huge weapons cache confiscated by authorities in the immigrant ghettos in a few days anyway.
