Harry's Place

As the London mayoral election thread ages towards almost half a week, many regulars on political blogs will be losing interest and looking for a more topical subject to discuss.
Today France and Greece are going to the polls in presidential and parliamentary elections respectively.
The first round of the French presidential elections saw a turn-out of [...]

A very quick pre-work post.  I’m glad that Francois Hollande beat Sarkozy and his halal obsessions but not at all glad that le Pen beat Melenchon into fourth place.  Although he is the far left candidate, his politics seem nothing like those of, say, a George Galloway – the ‘populist’ tag which has been used [...]

Prosor and Le Pen
A justifiably angry Adar Primor writes at Haaretz:
Marine Le Pen hit the jackpot. She invited about 100 diplomats to a luncheon last week during a visit to UN Headquarters in New York. Four accepted: There were the envoys from Trinidad and Tobago, Armenia and Uruguay, who obviously are of no concern to [...]

Although the casual antisemitism in George Simenon’s books and his willingness to slot into life under Nazi and Vichy rule has been discussed, it has been less clear how far Commissiare Jules Maigret would have gone in assisting the identification and deportation of political and social enemies.
One account I read some years ago of a [...]

The Telegraph reports on a French television debate on the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn:
Ever since the French were confronted with the unimaginable pictures of one of their rulers, a man widely expected to become President of the Republic, unshaven and in handcuffs in the dock of a Manhattan courthouse, reactions have been increasingly split between [...]

While the French media has a problem with bedroom politics, although accusations of rape step are far outside the normal meaning of that term, they apparently have no problem with outing an alleged rape victim, discussing her buttocks, and naming her daughter.
Both Le Figaro and Paris Match have named her teenage daughter. A number of [...]

AFP quotes President Sarkozy as having stated in a television interview:
If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France.
The French national community cannot accept a change in its [...]

Marine le Pen has been elected leader of France’s National Front, which is riddled with Nazis some observers believe to be racist.