A lying budget minister has deepened mistrust among the French for their political leaders, and a growing morosity from 'la Crise’ is making itself felt in the French heartlands, writes Michael Wright from the Limousin region in this feature article in The Telegraph.
Imagine staying at the house of an old friend who insists upon feeding you even though you know she is flat-broke. And then having to sit like a lemon and watch while she makes the shock discovery that her husband has been cheating on her for years, and that the roof is about to collapse. Well, that’s how it feels being an Englishman in France in April 2013. It’s difficult to know where to look.
Of course, the Credit Crunch — or la Crise, as the French call it — has been going on for years, and few countries are having an easy time of it. Britain has been branded a “crisis economy” by the incoming governor of the Bank of England – and he is supposed to be on our side. But my impression is that the mood on the streets of France has — as opposed to the stark economic figures, which have been scary for a while, with 10 per cent unemployment and just 0.1 per cent growth in the first quarter of 2013 — taken a striking turn for the worse in the past few weeks.
“People are morose,” says Jean-François Augrit, a guard on the TGV trains from Paris to the regions and beyond. “You can see it in their faces. They don’t believe in anything any more; the Right and Left are just as bad as each other.” He explains that people have begun to fear that the next generation will be worse-off than their parents. “This would be the first time that has happened,” he says firmly, “even going right back to the 19th century.”
Last month, a poll of more than 3,000 French adults found that 68 per cent of them were depressed about the country’s future. And that was even before the Cahuzac scandal broke, in which a former budget minister given to winkling out the kind of slimy tax-dodgers who hide their wealth in secret Swiss bank accounts was forced to admit that he, ahem, had one too — but only after he had looked France squarely in the eye and lied and lied, long before the cock crowed thrice.
The cock is certainly crowing now. The scandal has, in the words of Le Monde, “unleashed a political tsunami”. But it is the effect that the scandal has had on the people of France that I find so telling, and so touching. In Britain, we are used to our politicians lying to us. It is one of the cosy constants in our daily lives: rocks are hard, trains are late and politicians are incapable of telling the truth. This is fine, because at least they are consistent, and their mendacity helps us to forget how easily we lie to ourselves. In France, many people really do seem to believe that the state is run by people who have their best interests at heart.
“We’ve had political scandals before, on the Right and the Left,” says Fabrice Nivard, 58, the respected mayor of Darnac, a village nestling in the heart of la France profonde. “But this one really shocked me, because for a budget minister to tell people to tighten their belts and contribute more, even as he is secretly hiding away his own wealth, is worse than lying. It’s taking the French for a bunch of — well, you can fill in the blank yourself.”
Unfortunately, President François Hollande, who has a sexton’s ability to make a grave situation graver, followed up the Cahuzac scandal with a masterstroke: in the interests of transparency, he ordered his ministers to reveal all their bank accounts and assets. Et voilà! It turns out that they are all just as bad as each other. Even the ones who aren’t millionaires have been pilloried in the press for stashing their shekels in underperforming accounts. What hope for the national economy, when the charlies in charge of it can’t even manage their own money?
Read more of this article from The Telegraph.