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France's Iron Lady?
The Guardian's cartoonist Steve Bell must be praying for a Nicolas Sarkozy victory next week. He has his Sarko schtick worked out already - a crazed, hairy-legged dwarf dragged up in Margaret Thatcher costume and wig.
His Ségolène Royal caricature, in contrast, is crap. A kind of bony, squinting Marianne. Cartoonists need visual tags to identify their subjects and make their job easier - Bell's most famous and persistent image is of former PM John Major in his y-fronts, which he is reported to have tucked his shirt into.
Sarko as Thatch is unsubtle and crude, but it might be worth getting used to over the next few years if Sarkozy wins on May 6. With Britain's Conservatives posing as the Care Bear Bunch, the US Neoconservative movement largely discredited and Tony Blair on his way out, Bell's supply of rightwing psychopaths is running dangerously low.
It's a plus, too, that the sort of people who read the Guardian and write for it happen to be the only people outside France's juvenile far left who believe that Sarkozy is the next Thatcher. As Daniel Hannan argues, this is wishful thinking from both right and left.
Conveniently, the newspaper publishes a rant attacking the "brutal liberal" Sarkozy who believes in "the clash of civilisations."
Is this the Sarkozy who attacked hedge funds and global finance in a speech in Lille this month? Or who promised to keep manufacturing industry in France? Or who, as finance minister, went head to head with the European Commission after bailing out ailing French manufacturers?
Does the author refer to the Sarkozy who created a Muslim council for France in the hope of bringing Muslim citizens into the political mainstream? The Sarkozy who argues that France should relax its Republican colour-blindness and begin discriminately positively in order to get Muslim citizens into jobs?
He also has a go at Royal, who he feels betrayed the left (even though leftists voted for her in unprecedented numbers). He bemoans the "tragic errors" which divided extremists on the left (a group who could muster only ten percent of the vote, even with an all-time high turnout).
How could someone come up with an analysis that is so completely out of touch with any reality in either Sarkozy or Royal's campaigns? Ah: the author of the column "is senior lecturer in French and European politics at University College London."
That explains it.
