Updates

Hi guys,

Sorry it's been a little while. After I got back from London, things slowed down for a while. Spring Break is in a week and a half, so we've been having more grades than usual (midterms). I've mainly just been running around Paris, trying to see all the sites.

One cool thing I did see was the cantonal elections. France is divided into 100 (soon to be 101) departments. Each department is made up of smaller cantons, and cantons are used to elect members to departmental assemblies. Departments are somewhat like states, and cantons are somewhat like counties, but smaller. Like in so many other ways, the French are very old school when it comes to voting. When elections are coming up, you get mailed a packet with the names of all the candidates for the position written on individual pieces of paper. (The French never vote for more than one position at a time). When you arrive at the school (elections never take place at churches; they take separation of church and state very seriously), there are booths, just like in the states. You take one paper envelope and all of your paper slips into the booth, and put the paper of the candidate you want to vote for in the envelope. Then you leave the booth and put your sealed envelope in a huge, clear, glass box. At the end of the day, the two workers come together with their two separate keys to open the glass box. The envelopes are separated into groups of 100, and citizens sit down to count them. One set of people opens the envelopes, and another tallies the votes each candidate wins. It's actually very quick and very effective. I went to watch the counting process last week. They all knew that I was American, so they kept asking me why American elections are so complicated, why we keep using the machines when we have so many problems in Florida, in Chicago back in the day. It was mainly funny, and so interesting to watch this take place. Because I live right outside the business district (La Defense), this entire area votes right, but not so right that they vote for the Front National.

The Front National is like France's version of the Tea Party, but less legitimate and more racist. The party is run by a father-daughter duo, Jean and Marine Le Pen. Daddy Le Pen started the party about 25 years ago, and the daughter has taken over since he retired. They say delightful things like the Holocaust being just a detail in history (Daddy) and that Libyan refugees should be shoved into the ocean (daughter). They are still not popular, but they definitely do draw votes away from President Sarkozy's party, the UMP.

To clear up another misconception about French politics, the French left is not nearly as left as many of you guys might think. The Communist party is nearly non-existent. They do not have any representatives in the legislature. The Parti Socialist (one of the two big parties in France, the nemesis of Sarkozy's UMP party) is really not that leftist either. Big players in their party (included Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the possible 2012 presidential candidate) have/do head international monetary organization, like the IMF, the World Bank, and the European Central Bank. How anti-capitalist can someone like that be? France is more leftist than many people in the States, but the Trotskyists are long gone.