J'aime pas (3)

In 5 weeks time, it will be the municipal elections all across the 36.000 cities and hamlets of France. In Paris, the electoral procedure isn't very different from the American presidential election. Voters don't directly elect the mayor of Paris but the mayors of each arrondissement (district), who, in turn, elect the mayor of the city of Paris.

Eventually there are 2 likely winners: On the left is Bertrand Delanoé (he has my vote) and on the right, Françoise de Panafieu.

Now, who's that woman?

Françoise de Panafieu may look attractive indeed but that doesn’t suffice to make her look nice to me. She’s the daughter of a former minister of Pompidou, François Missoffe, a very bourgeois conservative from the time when France was suffering under the yoke of the most rotten and corrupt right France had known since the 1824-1848 period. Her mother was daughter of the count and countess of Mitry which isn’t exactly something that is likely to make her popular in contemporary France.

Her husband is a former CeO of Bull, which went bankrupt but like all CeO in France this had no consequences whatsoever for him. She’s also akin to the Wendel family which says all about her class consciousness. Some weeks ago, there was an information on Wiki about one of her daughters having married a Spanish aristocrat. For some reason (the elections are approaching?) this information has been deleted...

She knows where she comes from and which values and interests she’s elected to protect. She may play in the youth playground by having a rollers picture shooting session but this doesn’t fool Parisians.

By and large, I’m not really likely to have love at first sight with these people who were born with a silver spoon in their mouth and whose main virtue is to be son/daughter of their parents. (M.A.M, Roselyne Bachelot etc. Merci papa…).

Of course, Panafieu isn't responsible for her background but it's always interesting to know where people come from. It also helps to understand the values they stand for.

Fair to say, she's not the most reactionnary member of her party but when I listen to her I can easily recognize the smiling face of the ruling class.

Among her wishes for Paris is the desire to turn again the City of lights into a world metropole. Yeah, we all agree about that. Even Delanoe has the same ambition. But what she suggests is to build a monument of the XXIth comparable to the tower Norman Foster has erected in London. Good gracious! I certainly don't want a giant suppository in the middle of Paris. What's more, such an ambitious project is beyond the reach of power of the mayor of Paris.

So, her other main project is to get rid of the bike lanes that have been set up in Paris in the last years so as to restitute more room for cars. Grandiose!

I don't detest Françoise de Panafieu but I certainly don't want her to be mayor of Paris.