Julian Assange says he will stay in the Ecuadorian embassy "as long as it takes"

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange marked a year living in one room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London this week, and announced he will stay "as long as it takes" to resolve his situation. He originally took refuge in the embassy when the British high court refused his appeal against extradition to Sweden, but now he says he won't come out even if Sweden drops its request because he believes the US has already drawn a secret warrant for his extradition on charges of leaking military documents. The advantage for Assange in remaining in the embassy is clear; he keeps his case in the media spotlight, a cause he's helped this week by tying his case to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's, offering him a charter flight from Hong Kong to Iceland. It's interesting to think about what Ecuador is gaining from this; foreign minister Ricardo Patino visited London for talks this weekend in what looked like a desperate attempt to get rid of their awkward house guest, but then defiantly told a press conference Britain is violating Assange's human rights. It seems to me that Rafael Correa's government believes it's worth risking strained relations with Britain and the US for regional diplomatic gains; the charismatic Ecuadorian president sees himself as the heir to Hugo Chavez as leader of the Latin American left and wants to be seen defending the sovereignty of small countries against perceived imperialism, even if that means sheltering an alleged rapist.

Here's my report for Channel News Asia on Assange's year in the embassy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3uXbFbtoww

G8 disappoints on tax evasion

Last week I interviewed a number of anti-poverty activists full of hope ahead of the G8 summit, praising David Cameron's courage in pushing the issue to the top of the summit agenda. For the British government, the political calculation is clear; the electoral advantage in convincing a public outraged by serial revelations about tax dodging that major international firms are being forced to pay their share should outweigh the interests of keeping those firms happy. All the G8 nations lose money to tax havens; developing nations lose more than they receive in aid, as multinationals extract resources and hide their business in shell companies based offshore. The summit concluded with much fanfare about a breakthrough in fighting tax evasion; but the devil is in the detail. Campaigners wanted two things: a set of international rules on exchange of tax information, and a pubic registry of beneficial ownership that shows who really owns companies. On the former, the G8 agreed to exchange information with one another, but doubts remain over how much developing countries will get access to that information, with the US particularly having pushed for exchanges to be reciprocal, when most developing nations just don't have the bureaucracy to collect that kind of information. On the latter, the UK was alone in pushing for public registries. A 10 point plan was agreed that says lots of the right things, but doesn't give member countries any deadlines for action. I'm reminded of the fact that a quarter of the aid promised to developing countries at the 2005 G8 summit has yet to be received; set-piece summit diplomacy continues to make grandiose promises, but deliver very little.

Here's my report on the G8 and tax evasion for Channel News Asia.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRqZYG2EoR8

British space industry goes into orbit

The UK is hoping to become a world leader in aerospace technology - with the government last year announcing a 300 million pound boost in funding for the sector, saying Britain could become the best place in the world to do science.

The drive to develop new satellite technology in Britain is being led by a collaborative project with China - manufacturing high-resolution observation satellites in a factory near London, as part of a joint agreement with Beijing-based firm 21AT.

Here's my report for CCTV.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kgeWBvLCCk

Ethical fashion, made in Britain

After the Bangladesh factory collapse that killed over a thousand people, the major British retailers are under increasing pressure to clean up their supply chains, with Primark among big names forced to admit their clothes were being made in the factory where the disaster occurred. Fast fashion retailers aren't solely responsible for poor welfare standards though - far more expensive brands are also unable to give shoppers any guarantees about the way their clothes are produced, I discovered when researching this piece for CCTV. But there is an alternative; small British brands who are revitalizing the garment industry in Britain and keeping traditional crafts like Harris tweed alive, by choosing to produce their clothes entirely in the UK, as you can see in this report.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsGUqJgeyD4

On Carnival, and deleting racism from the dictionary

I've neglected to blog entirely since moving to South America, but did feel the urge to sit down and write this evening, so apologies for the poor service, and I hope this is the beginning of a return to form. 

It's Carnival here in Uruguay, a place that clearly decided that if they couldn't beat Brazil in sequins and spectacular, they would instead trump them by having the world's longest Carnival, seven weeks of it, stretching out to the middle of March with no regard whatsoever for Lenten frugality. The setpiece though is a parade that sees teams of dancers snake their way through the city to a throbbingly heavy drumbeat pounded out until the drummers' hands bleed - a shockingly African drumbeat. I say shockingly because one could easily live here for years under the impression you were in a small town in Spain or italy several decades ago, certainly before the arrival of mass immigration; quaint restaurants selling home-made gnocchi, blustery beaches, bars that play the Beatles unironically - in short, a less exotic feeling place 6000 miles from Europe it is hard to imagine. 

In the 17th century, though, Montevideo was the main entry port for African slaves trafficked to South America to till Brazilian sugar plantations or toil in Bolivian silver mines, and inevitably some stayed. About 8% of the population is considered of African descent now. Their faces are virtually absent from the city centre and swish beachside suburbs, being mostly tucked away in parts of the city you're advised not to go to alone, only allowed to stake a claim to public spaces at odd events like the carnival parade, or the festival pictured here, where believers throw fruit and flowers into the Atlantic for the African sea goddess Iemanjà. 

Those faces have also made newspaper headlines here lately for less picturesque reasons - a racially motivated attack by two white girls on a black anti-racism activist outside a nightclub has caused a national bout of soul-searching about whether Uruguay is much more racist than people would like to think. Campaigners have also been grabbing column inches with a petition to get the expression "trabajar como un negro" - to work like a black man - removed from the official Spanish dictionary. If you're a native English speaker, of course, you just involuntarily gasped on reading that expression, and I feel slightly morally compromised for having even written it, but the role of dictionaries is to describe language as it is used, not prescribe - or proscribe - it. 

There is a debate worth having here, though, about language, racism and political correctness. The conservative press here, while admitting the black population has suffered systemic discrimination, rails against copying the Anglophone example of policing language, socially banning certain terms and replacing them with more consensual alternatives, and many in the Anglophone press would agree. Even if reports that, say, Luton Council once banned Christmas decorations because they might offend non-Christian residents (this was repeated in an Uruguayan paper today, but I'm virtually certain it was a British tabloid invention) have been somewhat exaggerated, we all sometimes feel that in English we are treading in a linguistic minefield. Spanish is far less socially policed in this sense; does that mean, as someone argued to me last night, that Uruguay's most famous son Luis Suarez shouldn't have been suspended, whatever he said to Patrice Evra, because for him the words don't pack the same cultural punch? There is a shred of a case here - most people swear much more liberally in foreign languages because you lose the learnt sense of taboo - but I don't believe that Suarez, who has claimed the regular excoriation he gets from the British press is racially motivated, doesn't understand the taboo, even if he doesn't know much about the cultural baggage around race in Britain or Evra's native France. Does the blunt language still used about race in Spanish, then, really mean its speakers are generally more racist than Anglophones? Most people who consider themselves cosmopolitan and multilingual would say it's just a question of cultural difference, and most translators, if confronted with "trabajar como un negro" would render it into something inoffensive in English.

And yet. And yet, in Uruguay the unemployment rate for young black women is nearly double that for white ones. A scholarship scheme to help send Afro-Uruguayans to university can't find enough qualified applicants. In Mexico, one of my home countries, the indigenous population suffers systematic discrimination, to the point where people of indigenous origin living in cities do everything they can to hide that fact. They rewrite their histories and pretend they can't speak indigenous languages to fear of being classed an "indio", a word that's still almost universally used, and makes me shudder every time I hear it. Language is not just a toolkit manipulated to describe the world around us - it manipulates us, it sets the parameters within which we can express ourselves. We think we can go in any direction we choose, but in fact we have a set range of passages to choose from within the architecture built by syntax, grammar, and the vocabulary available to us. Deleting an expression from a dictionary in itself cannot help close one of those passages, but its existence is the signifier that points towards a deeper cultural problem. It will take time for mainstream Spanish usage to absorb the difference between, say, disabled people and people with disabilities, but the quicker it goes down that route, the better.  

And if you clicked on this hoping for a fun story about Carnival, here's one I made earlier - about Uruguay's 79 year old drag queen.

The campaign that was - and the problems it's left President Hollande

This post was originally published on my  France24 blog on May 7th 2012.

It was the party the French left have waited 31 years for - the iconic Place de la Bastille carpeted with people squeezed in so tight you could barely breathe, people hanging out of trees and lampposts with French flags, campaign T-shirts and home-made placards, deafening boos when Nicolas Sarkozy took to the giant plasma screen to give a surprisingly humble admission of defeat, and far, far more deafening applause when François Hollande took to the stage at half past midnight to address the crowd for the first time as their president. For those of us who were there, it's a moment of history to remember for ever, but reading the signs in the crowd was enough to flag up some of the challenges that face President François - and the fault lines that could soon appear among the ecstatic crowd.




There were louder shouts of 'Sarkozy, c'est fini' than anything else - and more posters attacking the bling-bling president than vaunting the virtues of Mr Normal, the provincial bank manager lookalike from Corrèze. In an overwhelmingly negative campaign, this has been more a punishment vote for the incumbent than an expression of confidence in Hollande - as today's Guardian put it, Nicolas Sarkozy should take this personally, because it is personal. Some of the French were put off from that first night at le Fouquet's five years ago, by the yachts and the Rolexes and the supermodel wife, others by the hard right tone of a re-election campaign that blamed immigrants for all France's woes and claimed halal meat was foremost among voters' worries, but it will take work to convince many the man they voted for is more than the least bad option. Then there are the far deeper divisions in French society that right-wing campaign dug; we're left, effectively, with three Frances: the victorious left, the disappointed mainstream right, and the enraged hard right, who feel entirely disassociated from traditional politics and have chosen to reject a European-leaning, globalised France they feel has rejected them, by tossing them onto the scrapheap of unemployment and dead-end jobs. Nicolas Sarkozy is overwhelmingly responsible or this, for running a campaign that crossed every taboo, from suggesing a populist referendum on immigration or saying le Pen was 'not incompatible' with teh values of the Republic; but it's François Hollande who has to find a way to re-engage the often young, mostly working class, small town voters who chose Marine le Pen - he cannot afford to ignore them. Parliamentary elections are just a month away, and Le Pen is counting on the implosion of the defeated UMP to win a block of seats - he must show the socialists can build those voters a better future and counter the malign influence she may soon wield from the Assemblée Nationale.




Many of those who did vote for him also present a problem; one of the commonest placards last night was a variation on 'François, don't let us down'. After 17 years of right-wing government, hopes on the French left could hardly be running higher; and he'll be under a lot of pressure ot fulfil them. The 11% of far-left voters who opted for anti-capitalist Jean-Luc Melenchon in the first round did so to send a future President Hollande a clear message - many on the left also feel entirely disenchanted with the current system, and would like it remade virtually from scratch. Communist paper l'Humanité today called for higher wages, more protection from redundancy and retirement at 60 for all; Hollande has promised none of that, but that won't stop widespread disappointment, and probably angry unions on the streets, when it becomes plain just how empty the state coffers are.




The most common message heard on the campaign trail, though, was 'Why aren't the candidates saying anything about the issues that worry me?' ; most commonly, housing, unemployment, the economy, and the future of France in Europe. Hollande, of course, has promised to renegotiate the European fiscal pact, and has become the embodiment of hope for many struggling under austerity measures from Lisbon to Athens. It very much remains to be seen, though, if he can really create a new Europe-wide policy based on growth, or if those many cynical French voters who said 'It hardly matters who I vote for, our economic policy will be decided in Brussels and Berlin anyway' will turn out to be right after all. It was certainly a good party - but the new President will have no breathing space to recover.

What do young voters want?

This post was originally published on my France24 blog on April 11th 2012.

Definitely my weirdest experience of covering this French election campaign was at a UMP youth rally a couple of weeks ago, watching a series of well-groomed young people, most of whom didn't look old enough to vote at all, writing their messages of support (and declarations of love) to the President with marker pens on a white wall, and queueing up to have their photos taken with a cardboard cut out of their hero. Unfortunately for him, these cravat-wearing heirs of France's ruling class are far from typical of their age group - two thirds of under 30s voted socialist in 2007. Polls now indicate their preferences might have swung in some rather less orthodox directions - one this week had Marine le Pen as the preferred candidate for 18-25 year olds, while numerous others say large chunks of the young don't plan to vote at all. This risk of record low turnout worries both major parties - this week saw a unlikely political spat over driving licences as both Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande both promised to make them cheaper to get, in a fairly blatant bid for the young vote. They've got concrete policies aimed at that age group too - Hollande's put them at the heart of his campaign, offering to cut charges for employers hiring them, while Sarkozy promised a youth bank to help them finance study or starting a business. Nevertheless, a poll for today's l'Humanité said 73% of the young are 'disappointed with all the candidates'.

Young people, though, don't constitute any more of a homogenous vote than any other age group, and they aren't all avoiding the polls for the same reasons either. A clever bit of polling from Liberation recently divided them into four groups; the 'prosystem' 22% - that's the polo shirted middle-class kids who want to see Sarkozy re-elected, and tend to be very well educated and optimistic about their futures; the 32% who want to see things change, sympathise with the Occupy movement, and feel their generation has been ripped off by their elders - they choose left wing candidates Hollande or Jean-Luc Melenchon, but also Marine le Pen, an example of how she's managed to make her party presentable, partly by stealing a lot of the economic clothes of the left; the 17% who really aren't interested in politics at all; and the 29%  of often unemployed or low income youth who say they're completely disenchanted and unlikely to vote at all - or if they do, for you guessed it, Marine le Pen. Her poll numbers are actually falling consistently among voters as a whole, but her mix of a fresh and engaging image with rhetoric placing her as the defender of ordinary people against a rapacious system is playing well with impressionable young people who don't remember her father's anti-Semitic rants. It's this temptation towards extremism - or abstention - that the main parties are doing everything to fight. I went to meet some of their youth leaders, to find out how they do it.

Is Sarkozy milking the fear of radical Islam for political gain?

This was originally published on my France24 blog on April 4, 2012.

 At least 10 people have been arrested this morning in France on suspicion of being linked to a radical Islamist plot, adding to the 14 placed under formal investigation yesterday for allegedly plotting a kidnap a Jewish judge in Lyon. On top of this, the govenment this week expelled five allegedly radical Islamist clerics from France, and announced four more, invited to the French Association of Islamic Organisations' annual congress in Paris this weekend, would not be welcome on French soil. For the right wing press, this is an appropriate response to the Islamist threat - some of these preachers, after all, are on record saying some pretty extreme things, like Youssef al-Kardawi's statement that the Holocaust was a punishment from God.
For a President just two and a half weeks from an election, though, this does seem pretty convenient. It's a clear attempt to head far right opponent Marine le Pen off at the pass, as she tours TV sets saying she's long been telling everyone the threat of radical Islam was being underestimated in France. It's also overdramatising a danger experts say has much decreased in recent years - one tells Liberation the jihadist agenda is finding it difficult to recruit across Europe after being so comprehensively overtaken by democratic reformists in the Middle East, and in France especially extremist clerics have been keeping a very low profile for some time after previous crackdowns by the intelligence services. Cynically, the Toulouse shootings have provided the president with an opportunity he is mining to the fullest - and he's also very aware that the outcome of an ongoing invesigation into whether the intelligence services missed an opportunity to catch Mohammed Merah sooner could well turn out to be very embarrassing for his government, hence the overcompensation now.
One thing seems to have been left out of this election campaign entirely, after all the discussion we've had of halal meat and extremist dangers - the Muslim voters. The French don't keep exact figures for religious minorities, believing it to be against the principle that all are equal in the eyes of the state, but there are at least a million Muslims on the electoral roll. Unlike politicians in Britain, for example, here no-one has really made an attempt to court the Muslim vote. Many now feel disgusted by politicians who've stigmatised them again and again - and say they'll be staying away from the polls all together. I went to meet some of them at the Paris halal food fair.

Made in France

 This post was originally published on my France24 blog on March 19th 2012.
All the presidential candidates are encouraging us to buy made in France - so I went to see if that's really possible, and what businesses who do manufacture here think of the politicians weighing in on the subject.

Storming the Bastille

This post was originally published on my France24 blog on March 18th 2012.

Paris' Place de la Bastille was draped in red on Sunday, with Communist Party flags hanging in every tree, and l'Internationale ringing out from thousands of throats. The march was held to Bastille - birthplace of the French Revolution - on the anniversary of the founding of the Paris Commune, and was dripping in historical symbolism. In any other country, this would have to be a historical renactment society, but this is France, where not only does the Communist Party still exist, but it's managed to ally itself with an assortment of other left wing groups under the leadership of a charismatic former Socialist minister, to form a coalition that's now scoring over 10% in the polls. How has Jean-Luc Melenchon managed it?



Firstly, he's struck a nerve in troubled economic times; the French, like every other European nation, are being subjected to public sector budget cuts and feel they're having to stretch already meagre budgets thinner every month, while the bankers who caused the crisis continue to make telephone number bonuses. Of course, Socialist candidate François Hollande has tried to placate this anger by proposing a 75% tax on incomes over a million euros, and describing finance as his enemy, but for many voters it looks too much like an electorally convenient last-minute conversion from a man who has been at the heart of the political establishment for decades without having too much to say about bankers. Across Europe, there is a 'plague on all your houses' feeling, a widespread rejection of mainstream politics on both the right and left, a feeling that they're all part of a detached ruling class that don't understand how ordinary people are suffering. Hollande's long leadership of the Socialist Party, his elite education and his bourgeois manner all play against him with these voters. The 'anti-system' tendency has grown so much that even Nicolas Sarkozy has tried - risibly - to position himself has somehow against the establishment, although of course his famous, and famously shady, relationships with some very rich friends, and the subsequent series of corruption scandals his government has seen, have done more than anything to make the French reject their political class. The anger at this seemingly endless series of allegations - the Bettencourt affair, the suitcases of cash from African leaders, the cash from Gaddafi, the Karachigate affair involving kickbacks from 1990s arms deals, I could go on - has coupled itself with a European-wide anger about the little people having to pay for the crisis, and it's found a home in the Melenchon campaign. I was talking to a friend the other day about why the 'indignado' and Occupy movements didn't take off in France, when the book that inspired them, Stephane Hessel's Indignez-vous, was written by a Frenchman; I think part of the answer is that the French actually have a political party that represents that feeling.


It would be wildly inaccurate, though, to think that the only people attracted to Melenchon are the kind of studenty types and hardcore leftists who would form the core of an Occupy demonstration; Sunday's march included teachers' unions, immigrants' rights groups, and grannies who told me they'd never been to a demonstration before. All sorts of groups in French society have been made feel persecuted by the rhetoric of the Sarkozy government: Muslims and other ethnic minorities upset by the increasingly xenophobic tone; the unemployed, low paid and teachers, who' ve all been accused by the president of not working hard enough; and it's served to radicalise people who wouldn't otherwise be found marching. Melenchon doesn't just focus on economic issues, eiher; he's directly taken the fight to Marine le Pen among the working-class voters most tempted to vote for her, making the anti-racism cause his own, and on Sunday his speech championed gay marriage and abortion rights. He's even managed the trick of pulling together the ideologically diverse strands of France's far left; smaller parties Workers' Struggle and the New Anticapitalist Party (both essentially Trotskyist) picked up 6% of votes between them last time round, but both have now collapsed and will be lucky to get 1% put together, because Melenchon has won over all their supporters.


He's also profiting from the weakness of François Hollande, who just can't muster the language to talk to ordinary voters or the charisma to inspire them. He's given some good speeches, sure, but this weekend I was Hollande do his best at inspiring an audience on Saturday, and Melenhon on Sunday, and it's quite clear who is the master. Hollande is frequently accused of profiting more from popular loathing of Sarkozy then any actual popularity of his own, but Melenchon's certainly aren't just anti-Sarkozy voters - they're impassioned voters. It was telling that Melenchon didn't even mention any of the other candidates in Sunday's speech, focusing on his own policies, historical symbolism, and, yes, calls for a revolution. That might sound rather retro, and Melenchon is still only fifth in the polls, but François Hollande would have done well to listen carefully.

The candidates' European problem

This post was originally published on my France24 blog on March 17th 2012.

François Hollande gave a big speech in Paris today aimed at countering accusations his foreign policy is weak and anti-European. The right wing UMP have jumped on his plans to renegotiate the recent European budget treaty - the one that ties states into strict spending limits - as evidence his foreign policy is naive and he won't be able to work with fellow European leaders, a fear that gained traction after rumours published in der Spiegel that the continent's right wing leaders had agreed not to meet him during the election campaign. Members of his socialist party have also been accused of being anti-German after they complained Angela Merkel's government was imposing its will on the rest of Europe, so he was under pressure to prove he and his party are international and outward-looking.

He rolled out the biggest names he could find in left-wing Europe - Italian Democrat Party leader PierLuigi Bersani, German SDP leader Sigmar Gabriel, the president of the European Parliament - tellingly not a very stellar list, which reflects how much most of the European left currently finds itself in the doldrums. They've failed to capitalise on the economic crisis, allowing their conservative opponents to impose the narrative that austerity is the only way, and François Hollande is their great hope; the man who just might win an election, renegotiate the treaty, and pull France out of economic crisis with a policy based on growth rather than cuts.  The German and Italian leaders were here to support him, but also because they desperately hope he'll prove it can be done, and thus provide an example they can copy; Mario Monti's caretaker government is due to hold election by the end of 2013, Germany in October next year. For that reason, Hollande had a lot to say about European solidarity, about creating a union based on hope rather than markets. He also took some pretty strong swipes at the neoliberal policies he says caused the current crisis by allowing irresponsible financiers to do whatever they like; they will play well with the 60% (in some opinion polls) of the French who think Paris has handed too much control over its budget to Brussels, but might be a little too much for some of his European allies, especially the German SPD, who've made it clear some of his more radical plans, like a 75% tax on millionaires, won't be making their way into their programme.

Angela Merkel et al can't have been very reassured either by a speech high on leftwing rhetoric and low on concrete detail; and therein lies Hollande's European problem. If elected, not only would he be almost Europe's only leader on the left, but would have to get to work with his ideological opposites straight away on a series of key dossiers currently on ice until election day - including reform of the Common Agricultural Policy and the EU budget for the next six years. He's also tied in to a 4.5% deficit cut this year and 3% the next, which his policies can only fulfil if optimistic growth predictions come true, and the European Commission can insist on further cuts if he fails.

He's not the only candidate treading a fine line on Europe - after become synonymous with a certain kind of European unity in 'Merkozy', the incumbent last week promised to renegotiate the Schengen treaty and pass a 'Buy European Act' imposing protectionist trade measures, saying he would act unilaterally if Europe does nothing within a year. That reportedly sparked a lot of worries about dangerously anti-European populism in Brussels, with Herman van Rompuy heard to remark in Paris on Tuesday that the French won't have a positive image of the union as long as their leaders don't seem to believe in it. After this, Hollande is more able to paint himself as the pro-European candidate, but what his European counterparts want is hard to square with what his increasingly Eurosceptic electorate want to hear. Today was his attempt to circle that square - set out a blueprint for a united, progressive Europe - but the kindest judgement one can make is that it's a pretty blurry blueprint.

Here's me reporting live from that summit of European left-wing leaders.

Where are all the women in French politics?

 This post was originally published on my France24 blog on March 8th 2012.

It's International Women's Day - and so I took a look at the women in French politics, in today's show.

Sarkozy and the city

This post was orginally published on my France24 blog on March 10th 2012.

 Nicolas Sarkozy has picked Villepinte in the Paris suburbs as the site of tomorrow's rally, the biggest he has planned before election day - probably because it houses a conveniently big arena, rather than because he hopes to appeal to local residents - but the location highlights some of the biggest unfulfilled promises of Nicolas Sarkozy's presidency, those he made to France's run down suburban estates.

In his 2007 campaign, the president promised a 'Marshall Plan' for the banlieues, that would slash the number of teenagers leaving school with no qualifications by two thirds and cut the stubbornly high unemployment rate among ethnic minority young people. His project for the banlieues was launched with much fanfare in 2008, led by new cities minister Fadela Amara, who is herself of North African origin and grew up in the banlieues, and came to national attention leading the campaigning organisation for ethnic minority women 'Ni Putes Ni Soumises' (not whores or submissive). After she became frustrated with the slow pace of progress and resigned from the government in November 2010, the banlieue project was quietly shelved.

In fairness, it has left some positive legacy; urban regeneration projects have led to the bulldozing of some of France's most decrepit Sixties towerblocks and seen them replaced by better housing. The government Association for Urban Regeneration, though, says it needs another 40 billion euros of funding to build all the projects that have been approved and then left on architects' drawing boards; while homelessness charities say an extra million social housing properties are needed in the Paris region alone.

There have been some concrete steps taken to tackle school dropout rates too; children at risk of dropping out now get personalised mentoring, and schools are working much more closely with businesses to help students understand what jobs their qualifications could lead to, and why it might be worth staying on at school. Unfortunately, the statistics tell a much bleaker story; 150 000 French teenagers leave school with no qualifications every year, including 40% of all young people in the banlieues,  where half of those have problems with reading and writing French. Their insertion into the job market isn't much easier either - the unemployment rate for young black men is at very nearly 50%. That's double the rate for France as a whole, and it isn't really a product of the current crisis; these are statistics that haven't changed in 20 years. The obstacles between them and a job go far beyond a lack of qualifications; French employers are notorious for binning CVs with the wrong postcode on them, or an African surname. There's also a more subtle form of discrimination that stems from these young people's detachment from the job market; they simply don't know the unwritten codes of behaving in a workplace, like why you shouldn't wear a tracksuit, or swear, or address a job interviewer as 'tu'. During my Masters (in linguistics) I once wrote a paper on whether 'banlieue French' is a dialect or a separate language, so full is it of expressions taken from Arabic and slang unintelligible elsewhere, and that to my mind neatly digs out the root of the problem; France has created a class of the poor so disconnected from the rest of French society they barely speak the language. It's these deep rooted problems that the Sarkozy government hasn't addressed, because it hasn't acknowledged they exist.

I went to meet some of the people trying to bridge this cultural gap.

On the French campaign trail - in London

This post was originally published on my France24 blog on March 1st 2012.

If you're an expat living abroad, a presidential election in your home country can often have little effect on you - after all, you pay taxes, and use a health and education system, in the country where you actually live. French expatriates, though, are being put at the heart of this election race - Nicolas Sarkozy has created 11 new constituencies just to represent them. They've carved up the world into chunks with roughly equal numbers of French voters - so an MP based in London and voting in Paris will also represent voters living in Finland and Latvia. Sarkozy's UMP have been accused of a gerrymandering attempt here, because so many French expatriates are high earners who have effectively fled the tax system at home and are unlikely to vote for the left, but socialist candidate François Hollande threw himself with gusto into the race for this electorate on Wednesday, with a campaign trip to London - demographically France's sixth biggest city, with 300,000 citizens of l'Hexagone in residence.

He was greeted by crowds of applauding supporters at St Pancras, mostly young and often female; belying the stereotype of the London-based Frenchie as, as the Independent put it "a besuited banker who works in Canary Wharf and lives in South Kensington". The latter are the people Sarkozy was talking to when he visited the City before his election in 2007; and there are still plenty of French bankers in London who will certainly be kept away by moves like Hollande's planned 75% tax ate for the highest earnings. Now, though, the average French expat in the UK is younger and more likely to work in the public sector. It's indisputable that a lot of French people abroad, especially young graduates, have chosen the more flexible 'Anglo-Saxon' economic system over one where they find it impossible to get in to the job market, but they 're certainly not politically uniform. There was a big turnout at Hollande's London rally on Wednesday night; and the expats France24 talked to were enthused about the idea of having their own MP, saying it's great to be included in the political process back home, and feel they're still important to the candidates. The socialist candidate to be these voters' MP, Axelle Lemaire, went further - saying she hopes to fill a democratic deficit for a chunk of people who aren't being properly represented at all.

Whatever you think of the idea of having MPs for expats, what they'll actually be able to do is fairly limited; there is around 900 million euros of French public money spent every year on things like cultural programmes abroad, so they may be able to influence where that goes, but essentially the move is symbolic. It helps expatriates feel they've not been forgotten, and lets politicians look cosmopolitan on campaign visits. I still think, as I argued in a post here a few months ago, that EU citizens should be allowed to vote in the country they live in, and not the one for which they happen to hold a passport.

Here's our TV report on the expat vote in London.

Getting out the vote - in Paris' poorest suburbs

 This post was originally published on my France24 blog on February 20th 2012.

They're all at it - Nicolas Sarkozy in his big speech yesterday in the traditionally working class city of Marseille, Marine le Pen in front of a blue collar audience in Lille, François Hollande visiting a series of rundown estates this week. They're all trying to appeal to ordinary people, trying to convince those who can't quite make it to the end of the month that they are top of politicians' minds. This is a consequence of the economic crisis, of course; the discourse of aspiration and being relaxed about a few individuals acquiring vast wealth looks much less tempting now than it did at the last election in 2007. "Work more to earn more" doesn't play well when there are no jobs - what people want to hear instead is that candidates will help keep their electricity bills down.
In some parts of France, though, poverty and unemployment are not a consequence of the current crisis - they're ingrained social problems that decades of changing administrations on right and left have done little to tackle. These are France's banlieues - the mostly 1960s built sink estates forming a doughnut of deprivation around big cities, especially Paris. Here, unlike in Britain and America, the inner cities are desirable middle class areas; the poor have been pushed out, out of sight and out of mind.
A succession of surveys has shown that voters here feel disconnected from the political process; turnout is low and residents commonly feel ignored by both the right and left, as the years go by, governments change and problems like poor housing are not dealt with. At this election, this rejection of the main political parties might also translate into a high vote for left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, and among white voters for Marine le Pen; both have worked hard to paint themselves as outside the political establishment. This 'anti-system' rhetoric is perceived as playing so well with working class voters, in fact, that virtually all the candidates are jumping on the bandwagon - centrist François Bayrou, François Hollande, and even somewhat implausibly Sarkozy himself, with his attack on 'elites' made up of elected officials and unionists at the weekend.
Is this populism working, though? I went out canvassing with the local socialists in the Paris suburb of Evry this weekend to find out.

New to Twitter? Tips for @nicolassarkozy

This post was originally published on my France24 blog on February 15th 2012.


@nicolassarkozy only joined Twitter this morning and has over 40 thousand followers already (whether they're all real accounts that existed before yesterday themselves might be another question, but still) which is pretty good for someone who's only posted two pretty anodyne tweets so far - "I've joined Twitter" and "watch me on TV this evening" basically. The news caused a frenzy in newsrooms across Paris, with some older colleagues heard to ask what Twitter is and what it does - but surely the actual question is, what on earth has taken so long? This isn't this week's only social media-related controversy in French politics - the president has a new all-singing all-dancing Facebook page, using the Timeline to highlight the parts of his record he'd like you to remember and gloss skilfully over the bits he'd rather forget (divorce when he first became president, being spokesman for Edouard Balladur's 1995 election campaign that's become synonymous with dodgy money, etc.). L'Express magazine today reports his team had help from Facebook staff to set it up, giving them an 'unfair advantage' before the new functionality was available to everyone. There is a slight flaw in this story, though - the Timeline features the profile uses have been available to everyone since last September, so if you had paid attention to Facebook announcements and spent as much time on the site as the Sarkozy team over the last few months (I know you did, I mean you could have spent it productively) you too would have a profile this good at selling yourself. That goes for you, and, of course, François Hollande's campaign team, who are the ones caught lacking here. Again, the question is: why are they so behind?

French voters are at least as internet-savvy and present on social networks as those in the US, for example, and yet politicians simply aren't using the medium to connect with them well enough. Where are they going wrong? Politicians' tweets have drawn attention for overstepping the line, either in embarrassment - @Eric_Besson trying to seduce his wife via Twitter, thinking he was sending her a private message - or insult, with minister @nadine_morano nicknamed 'Sarkozy's attack dog' byt the media for her Twitter barbs, and then using the medium to hit back at the journalists concerned as well. We've identified Political Networking Error no.1, then - remember that while SOME mild banter goes with the terrain, you aren't texting your best friend. It's a public medium. If running for office, don't say anything you wouldn't on the evening news. Politicians' personal vendettas against other politicians/particular journalists are of interest to no one except politicians and journalists.

Compare those French ministers with the @BarackObama feed - sounds human, but tweets nothing negative or attacking,  instead asking followers to 'share what tax cuts mean to you' or 'let us know what inspired you to support Barack Obama'. See, it makes you feel all warm and fluffy inside - and by asking readers for their own views and stories, and retweeting them, it creates a genuine sense of community, which is what was the real key to Obama's oh-so-successful social media strategy in 2008. If people are to really believe in a campaign, they have to think it cares about them - Political Networking Error no.2, then is It's Not About You, It's About The Voters. Yes, getting some sense of a politicians' real personality is great, but on Twitter, a good campaign should make followers feel they're in a discussion, not a lecture. This is where @fhollande's otherwise pretty decent Twitter feed goes wrong - it tends to tweet virtually the entire text of major speeches 120 characters at a time, which gets as dull as that sounds.

Political Networking Error no.3 - actually provide information. Sounds obvious, but the Obama 2012 Facebook page can tell you where to find a rally or a meeting on just about any street in the US (and get you GoogleMaps directions), how to volunteer for the campaign, direct you to an archive of favourite Obama clips, AND tell you how much the President likes Miles Davis and Toni Morrison, just like a real person's profile. You could go to the François Hollande page with a burning desire to help the campaign, though, and it won't actually tell you how to do anything more than watch his next TV interview. Social networking is meant to get people involved.

Political Networking Error no.4 - Facebook and Twitter denizens are adults, as much as voters you press the flesh with on visits to factories and cheese shops. Your campaign team might have worked out this is a way to connect with that hard-to-reach youth demographic, but you still need to talk about serious issues seriously. Use real words. Abbreviate with care. No smileys. No one wants their country to be run by someone who uses smileys.

Having said all that, at least the candidates have worked out social media IS a campaign terrain, as much as going on walkabouts in rural villages, and they're trying, bless them. Keep following them and you know, by election day they might have read this and raised their game.

Here's the episode of Campaign Chronicles from February 17th 2012 when we talked about getting the vote out online:

17 and alone in a foreign country

This post was originally published on my France24 blog on Feb 7th 2012.

There are drawings of houses and families on the walls, charts of French verbs, times tables and geometry charts. There are neat rows of desks, whiteboards, old-fashioned globes and boxes of pencils. There is colourful student artwork everywhere. It could be any primary school - perhaps one that's rather short of resources - but here the students being drilled in basic French grammar are mostly 16 or 17, and they're chatting amongst themselves in Dari, Pashto and Hausa. There are hand drawn flags from around the world, and a big global map covered in pins, with particularly thick forests in Afghanistan and west Africa. They mark where the 300 or so students that take classes here have come from. This is the Maison du Jeune Refugié in northern Paris, run by the NGO France Terre d'Asile, and all these young people have found themselves alone in France, with no family here that can be traced. Most were found sleeping on the streets by the charity's teams, especially around the nearby canal where rough sleepers congregate.



Steve (all names have been changed, and faces hidden) is from Guinea-Conakry, where ethnic violence broke out after a disputed election just over a year ago, adding danger to grinding poverty. He came to France with an uncle after his parents died, but then the uncle kicked him out after a row, alone, knowing no-one else in France and with no idea of where to go. He spent two nights sleeping by the canal, not eating anything for two days, before France Terre d'Asile picked him up. That was 10 months ago, and he now has a bed in a Salvation Army shelter and is studying an apprenticeship in the building trade. He says life in France has been difficult to adapt to, especially the cold and being so far from everything he knows, but he's trying to make the best of it. He is 16.


James is from Ivory Coast, and decided to leave during the violence that followed last year's disputed presidential election there (about 3000 people died after outgoing President Laurent Gbagbo refused to hand over power). He says he's always dreamed of moving to France since he learnt about it in primary school (all these countries are of course former French colonies), because his teacher said that in France there was no conflict, and young people had the chance to become anything they liked. His father died when he was a baby, his mother last year. He travelled with another boy from the same village, paying his family savings to a trafficker for plane tickets to Morocco and false documents, and then crossing the Mediterranean on an overcrowded boat to Spain. Spain, he says, was much worse than here - he slept on a concrete floor in a cold hangar with dozens of other migrants, and was beaten up by police officers. He smuggled himself onto a train to Paris, because he hoped to find cousins here, but with no address or phone number he hasn't managed to track them down. He slept on the street for four nights, in December, and has been at France Terre d'Asile since. He too is studying, but says it's maddeningly frustrating not be able to earn his own money; he says that in Ivory Coast he had worked since he was 10. He is 17.



Omar is the most articulate and talkative in this little group playing pool in the stairwell that passes as a games room, and he too is frustrated - by the months he has been waiting for papers so he can stay legally in France. He's also from Ivory Coast and travelled here with an older man from his village who he says had promised him work and somewhere to live, and who he trusted because he had already helped lots of people he knew to come to France, but who abandoned him to sleep on the streets as soon as they arrived. Once these children have been picked up by France Terre d'Asile's teams, they are found somewhere to sleep and given schooling in French, literacy and numeracy, but they're also stuck in a legal limbo. If they are under 18, the state has a responsibility to protect them, but their age is often in doubt; the authorities apply a hundred-year old test based on the growth of certain bones that doctors admit has a margin of error of about 10 months in adolescent boys. France Terre d'Asile director Pierre Henry says the NGO is furiously campaigning for it to be replaced with something more accurate. Once they've been accepted as minors, many only have a few months before they turn 18 and can thus be eligible for deportation by the French authorities. The NGO tries to have their applications processed as quickly as possible - many are eligible to apply for refugee status - but bureaucratic delays mean many spend months waiting to find out if a judge has decided if they can stay. For Omar, this waiting is the worst part, because at least in Ivory Coast he felt he could decide what to do tomorrow, he says - now he can only wait.


The centre's director Julien Mache tells me that's probably the worst of the problems these young people have once they've been given somewhere to live; a frustration, an ennui, a sense of no longer being the actors in their own destiny, a loss of identity, he says. Many have travelled long distances alone, overland from Afghanistan for example, and developed an extraordinary maturity and capacity for resilience most of us find hard to imagine. After that experience, they resent being put in classes and treated like children, and above all they resent the wait for paperwork. That's more psychologically distressing, he says, than being separated from their families, cultural isolation or traumatic memories, and pushes his charges into depression and drug use, because they're no longer in control of their lives. Many of them have great responsibilities to fulfil; they've been sent by families who have scraped together life savings or got themselves into huge debt to send a son abroad, and they have a strong sense of duty. For some, that means needing to pay off a trafficker who can track them down in Paris; more often, it means leaving a safe haven here to continue a seemingly endless journey to meet distant relatives in Britain and Scandinavia, whom they may never be able to find. Henry tells me very few of the young people his association works with have chosen to leave home on their own, meaning they're carrying all the hopes of an extended family with them. It's no wonder they're keen to start working and earning money as soon as possible - after all, that's why they came - and they find the limbo hard to deal with.


Where does the French state stand in all this, then? Pierre Henry says local authorities don't fulfil their legal responsibilities, basically passing the buck - areas that have international airports or big cities don't see why they should have to pay for looking after all these extra children, and demand federal government help that never arrives. The charity can apply pressure to get cases processed faster, but they can't change the political climate, Henry says, and it certainly isn't one in which refugee children are a top, or an uncontroversial, spending priority. France at least doesn't try to deport children - unlike some EU countries, including the UK, who have signed up to a scheme aiming to return them to their families, with fixed annual targets for returns. Back home, of course, they may well not be welcome, if the family can be traced at all. In order to stay in France after their 18th birthday, though, they must prove they can speak French and are in education, alongside a fair amount of sheer luck in negotiating the tangled system. Henry admits that despite France Terre d'Asile's best efforts, dozens are simply lost every year, disappearing from the public record over fears they will be deported.

The energy, motivation and drive of some of the young people I met are overwhelming, though, despite the legal and practical challenges they face. I'm sure that's partly due to the support and confidence building they've had from France Terre d'Asile, but Mache says those of his charges who attend mainstream schools improve standards for the whole class because they're so motivated. He also describes the experience of being young and alone in a foreign country as 'Darwinian' - the naturally toughest and most resilient do well, weaker ones less so. What these young people - some as young as 13 - have been through is inconceivable to most of us, but France is responsible for what happens to them next, and it's time, as Pierre Henry put it to me, for France to step up to that responsibility.

"The insufferable Mr. Gueant"

This post was originally published on my France24 blog on February 6th 2012.

 "Not all civilisations are equal" a gem from interior minister Claude Gueant to a group of right wing students at the weekend, that's now sparked outrage across the political spectrum. This isn't his first offence, of course; le Parisien has a neat round up of some of his most controversial remarks over the last year, which include saying that the French no longer feel at home in France because there are too many immigrants, and that two thirds of students who drop out of school have foreign parents; not something backed up by statistics. Gueant himself has refused to apologise for any of these statements, despite getting a reputation as the ruling UMP's anti-immigrant attack dog - his response to the latest row is to tell le Figaro that he regrets nothing, and that the left's belief in multiculturalism is in fact 'moral relativism' that ignores the fact that democracy, women's rights and so on are better than the alternative. When you've finished being righteously indignant about the idea that those concepts are somehow innately Western (read: non-Muslim) the question to ask is whether he just speaks for himself, or if he's saying out loud what everyone on the right thinks.

The official line at the UMP, voiced this weekend by foreign minister Alain Juppé, is that Gueant is a loose cannon, but this doesn't hold up to much examination. Firstly, he fulfils a convenient political role for Nicolas Sarkozy; he allows the president to avoid saying anything too controversial on immigration, while still currying favour with Front National-favouring voters, something that could soon be very significant indeed, as speculation grows that Marine Le Pen herself might not be able to get herself on the ballot paper. That's certainly what the far right FN themselves think; in the past they've welcomed Gueant appropriating their discourse, now they're furiously attacking him, clearly afraid of losing voters.

Is Gueant, and indeed Marine Le Pen, really the problem, though, or are they a symptom? Look again at that remark in this morning's Figaro - multiculturalism in itself is bad, we should recognise that Western (French) values are somehow innately superior. That's not a remark you can imagine any politician in the Anglophone world coming out with and keeping their jobs. And therein lies the problem; French politicians on the left are as much responsible for creating a political culture in which you can say this as are those on the right, with their constant emphasis on French values, the secular state, and their defence of laws like banning the burqa, couched in a language that isn't that much different to Gueant's; a language of 'us' and 'them', that always implies there is something about Islam that is incompatible with 'our' values. There are many things wrong with race relations in both Britain and America, but politicians on all sides at least have realised multiculturalism is something to be valued, and that national identity is such a kaleidoscope of shfting sands anyway it's pointless to try and pin it down from one day to the next. Here, though, the notion that some beliefs are immutably French, and thus some beliefs can never be, isn't ever questioned - and until it is, there will still be Claude Gueants, and the right wing's dirty secret will still be that this sort of remark is a deliberate pitch for votes.

Here's the video of Campaign Chronicles, my politics show, talking about this subject on Feb 6th 2012.

Housing for all!

This post was originally published on my France24 blog on February 3rd 2012.

It's not the most glamourous subject - but it's been grabbing headlines in France. Eric Cantona said he was standing for President to draw attention to it, Nicolas Sarkozy dedicated a big chunk of his 'comeback' TV interview last week to it, and five other presidential candidates turned up at a charity summit this week to promise they'd do something about it - with socialist François Hollande even taking one for the team when a protester threw a bag of flour over him.

The housing crisis has definitely become a major topic in France's presidential election - and given the scale of it, it's easy to see why. The number of rough sleepers is one of the first things foreigners notice when they visit France, with charities estimating them at 133,000 across the country. Another 8 million people are classed as badly housed - meaning they live in overcrowded homes or spend more than two thirds of their income on rent. Paris especially has some of the highest rents in the world, which coupled with a soaring unemployment rate, has left a lot of people desperate. It's not just a problem suffered by the very marginalised either; in Paris, you can be a pensioner who's had a decent job all their lives, or a young graduate starting out in a professional field like law, and still find yourself only able to afford a 10m2 studio.

I went to meet some of the victims of France's housing crisis - and some of the campaigners trying to do something about it.

What exactly are politicians planning to do about this, then?
They don't exactly have a great track record; this week, the Fondation Abbé Pierre, in its annual report, described the last fifteen years of housing policy in France as 'completely out of sync with the way ordinary French people are living' and 'blind to reality' - notably criticising a policy that has allowed 50% of housing built on publicly owned land to go straight on to the open market, instead of using it for social tenants. They say the government has displayed a blind faith in the ability of the housing market to right its own wrongs, and the few strategies they have tried, like toppping up rents to persuade landlords to charge less, have been totally ineffective.

Now Nicolas Sarkozy says he has the solution - changing planning law so that you an build 30% more housing on the same amount of land. The problem, of course, it that that's a gift to those who already own land, but unless they're under an obligation to rent it cheaply, it doesn't help bring down market prices. Local authorities across France have also accused his party, the UMP, of exacerbating the problem by blocking councils from building social housing on publicly owned land; the socialist mayor of Paris, Betrand Delanöe, claims he could solve the housing crisis in Paris' chic 16th arrondissement if only the local UMP would give him planning permission. Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande has promised to make it easier for mayors to build, and cap rents. Housing advocates say that while that might give many people a breathing space, setting a legal limit per square metre might encourage landlords who arent currently charging that much to put the rent up.  Centrist candidate François Bayrou wants to ban rent deposits, and leftist candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon has gone for a serious attack on mortgages - saying the dream of ownership is a fraud and people just go from being at their landlord's mercy to being at the bank's. As far as I can see, there's a big gap in all these plans; freezing rents is not enough when there aren't enough houses to live in, but there are half a million empty properties in France. Some kind of punitive tax that would encourage owners to put empty houses, or holiday homes used for a couple of weeks a year, back onto the rental market would upset a fair few wealthy voters - but it seems like a missed opportunity.

That's what I think - here's what the papers made of the housing plans, plus François Hollande geting floured, in yesterday's Campaign Chronicles (a new show I'm doing, all about the French presidential election, every weekday morning at 9.50 on France24).

Is Mexico's experiment with democracy over?

This post was originally published on my France24 blog on January 19th 2012.

Mexico goes to the polls for a new president on July 1st, in the midst of a security situation so dire I hardly need to tell you - at least 20 thousand narcotrafficking-related deaths in five years, ingrained corruption so deep sections of the army and police force are fighting drug gangs' battles for them, perhaps half the country (mostly in the north) a virtual no-go zone where trafficking gangs have more power and command more loyalty than the government.

Amid widespread cynicism about the likelihood of a change of president doing anything to alter this, it's hard to remember that just 12 years ago Mexico celebrated what was billed as its first free and fair presidential election, lauded around the world as a transition to democracy. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) handed over power to historic opponents the National Action Party (PAN), after seven decades of often repressive one-party rule, and that was meant to change everything. Twelve years on, things look so bleak polls show the PRI set to return to power, just seven years after being forced out in disgrace, as Mexicans start to see multiparty democracy itself as a mistake. How did we get here?

The PRI always ruled through a highly centralised, corporativist system that gave them tight control of every sector of society, but especially the rural poor. By providing them with land, infrastructure like paved roads and electricity, and free health and education (usually poor and patchy services, often inaccessible or virtually non-existent, but still better than nothing) they expected unswavering electoral loyalty. Local politicians and landowners would ensure the inhabitants voted in the correct way, and threaten them with expulsion from their land or worse if they did not. They did resort to classic dictatorship tactics when opposition voices got too loud - torture, disappearance, burning villages - but they mostly held on through a mix of people's fear and resignation.

The PAN has a very different electoral base - the newly rich middle classes who drive Hummers and send their children to private universities in the US, and aren't afraid to deride the rural poor as uneducated 'Indians' - but their tactics in winning over poorer voters have shown a familiar mix of bribery and intimidation. They have also presided over a catalogue of human rights abuses as egregious as anything the PRI did - these get far less international coverage than the drug story, but hundreds have died. The best reported have been the 2006 massacre of protesters - angry local street sellers who had been banned from a municipal market in San Salvador Atenco near Mexico City - and the harsh police response to the six month long teachers' strike in Oaxaca in the same year (dozens of teachers and activists were killed when the army opened fire on demonstrators), but there have been many others. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both put Mexico as Latin America's worst human rights offender - and they report the state is using the 'war on drugs' as cover to suppress dissent, especially in Chiapas near the Guatemalan border, which is both a hive of trafficking activity and the home base of the Zapatista movement.

The Zapatistas' five municipalities are run autonomously, rejecting all interference from the federal government, and when I visited last week reisdents had plenty of stories of being repeatedly stopped, searched and beaten by troops claiming to be looking for drugs, and armed incursions into the villages themselves, with soldiers burning the houses and killing livestock. The PAN is not responsible for all this - in many parts of the country, the PRI control over the campesinos was never broken, and it is PRI local governors and officials who mete out the same punishments for dissent that they have always done.

That is partly why they are set to return to power. The other reason is that the collapsing national security situation of the last 12 years has convinced many voters that not only has the PAN failed them, the whole idea of switching parties has been a mistake, and it would be better to have the country run with an iron fist than descending into utter chaos. The PRI candidate, Enrique Pena Nieto, is riding high in the polls despite being at least as good at generating mocking headlines as any US Republican - he recently could not name three books he had read when being interviewed at a literary festival, and his daughter was caught on tape referring to voters as plebs.

This might seem internationally unimportant - but Mexico matters. Aside from being the source of probably the world's biggest law and order problem (which can't be tackled in Europe and the US if it isn't tackled at the source) it is a big country and a big economy, in a very strategic location. We should be giving more international news space to this depressing state of affairs.

Policy making in the last chance saloon

This post was originally published on my France24 blog on January 30th 2012.

There were headline grabbing annoucements, even if little in them was new - a rise in VAT to pay for a cut in the cost of hiring employees, a financial transactions tax, plans to force big companies to provide a certain number of apprenticeships for young people. There were the fawning interviewers eschewing the tough questions in favour of asking if he plans on writing a book. There was the appropriately presidential setting - a grandiose theatre, framed by the French flag, dignified enough for an interview asserting its dominance of the French airwaves, on as many as 15 channels at once. There was the patrician tone 'When one is President of the Republic, one has certain responsibilities'.

But there were also the tell-tale signs of nerves, the fiddling with the tie, the unsubtle avoidance of tricky questions. There was a man choosing to hide in numbers and obscure fiscal policy detail where once he had an unrivalled line in speaking directly to ordinary voters. There were even apologies, sitting awkwardly with the pomp and grandeur of a sitting French President. And there was no killer blow - nothing likely to grab a floating voter and pull them back into the centre-right fold. Even the commentators who back Nicolas Sarkozy are muted in their praise this morning, trying to turn misses into hits - le Figaro's editorial tries to make a virtue of unpopularity, saying that the VAT rise may not be vote winner, but it's the right thing to do, whereas les Echos says it might work - as long as the French are thinking less about getting to the end of the month, and more about their children's job prospects in five years. Given the state of the economy, few bets are less safe. There are also major doubts over tactics being voiced within the right - Prime Minister François Fillon was reported last week as saying that if Sarkozy does not declare he is definitely a candidate within two weeks, he will lose - and he again failed to do so on Sunday night. Even Le Figaro seems to think that the strategy of painting himself as too busy running the country to worry about a silly election is wearing thin with the French.

Then there's his record - from which even right-leaning magazie l'Express found it difficult to pick out many high points in a special issue last week, in the end concluding the intervention in Libya was his greatest achievement - something that would probably never had happened, as a colleague pointed out to me earlier, if he hadn't needed to make up for having courted Gaddafi in the early part of his presidency. If he can't run by showing off the record of the last five years, then, he also can't run away from it - and so has instead opted for apologising for it, telling interviewers last night he recognised he had made mistakes. That's about as far from the traditional attitude of a French president as it's possible to get - and Le Monde reported at the weekend that more apologies may be to come, including a mea culpa for exhibiting his private life to paparazzi when he first married Carla Bruni in 2007 - something most voters found undignified and they probably won't take kindly to being reminded of. Le Monde called this the desperation of a man who knows he's about to lose - and with his poll ratings in the doldrums, it's hard to argue with that. Last week he made the headlines not for any policy annoucement - but for an off-the-cuff remark that he would retire from politics if he loses the election. I'm trying not to tempt fate, but if his campaign continues like this, it seems it can only be a matter of time.