The next Prime Minister will surely be the leader of Spain’s other major party, the right-wing Partido Popular (commonly translated as “People’s Party”), Mariano Rajoy, to the point that Rajoy has already started issuing messages (e.g. “Give us a break!”) meant for the European financial establishment. But there’s another area of policy (among many, admittedly) where he has held strict radio silence:

Espagne : mariages gays express sur le Web avant les élections http://t.co/FMHPonil

November 18, 2011 8:36 pm via dlvr.itReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

That’s right: Strict old, conservative Spain actually turned out to be rather progressive back in 2005, when it approved homosexual marriage. (Actually, not only that, but also gay couple adoption and inheritance rights to same-sex partners.) But that was when the Socialists were in power. Would the conservative People’s Party – especially if it comes in with the expected landslide – repeal that? After all, at the time they did vote against the 2005 laws pretty much en bloc.

As this article from Le Monde shows, many thousands of Spanish gays are not willing to take that chance. So it turns out that this very weekend is an especially festive and happy one there on the Iberian Peninsula as the number of marriages is WAY above normal. Well OK: maybe rather “festive” and “happy,” considering the constrained circumstances – but in all cases certainly “gay.”

“But how can Spain’s marriage infrastructure handle this rat-through-the-python bulge in demand”? you might be asking. (OK, maybe you wouldn’t particularly use “marriage infrastructure.”) One thing that is helping a lot is a high-tech innovation from the small Andalusian village of Jun, near Granada, whose mayor, José Antonio Rodriguez, has set up a system for marrying people on-line. It only takes five days; you don’t actually have to visit there; and apparently you’ll be completely, legally married afterwards. Rodriguez says that, whereas Jun had only eleven same-sex marriages in all of 2010, it now does fifty per week.

Who knows? Maybe that same sort of solution is for you – IF you share that particular sexual preference, have arranged a willing partner to join you in conjugal bliss, and know at least a little bit of Spanish. You can follow Mayor Rodriguez on Twitter at @alcaldejun (38,180 followers when last I looked!).

                          

Many commentators – rightly, and including the Le Monde editorial board itself – had seen Putin’s end-of-September announcement that he would run for (and therefore win) re-instatement as president in 2012 as taking Russian political development back to the Brezhnev era, if not even back to the time of the Czars. Not so, said Medvedev yesterday on Russian television – it is “something else . . . a means to resolve the challenges we have set for ourselves.” So he’s fine with missing out on the chance to “run” for the second presidential term he himself is entitled to under the Russian constitution.

On the other hand – surprise! – he’s not happy with the current state of Russian government:

I’ve been a lawyer, and I thought that I knew very well how the state apparatus works. I was mistaken, things are much more difficult and in a certain way more frightening. That’s why we must think about how to change the system of managing the State.

Aha, so there at least is a note of dissension! But note that this comes after he admits that he has only around one year left as president, and hasn’t even indicated what political function – if any – he will fulfill after that. Medvedev’s term in office has been chock-full of ambitious pronouncements like this – that Russia must be more investment-friendly, more subject to the rule of law, etc. – that came to nothing. This is certainly just one more.

                          

Le Monde provides a perspective, in an unsigned article (Libya, a political objective now uncertain for L’Elysée). Put simply, it’s something akin to buyer’s remorse. France was looking forward to a glorious “big brother” role with the assistance it provided the rebels, one that would go far towards erasing – so officials hoped – her rather ugly colonial history in the area. Most of all, though, this was supposed to be short and sweet, something – in the words of Juppé back in March – that was to “be calculated in days or weeks – certainly not in months.”

Well, now it is months later, and the fighting is still going on. The rebels do seem to be making some sort of progress, yet it still seems doubtful that they can take full control before the onset of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan on 1 August complicates their efforts considerably.

According to the article, Sarkozy had a somewhat earlier date in mind for a rebel victory: 14 July, or Bastille Day, just two days away, when the usual parade of military hardware down the Champs Elysées could be spiffed up considerably on the wave of a cut-and-dried successful military campaign. But that certainly will not happen, and meanwhile Le Monde reports how the French president recently changed his mind from a trip across the Mediterranean to go visit the rebels’ self-styled Libyan Republic and opted to visit actual French troops in Afghanistan instead.

At least Sarkozy has just confronted the issue of submitting his military operations to approval of the legislature rather better than Barack Obama has done, and indeed has gained renewed votes of support for Libya actions from the Assemblée and the Senate, when there were fears that this was not certain. But the fighting goes on, and perhaps it should not be so surprising that the French should start lowering their standards for how they think it should end, as long as it does so quickly.

                          

Bush “not overjoyed” by Osama news: “I don’t rejoice at the death of another person, especially one I couldn’t find.”

May 13, 2011 4:41 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@BorowitzReport

Andy Borowitz

Careful, Mr. President! You shouldn’t be saying things like that – you’ll sound like the French!

Un crime parfait http://lemde.fr/l5TC2a

May 13, 2011 2:03 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

You read that right: Christian Salmon of the French government’s research institute CNRS, writing in Le Monde, goes so far as to call the operation that dispatched Bin Ladin “a perfect crime,” according to the definition of philosopher Jean Baudrillard:

[A] crime whose authors are anonymous, whose narrative is impossible, whose body is unfindable, and for which all pieces of evidence have disappeared in the Pakistani night, even while it was filmed by cameras mounted on commando’s helmets and followed directly by the American executive. Invisible target. Invisible execution. Invisible cadaver. A veritable black hole in the mediasphere.

He’s sort of suspicious of what the Americans claim to have happened, you could say. It’s like something out of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter (but the French were always particularly fond of Poe). Even then, the Americans failed to smash that Osama Bin Laden myth of the lone cave-dwelling fighter, “who appears and disappears as he likes, taunting the greatest world power, an Arabian Clint Eastwood, a Muslim Robin Hood who claims to avenge the Palestinian people’s suffering.” Fundamentalists are ready to rename the Arabian Sea as the “Martyr’s Sea,” for heaven’s sake!

Similarly Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer of King’s College, London, also writing in Le Monde, is not very impressed by the Abottabad operation:

Tuer l’ennemi public numéro 1, est-ce “rendre justice”? http://lemde.fr/lZQWgY

May 13, 2011 2:03 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

President Obama, in his televised announcement, declared that “justice has been done.” Vilmer: “That’s surprising: if it was enough to kill him to do justice for the victims [of Al-Qaeda], why did they claim to want to arrest him?” Actually, Vilmer does not for a moment believe that the SEAL Team 6 commandos had any other orders than to kill. Bin Laden wasn’t armed; there was no return fire during that raid. No, it was far easy to kill him than to deal with all the issues having a live Osama Bin Laden on their hands would entail, including arguments over the death penalty and the possibility of retaliatory hostages being taken.

To use an Israeli term, then, this was a “targeted assasination.” But that’s OK – there’s no problem with such a concept for any country that does still practice capital punishment. France, however, does not do that, and has not done so for thirty years. Ultimately, Vilmer is disappointed not so much with Obama – as in, that’s the Americans, what can you expect? – as he is with his own leaders (Sarkozy, Foreign Minister Juppé) who were quick to echo the American president’s assertion that justice had been served. If one claims to remain true to French ideals, he wants to say, it’s not possible to be glad at Bin Laden’s death, one must rather regret that what really was constituted as an assasination squad through its actions made any true justice impossible.

                          

Portrait du “docteur” Zawahiri, le successeur potentiel de Ben Laden http://lemde.fr/jWKbaC

May 5, 2011 8:56 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

Anyway, Doctor, for as long as you are still around and in-line to head the Al-Qaeda organization – and keep in mind that two of your operatives have already been killed recently in Yemen by unmanned drones (link in Danish) – let’s take a look at this examination of your background, thoughtfully provided by Le Monde.

Firstly, for this visual age of ours it’s important to have a “grip & grin”-type photo together with the predecessor, as a token that he at least regarded the subject as a decent jihadi sort of fellow. Check! (True: there’s no “grip” in the picture provided here, and for that matter also very little “grin”; I think those things are probably un-Islamic.) In good newspaper-style, though, author Cécile Hennion cuts right to the essentials of why Zawahiri is the best bet to succeed Osama Bin Laden in her very first paragraph:

“Doctor” Zawahiri, with an Egyptian degree in surgery, is considered the ideologist of Al-Qaeda and the “brain” behind the September 11, 2001 attacks. He has for a long time been Osama Bin Laden’s principal lieutenant and personal doctor.

Curious, then, that he wasn’t present at that Abottabad compound during that deadly raid last Monday morning (local Punjabi time). Nonetheless, he suffers no shortage of terrorist bona fides. For instance, after Osama Bin Laden came back to his native Saudi Arabia a hero from fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, but then had to flee the country due to his anti-regime agitation, it was initially only the House of Saud that he swore to lead a jihad against. Zawahiri, who first met him in Afghanistan, convinced him to widen his target to all “apostate regimes of the Muslim world.” The Doctor was also behind the fatwa of the late 1990s which declared that it was the responsibility of all good Muslims to kill Americans and their allies.

Fundamentally, though, where Bin Laden himself was Saudi, Zawahiri is Egyptian, having been born in 1951 in a Cairo suburb to a family of the “high bourgeoisie.” And it’s in Egypt that he started becoming all fanatical and everything. He was close to Sayyid Qutb, the leading radical Islamist thinker and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who spent most of his time in prison from the time he (Qutb, that is) was 48, in 1954, until he was finally hanged by the Egyptian authorities, after a proper show-trial, in 1966.

Apparently the 15-year-old Ayman Zawahiri was present at his trial and execution. That would be embittering enough, but what really drove him off the deep end was his own period in Egyptian jails, from his arrest in 1981 in the wake of the Sadat assassination (in which his Islamic Jihad organization was certainly involved) until 1984 – maybe only three years but replete with torture and other abuse. Once he was out, he got himself promptly out of the country, and thereafter never ceasing to plot the overthrow of Egyptian leaders, in particular Hosni Mubarak, who barely escaped an assassination attempt set up by Zawahiri’s men on a visit to Addis Ababa in 1995.

Of course, we now know that a people’s revolution, led mostly by the young and employing peaceful protests and non-violent resistance, would do the job of toppling Mubarak for him in early 2011, to the point where the ex-Egyptian president might soon be on trial for his very life. That’s one irony here. Another is the rocket-propelled supercharging applied to Zawahiri’s terroristic motivations by the three years he spent being tortured in Egyptian jails. Anyone here remember a place called Guantánamo?

An additional interesting note: A blurb at the bottom lets us know that the essential bits of this piece were actually published already in the Le Monde issue of 9 September 2009, so that that article was just slightly re-worked to reflect recent developments and published again today. This news-recycling must surely reflect the Green Movement’s growing influence in Europe!

                          

This quite excellent article – structured as a moderated chat in which names like “Mazen,” “hakan,” “Jack,” and “Heisenberg”* pose a series of questions – is pretty much a one-stop briefing on what is going on over there and the historical background that has led events to this pass.

Ah, but it’s also exclusively in French – being Le Monde and all that – but I’m glad to help you out with the main points, among which:

• It was always unrealistic to assume that Syria could somehow avoid this wave of unrest sweeping through the Arab world from its origin last January in Tunisia. Indeed, the country probably offers the closest resemblance of all to the 1980s Soviet Union: that the Ba’ath Party is the sole governing party allowed was established back in the 1973 constitution, but today it stands for nothing other than a cynical clientelism – it is merely “a superstructure without true ideological content.” The economy is in a similar state, since everything was nationalized back in the 1960s, so now everything is inefficient, uncompetitive internationally, and staffed on the basis of politics and patronage, not competence.
  
• Added to that, “[s]ince 1963 Syria has lived under a state-of-emergency regime which permits the security services to intervene at all times and with practically no control in the public and private affairs of the population.” Yes – since 1963! Abolishing that state-of-emergency tops the list of the demonstrators’ demands, along with freeing political prisoners and doing something about the widespread corruption.
  
• But note that there’s nothing in there about Islamic-type goals (nor, for that matter, about toppling the regime – at least not as of yet). Further, the demonstrations have occurred not only spontaneously (i.e. not at the instigation of any existing political organization) but uniformly peacefully – at least on the part of the demonstrators themselves, as opposed to the police/military forces that have been sent against them.
  
• Ironically, that state-of-emergency is not likely to be abolished anytime soon, as the regime makes full use of it to try to beat down the protests!
  
• The 1973 constitution does provide for a vice-president who could succeed President Assad – in fact there are currently no less than two of them. But Assad will never step down voluntarily, because his government is essentially a family affair and his family won’t ever let him give up their privileged ruling position in the government and in society.
  
• Daraa – that’s some town down near the Jordanian border that no one had ever heard of previously. Why did the unrest start there? For one thing, Daraa has always been poor, but its economic situation is even worse these days after four years of drought, as it is stuffed with poor farmers whom the drought has driven off of their land in the countryside. Plus Daraa apparently has a larger-than-usual contingent of young men who earlier fought against the American-led occupation forces in Iraq – and whom the Syrian regime has dealt with by throwing them into prison. The regime also threw into prison a bunch of even-younger people (16 and below) whom policemen caught writing anti-government graffiti on the walls – in fact, they were taken all the way to Damascus to a prison notorious for the torture practiced there. Apparently most have now been released and returned to their parents in Daraa, but with plentiful signs of such torture on their bodies.
  
• Allies and enemies: There are all sorts of countries in that area nervous about what they see going on in Syria. That country’s leading ally is probably Iran, which relies on the current Syrian government to allow it to ship weapons to its Hezbollah client in Lebanon. Other allies are Algeria, Libya (i.e. the Qaddafi regime), and Qatar. But Israel is also nervous: although it is by no means Syria’s ally, under Assad the Syrian front has at least been quiet and predictable. The Israelis are very nervous that that could be about to change.
  
• So what is going to happen? The title of this piece gives it away – our answer-man believes that, sooner or later, the Assad regime is toast. However, he is more skeptical that there will ever be any international intervention there, no matter what outrages the government perpetrates against its own people. That is no surprise, considering that Israel is after all a next-door neighbor and occupies territory that used to be Syrian – still, he does not rule intervention out entirely. (You like “no fly zones” and “no drive zones” in Libya? You’ll LOVE them in Syria!)
  

Darn – and they’re such informative answers, too! So do we forget about them? I leave that decision to you.

* Heisenberg, it turns out, stands particularly in need of this sort of expert country assistance, since whenever he thinks he has a good sense of where Syria is now, he completely loses track of where the country is going, and vice-versa!

                          

Hardly. An interesting article today in Le Monde (no by-line) indicates that they’ve taken up a new target, not really Wikileaks-related and ordinarily so off-the-map in geopolitics terms as to usually never attract attention: Tunisia, specifically its government. A couple days ago I twittered in this space about “Trouble in Tunisia,” basically some violent police-student confrontations in a mid-sized city off to the west, near the Algerian border. But this Le Monde article shows that I didn’t even know the half of it. (Probably fortunately for me at the time: I had only 140 characters to work with!)

I know: “Who cares about Tunisia? I probably couldn’t even point it out to you on a map!” Well, from today’s piece there are at least three noteworthy tidbits that come to the surface:

1. Facebook Rules: The Empire of Zuckerberg definitely has succeeded in setting up a firm outpost here at the northern tip of Africa. Tunisia is a smallish country, with a 10 million population – but 2 million of those people have Facebook accounts! (In Arabic overwhelmingly – tricky for keyboard input, as it’s read from right-to-left – although there are French-speakers as well from the colonial legacy.) Apart from the natural appeal arising from the opportunity for social media use, Facebook is mainly attractive to Tunisians because it’s one communication medium they have that is not watched like a hawk by the government.
   
2. Great Firewall of Tunisia: Not that that government doesn’t put out the effort (specifically, the censorship officials, known as “Ammar”). It’s actually striking how similar the repressive Internet policy employed by those authorities is to the famed “Great Firewall of China”: there’s a similar filter in place at the national cyber-borders that acts to keep out content from blacklisted sites (including YouTube and Dailymotion) as well as content from anywhere containing certain keywords indicating “terrorism,” pornography, and the like. Indeed, back in 2008 the authorities set about simply blocking Facebook as well, but the article says the Tunisian President, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, intervened to stop it.
   
   

   He may have regretted that just last month, when a young sidewalk fruit-and-vegetable vendor in Sidi Bouzid (another Tunisian city, in the center of the country) actually set himself on fire (and eventually died) in protest at what he saw as unfair government confiscation of his goods. That set off demonstrations all over the country, naturally coordinated via Facebook, and with a wildly-popular Facebook group with the snappy name (translated) “Mr. President, Tunisians are setting themselves on fire!” as cherry on the cake. Naturally, the Ammar swung into action against Facebook again, proceeding to block access but not after (it is alleged) shutting down and/or defacing individual accounts through somehow getting their passwords.
   

3. Here Comes Anonymous: And so we have Anonymous back in action here, in response to all this cyberabuse. What that has meant concretely is that over the past few days it’s been impossible to access virtually any official Tunisian government website, and that of a major bank there, Banque Zitouna, as well. Check that: they’ve either been completely inaccessible or they’ve been “accessible” where all that you see at the URL is a calling-card splash-screen from Anonymous.
   

                          

Writing in Le Monde, Marion Solletty takes yet another cut at what this latest move by Google means:

. . . the star of Silicon Valley feels itself under threat. Its vital forces, the engineers who fine-tuned its mysterious algorithms, are leaving it. With the eye of a connoisseur they have watched the sparkling rise of the new stars of the Web, the social networks. And they respond to the call of the bold.

Search, and text ads, and YouTube videos: all that is just so yesterday, man, just so . . . 2008, you know! And then following directly comes the anecdote of Cedric Beust (with a suspiciously French name!), a six-year Google employee who now has left to join LinkedIn.

What goes around, comes around. According to Solletty, Google first stocked itself with quality personnel by raiding the leading Internet-related firms of its own period of skyrocketing growth. Now it’s the turn of others, including especially Facebook, whose employee total has gone from 1,000 to 1,700 within the past year (although it has had its own top-level defections), or Twitter, which has tripled from 100 employees to 300 in that same period.

Ironically, Google’s latest salary-move did cost it one employee. The internal company message announcing it (“CONFIDENTIAL: INTERNAL ONLY”), and lauding employees as “the best in the world,” was soon leaked to an industry blog so we could all savor the message, at least vicariously. But he who did the leakin’ was fired.

UPDATE: It’s worse for Google than we thought! TechCrunch now has this piece about a Google engineer threatening to leave to join Facebook and getting $3.5 million in stock to stay!

                          

The result: Even as the masses out on the streets shriek NO! the government goes ahead with “Yes” – and this in a liberal democracy. Of course, things are actually not quite so clear-cut as that. All the people out demonstrating often make an impressive sight, but do they really represent the political will of the majority of France’s citizens? And even if they do: France is not a direct democracy where the people vote directly on laws – no modern society is a direct democracy – but rather a representative democracy, where according to one section of the rules of the game (somewhere; I believe it’s in Aristotle) the elected law-makers do have the right to go against the will of their constituents if they believe doing so better serves the nation. And it would seem raising the retirement age from what is financially a completely unsustainable age to one slightly less unsustainable qualifies.

Ah, but even as the Assemblée Nationale and French Senate undertake to do so, they make a mess of it. For while they were passing this retirement reform, they chose not to pass amendment 249 – that’s the one that would have subjected their own even-more-generous lawmakers’ pension system to the same conditions they were about to impose on everyone else’s!

Pretty outrageous, no? (Then again, the US Congress also almost routinely exempts itself from the laws it passes for the rest of the country.) I heard about this little bit of chicanery in the first place from an editorial in today’s Le Monde: You’re making me take to the streets – me, a moderate! It’s written by one Gregory Kapustin, who calls himself an “entrepreneur” and “former moderate.” (Check out his public LinkedIn page!) His message is basically expressed in his title; the actual article fills in the details about how, yes, he understands why pensions must be reformed, and he wishes the French nation would grow up and face the real world of globalization – but really, in exempting themselves the legislators have simply gone too far with their cynicism and he’ll be off to join the nearest street-demonstration. (With gasoline, bottle, and rag-stuffing in hand? He doesn’t say; he still seems to be too much of a professional dude to go that far.)

One can gain a similar feel for what he is fed up with from another article, from Le Point: Sarkozy will take some time to reflect on the situation after retirement reform. The lede:

Nicolas Sarkozy declared on Friday that he will announce when “the time is ripe” for initiatives in response to the French people’s worries and that he first intends to “take some time” to reflect on them.

As becomes clear as the article goes on, however, don’t expect him to start that thinking anytime soon, he’s a busy man. The Chinese president will be visiting Paris soon, then it’s off to Seoul for the G20 summit. Sarkozy made it clear that, when it comes to addressing the concerns of his countrymen he won’t “confuse speed with haste” but will take “time to reflect serenely, calmly, profoundly.” Hey – merci bien, monsieur le président! I bet your own pension is rather more generous than that of the man-on-the-street as well!

                          

Then there is the report by Anne Michel in Le Monde, also cited in the FT Alphaville round-up. Why is everyone so stressed about these “stress tests”? Mainly because banks can only “pass” them or “fail” them, and failure could carry a high price in terms of loss of investor confidence, for starters. Indeed, the impact is likely to be even greater than it was for the ten banks (out of nineteen tested) which “failed” during the American “stress test” exercise carried out back in May, 2009, for banks that fail by definition need recapitalization and there is a dwindling number of European governments still able to provide that. It’s notable, as Mme. Michel points out, that European authorities have staged such “stress tests” twice before, namely dry runs in August of 2009 and April of this year with a more limited selection of banks, whose results have never been made public.

But this time it’s serious, and all results will be released publicly. Naturally, everyone would love to jump the gun and get word of at least some of the results before they’re released to the unwashed masses (there’s potentially money to be made, for one thing). Mme. Michel does her best to oblige. It looks like all the French banks involved – namely BNP Paribas, Société générale, Crédit agricole and BPCE – have passed the test. Indeed, the failures are expected to come only from the usual suspect nations: Spain, Greece, and Portugal. Oh, and Germany, too – but the one German laggard is likely to be the Hypo Real Estate Bank, which already got into so much trouble back in 2008 that the German government fully nationalized it. (Note that this last bit does not come from Mme. Michel’s article, but from another of my on-line sources.)

Going back to the star banking pupils from France, such seeming across-the-board success inevitably raises questions as to the stress tests’ legitimacy. The article does go into some detail about how the tests’ parameters have been toughened up to include some degree of sovereign debt default, placed on top of a posited recession of 3% negative economic growth lasting over a year-and-a-half. But will this go far enough to convince the markets that all this has been a worthwhile, bona fide exercise? That is probably what most EU officials and bank executives are stressed-out about most of all.