Friday, February 16, 2007

Psst. Don't let this get around, but...

I'm voting for Sarkozy:

PARIS, Feb 16, 2007 (AFP) - The rarefied world of France's intellectual elite is in ferment after several well-known philosophers publicly deserted the Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal -- one saying he is "aghast at the state of the left".

Traditionally hostile to the political right, the Latin Quarter salon set has been at daggers drawn since one of its leading members -- former Maoist Andre Glucksmann -- wrote an article two weeks ago in Le Monde newspaper entitled "Why I choose Nicolas Sarkozy".

Glucksmann, who in the 1970s was co-founder of the influential New Philosophy movement, said that the right-wing interior minister and favourite in the April-May election alone represents France's tradition of anti-totalitarian humanism.

....Alain Finkielkraut, who teaches at the elite Ecole Polytechnique and has a radio show on the highbrow France-Culture radio station, said he felt solidarity with Glucksmann "in the face of the hatred that his support for Sarkozy has excited" and described Royal as "manifestly incompetent."

"I am aghast by the current state of the left. I can only observe that the Socialist party is in a coma," Finkielkraut said, and he described a PS tract which depicted Sarkozy as an "American neoconservative with a French passport" as a "slip into fascism".

Pascal Bruckner, another "New Philosopher" and author of the recent book "Must one be ashamed of being French?", said he had initially liked Royal but was put off when her partner, PS leader Francois Hollande, said that "I do not like the rich".

"I do not like the hypocrisy of Socialists who got rich under (late president Francois) Mitterrand," he said.

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