Tomorrow the French go to the polls for the first round of the municipal elections. The poster to the right is of Mohamed Latrèche, a Muslim running for mayor of Strasbourg on the PMF party (Party of the Muslims of France). He stands for “real change” (le vrai changement). Gaëlle Mann, a most useful French website, asks:

Is it normal in a “laic” country (where Church and State are separate), for a purely religious party such as the PMF to vie for the votes of the electorate?

A reader offers an answer:

Of course, dear Gaëlle, it is perfectly normal for a Muslim religious party to present candidates in the election, since we live in a “laic” country. On the other hand it would be abnormal for a Catholic religious party to present candidates, since we live in a “laic” country.

Another poster that you can view at the website lists the urgent demands of the PMF party:

•    A Muslim cemetery with perpetual rights. The eventual elimination of a tomb considered by Muslims to be a profanation. [Note: In France and other continental European countries cemeteries are only temporary. They are bulldozered over after 50 years. If the families want the dead reburied they have to pay. Most families do not care.]
•    A school for girls who are deprived of an education by the liberty-killing law on headscarves
•    Halal meals in school cafeterias, hospitals, etc...
•    Dignified places of worship responding to the needs of the Muslims of Strasbourg
•    Special schedules at swimming pools for Muslim girls

 
Another article from Gaëlle Mann discloses that nude photos of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy have been published in the April 2008 edition of GQ magazine (Anglo-American version) two weeks before the official visit to England by the French president and his wife. The couple will be the guests of the Queen of England from March 26 to 28.

If you click the link above you can see three of the photos. Be advised they are suggestive. GQ magazine captions one of the photos with these words: “The proof, if proof was needed, that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac: look at Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the phenomenal love of the French president. Do the same, Laura Bush!”

Carla is supposed to have defended herself by saying that the photos were taken before her relations with the president were officially announced, but Gaëlle Mann points out that some of them came after the announcement, and that in any case, it hardly changes anything.

If you want more about Carla, and her insights on men, turn to this article in the Daily Mail (also containing nudity) about how she dislikes the French and has a preference for short men – like Napoleon: “The French are miserable but Sarkozy's my Napoleon.” The interview in which she made the remarks was given shortly before she met Sarkozy. She also indicates that she does not vote in French elections, because she is Italian, despite having lived in France all her life. It has been reported that she will not be voting in this Sunday’s first round of municipal elections even though, as the president's wife, she has the right to do so.

If there is a connecting thread in all of this it is the character of Nicolas Sarkozy himself. His second wife, Cecilia Ciganer-Albeniz, said in an interview a few years before he became president, that she was proud not to have a drop of French blood in her. Cecilia, in addition, made headlines when she did not vote in the first round of the presidential election. Her love affairs, too, have made world headlines. She, like Carla, has a musical background and is a classical pianist. Carla is a singer-songwriter (see her perform here) and has recently released a new album. The physical similarity between the two women has been noted by many.

So Sarkozy has never really married a Frenchwoman (his first wife was Corsican). He has chosen exotic women of mixed foreign heritage, women who dislike France, who become known as “femmes fatales,” women who are far to the Left politically, who have no interest in voting in French elections, who have no real interest in being First Lady of France, in the traditional sense of the term.

Another article from Gaëlle Mann explains the drop in Sarkozy’s popularity and the corresponding rise in that of Prime Minister François Fillon:

Why the devil is François Fillon so high in the polls, since anger over buying power, for example, should be directed as much at him as at the president? Because he does not expose his private life no doubt. Because he behaves like a prime minister, while the president, in the eyes of the public, is often out of line with their idea of what a chief executive should be. But also because the voters on the Left, who constitute a huge 41%, have confidence in the prime minister. Or say they do. Everything points to a situation where, in the game of the polls, the French are artificially helping Fillon to rise in order to punish Sarkozy for having disappointed them.

It is amusing to recall that shortly after he was elected president Nicolas Sarkozy was so popular no one remembered who the prime minister was or even if there was a prime minister! A reversal of fortune, indeed.

Meanwhile France is rapidly changing. “Le vrai changement” can be seen in an article posted at the Salon Beige
blog, using the paper publication Présent as its source. It tells the unhappy story of the Islamization of the French countryside:

Hérouville, in the department of Calvados, is now one of the suburbs of Caen. And the largest one. A simple village in the early 1960s it has gone from fewer than 2000 inhabitants to more than 25,000 in less than fifteen years. The cause of this “miracle”? The arrival en masse of immigrant families from North and sub-Saharan Africa. There is the new city. […] And the old village, known as Le Bourg, where the Norman patrimony is guarded: Saint-Clair church (11th century), Saint-Vincent chapel (a vestige from the 13th century of an annex to the Abbey of Ardenne), the castle of Beauregard.
 
To these witnesses of the Franco-Norman era, we must now add a mosque... Run by the Islamic and Cultural Association of Calvados, a member of the UOIF (Union of Islamic Organizations of France). A mosque that is now being added to the one in Caen and to that of Ifs (operated by the Turkish community). A minaret just like the ones back home. Four classrooms (where courses in Arabic and the Koran will be given). A library, shops, a prayer room measuring 300 square meters, a course of study in Islam centering on Saudi-style wahhabism, a kitchen, offices, a reading room, a computer room, a room for ablutions.

All this just 2 kilometers from Caen, the Norman capital of William the Conqueror...