French candidate stirs up patriotic storm

An off-the-cuff remark by Norwegian-born presidential candidate Eva Joly has plunged France into a four-day orgy of patriotic moralising and political name-calling.

Why, asked the official Green candidate, does France insist on celebrating its national day with a military parade? How can tanks and fighter-bombers represent the republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity? Why not have a "citizens' parade" on Bastille Day instead, she argued?

Joly's remarks initially provoked indignation from rival politicians of both right and left, who said her comments were insensitive as last Thursday's parade came the day after six French soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.

Then the centre-right Prime Minister, Francois Fillon, set off another political depth charge.

He recalled that Joly, 67, had come to France from Norway as an au pair in 1963. Her comments, he said, proved that she had "not been steeped for very long in French traditions, French values and French history". In other words, Joly, the official Green-Europe Ecology candidate in next year's election, was not truly French.

Cue another explosion of indignation from politicians of the left.

Fillon, normally a moderate and cautious man, was, they said, invading the xenophobic territory of the far right.

To suggest that foreign-born French citizens were "un-French" was to trample on French republican values.

The Socialist Party leader, and presidential candidate, Martine Aubry, said that if she was already President, she would have fired Fillon for remarks which were "not clumsy, but shameful".

The row entered its fourth day yesterday, leading all news bulletins and newspapers. Other ministers came to Fillon's defence and junior members of the governing centre-right party plunged into outright anti-Norwegianism.

Lionel Tardy, a centre-right member of Parliament, said: "It's time for Eva Joly to go back to Norway."

Joly was once a tenacious and much-feared investigating magistrate in France but is an inexperienced politician.

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