As a movie hero, Joan of Arc has it all over Jesus. Where Christ always
seems to invite wan piety, Joan provokes unashamed, enthusiastic love, and
it’s not hard to see why. Christ’s passive acceptance of suffering is a lot
less appealing (and a lot less dramatic) than Joan’s courage and
rebelliousness. You don’t have to believe she was a divine messenger to be
amazed by her victories, but if you don’t accept Christ as the son of God,
what you’re left with is pretty masochistic.
In movies alone, Joan has been the subject of Victor Fleming’s 1948 film
with Ingrid Bergman, who also starred in Roberto Rossellini’s unwatchable 1954 film
of Arthur Honegger’s oratorio “Joan of Arc at the Stake”; Otto
Preminger’s 1957 version of George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan,” which
marked the debut of Jean Seberg; Robert Bresson’s 1962 “The Trial of
Joan of Arc”; Jacques Rivette’s 1994 “Jeanne la Pucelle,” starring Sandrine
Bonnaire; and the greatest of all Joan films, Carl Dreyer’s 1928 silent
“The Passion of Joan of Arc,” a movie of almost unbearable emotional and
physical intensity. It was certainly too much for Maria Falconetti, who
played Joan — it was her first film and she was so drained by the experience
she never acted again. (I sympathize. I mean no disparagement to say that
Dreyer’s is a great film that I have absolutely no desire to see again.)
For all the reasons Joan has inspired artists, writers, musicians and
filmmakers, none is perhaps as unusual as that of Luc Besson, the French
director of the new international production “The Messenger: The Story of
Joan of Arc.”
For Besson, Joan’s story is an excuse to play with a whole
new set of toys. He got to play with spaceships in “The Fifth Element,”
big guns and explosions in “La Femme Nikita” and “The Professional,”
various undersea geegaws in “The Big Blue,” even the Paris Metro in
“Subway.” In “The Messenger,” Besson lets loose with catapults and flaming
arrows, boiling oil and swords, galloping horses and clanking armor, and a
whole assortment of evil spiked thingies that are smashed — at regular
intervals — into various heads and chests and limbs.
You want the brutality of war? How’s this for an opening: After seeing a pack of wolves
rip the entrails out of war dead, the terrorized child Joan hides in the
closet watching while a soldier impales her older sister on his sword and
then rapes her corpse. Just so we don’t miss the point that the soldiers
are, you know, barbarians, a pair sit in the background watching the assault
as they gnaw meat from a stew they’ve poured over the family dining table.
(That’s a very French definition of barbarism: “Sacri bleu! Zey waste zee
sauce!”)
Which isn’t to suggest that Besson forgets this is a spiritual story. Au
contraire, mon frere. The neat thing is, Joan’s visions allow him to play
with a whole other set of gadgets. His camera and lenses and editing
machine and sound effects team work overtime, producing blinding flashes of
light and solarized color, tilted angles and speeded-up motion,
disorienting shock cuts, even the sight of a sickly looking Christ whose
appearances are heralded by backwards tapes that make him seem less the son
of God than of George Martin.
I’ve never left a Luc Besson movie not thinking that the guy has
Froot Loops for brains, but at least in his last picture, “The Fifth
Element,” they rattled around amusingly. Instead of Besson’s usual empty
image-mongering, that movie showed some genuine zip and invention. Besson’s
vision of a future metropolis where the streets were stacked on top of one
another was the opposite of all the glum dystopias that sprang from “Blade
Runner.” This city, where taxis zoomed between buildings and you could get
lunch from a floating Thai restaurant that came straight to your apartment
window, made the future seem like it might be a hell of a lot of fun, or at
least the craziest mall ever built. Another thing the movie had going for
it was a crazily amusing Milla Jovovich in punk-red hair and
Gaultier-designed surgical bandages as the alien wild child Leeloo,
cackling and growling and spouting some sort of intergalactic gibberish
while she chowed down on roast chicken.
Jovovich married Besson after that film and it was then announced she would star in his Joan of Arc project.
(There seems to be some dispute about whose idea “The Messenger” was;
reportedly Besson was at one time set to produce Kathryn Bigelow’s Joan of
Arc film, which was to star Clare Danes.) But “The Messenger” doesn’t feel like a love poem to
Jovovich (the couple has since separated), or to Joan of Arc, or to anything except his own
status as France’s biggest commercial filmmaker.
Besson is very shrewdly
linking his box-office clout to the adoration of France’s national heroine.
Which would be fine if his approach weren’t entirely self-serving.
“The Messenger” is a truly vulgar movie (and I’ve never described any film
with that word), not just because Besson has taken on Joan’s story with no
feelings of reverence or awe or even much sympathy for her, but because her
story is reduced to an excuse for him to parade himself as Luc Besson, Epic
Filmmaker.
But as filmmakers with aspirations to the epic go, Besson is a runt. The
battle scenes are chaotic and noisy, with the camera whipping here and
there or plunged so close to the action that fake blood periodically
splatters the lens. These sequences are put together with so little basic
grasp of cinematic grammar that you can barely tell what’s happening, who’s
who, or where anyone is in physical relation to anyone else. (The one
exception is a throwaway shot — a blessed moment of stillness — of Joan
standing motionless in the midst of her soldiers rushing to battle.)
Some filmmakers set out to awe you; Besson sets out to assault you. His
wide-screen freneticism bangs you over the head while Eric Serra’s score
sounds as if it were already inside your skull and were pounding its way
out note by overwrought note.
Part of the confusion is surely due to Besson’s decision to shoot almost
the entire movie — dialogue scenes as well as battle scenes — in
close-up. The actors are so close to the lens they appear to be looming over
the first 20 rows of the theater. That is, I’m sure, no sin to such
practiced scenery chewers as John Malkovich (the blandest of scenery
chewers) as Charles VII, the dauphin Joan fights to make king, looking as
if God’s will were a distraction from the important business of cleaning
his fingernails; Faye Dunaway, as Charles’ mother-in-law Yolande, wearing
what appears to be a large brioche on her head; or Dustin Hoffman, in black
cloak, beard and a tone that might be described as stentorian Yiddish, in a
role credited as “Joan’s Conscience,” perhaps because the filmmakers were
embarrassed to list him as what he’s playing: “God.” A pity Hoffman felt no
embarrassment about taking the part.
Jovovich’s face seems all mismatches — a long, slender nose, full
lips, high cheekbones — that combine to make a stunning whole. She’s a
ravishing camera subject, and with her cropped hair and armor, and those
intense green eyes, she’s a captivating image of Joan. But this
role is a killer, demanding almost impossible (and contradictory) reserves
of strength, delicacy and fervor that have to remain clear-headed, and
suffering that cannot be self-righteous. It’s no shame to Jovovich to say
she’s not up to it. And it’s hard to lay much of the blame on her when
Besson, who appears to regard guiding actors as the least of his chores,
has directed her to keep her eyes and nostrils flaring for the entire
performance. She seems so petrified that at first she can barely get out
her lines; it’s simply impossible to imagine this girl inspiring the type
of confidence soldiers need to go into battle.
Besson hasn’t helped Jovovich by suggesting that Joan betrayed God by
killing in order to free France. If you’re not comfortable with making a
film about the glory of war, you should probably stay away from the story
of Joan of Arc (although there is no historical record of Joan killing
anyone, and there are many accounts of her sparing the lives of prisoners). This sop
to contemporary sensibilities makes nonsense of both Joan’s motivation and
her devoutness — her willingness to do what God required of her.
Besson is quoted in the press material as saying, “If she wanted to be a good
Christian, a good person … even if her motivation was good, to have her
country free, it was wrong to participate in the massacres. Thou shalt not
kill — that’s a commandment.” How dare Besson get on his moral high horse
when he’s the one who’s reveled in the gore and bloodshed of battle for two
hours and 21 minutes; after inventing the brutal
rape-murder of Joan’s sister; and, when the story stopped providing battle
sequences, tossing in a scene of Joan being kicked bloody by her guards? He
may not be the first of Joan’s judges, but he is by far the most lame-brained.
Luckily, we don’t have to settle for Besson’s version. “Jeanne la Pucelle
(Joan the Maid),” the legendary French director Jacques Rivette’s two-part
1994 film, has finally been released in this country on video in the
version Rivette himself prepared for the film’s British release. (It runs
just under four hours; the French version runs just under six.)
There’s always a risk of appearing snobbish when you use an art-house film
to berate a big commercial release. And, speaking realistically, “Jeanne la
Pucelle” is not a film that you can imagine ever attracting a large
audience. It’s long, demanding, austere and far, far from flawless. But Rivette, one of the Cahiers du Cinema critics who spearheaded the
French New Wave, is also a giant among living filmmakers. And I can’t help
feeling that there’s something a little obscene when a director of his
stature makes an epic film that doesn’t get even a small American release,
while an utterly meretricious film on the same subject gets international
distribution by virtue of its being partly funded by an American studio and cast with American stars. After watching Besson bungle scene after scene,
the unadorned way in which Rivette handled the same moments came into my
head until his movie began to seem like an emotional and stylistic rebuke
to Besson’s excesses.
To explain what Rivette does in the two halves of “Jeanne la Pucelle,” “1.
The Battles” and “2. The Prisons,” I need to describe a little of how he
works. Though Rivette loves narrative and is obsessed with the way in which
stories figure in our lives, it can sometimes seem that very little happens
in his movies. The easiest explanation for their usual three- and four-hour
length is that Rivette is expanding the compressed time in which movies
typically occur to something like real time, allowing us to live with the
characters, to be fully conscious of the moments that, in real life, we
allow to pass by. For me, no director has succeeded in putting as much of
life on screen — perhaps not its dramas, but its textures, gravity, lightness and the inconsequentiality that the day-to-day comprises.
In a superbly articulate piece in Sight and Sound about Rivette’s latest film,
“Secret Defense,” critic Jonathan Romney describes a sequence that
follows Sandrine Bonnaire as she takes a train to another city to kill a
man by commenting, “Just watching her in transit we feel the weight of
everything she experiences.” He could be talking about Bonnaire’s Jeanne.
Rivette’s focus on specifics, his decision to stick closely to the
historical record and the constraints imposed on him by making a film of
this scale with a minuscule budget all combine to give “Jeanne la Pucelle”
an irreducible actuality. Rivette’s film feels as if we are seeing
something that actually happened, less “history” than events that occurred
in the course of real lives.
Shooting (I assume) on location in actual castles and cathedrals, and in parts of the French countryside that,
500 years later, remain unspoiled enough to pass for the 15th
century, Rivette pares the film down to essentials. The effect is simple,
unadorned, at times even static (particularly when Rivette, usually during
scenes at the royal court, arranges his actors in stage-like tableaux).
Finally, the effect is like reading the description Joan gave of her life
at her trial (“Unique among the world’s biographies,” Mark Twain said,
because it is “the only one which comes to us from the witness stand.”)
What moves you is that something so simple and plain could add up to
something so profound. Rivette has no time for the folderol that clutters
up the Besson film: The way he loads each scene with period costuming,
weaponry or decoration; the disastrous idiocy of attempting to film Joan’s
visions as if they were LSD trips (how do you film a vision sent by
God?). Rivette allows nothing to get in the way of the events themselves,
and his bare-bones approach works wonders. That Jeanne’s army seems to
consist of only 20 or so men really does make her victories seem like a
miracle.
Bonnaire styles her acting to suit Rivette’s approach. With her
hard, sullen little face, she has sometimes seemed inexpressive, and it
would be easy to make that mistake here. There’s no charm, no charisma in
her Jeanne. But charm and charisma would be absolutely extraneous to a
young peasant girl who believes she has been charged by God and must
convince men far more powerful than she is to believe it, too.
Bonnaire’s extraordinarily disciplined performance is motivated by the
force of Jeanne’s contained determination. And because she never loses her
conviction that she has been chosen to save France, the contrasting moments
stand out in stark relief. Bonnaire conveys a radiant gratitude when she
drops to her knees before Charles, moments after he has been crowned king,
and proclaims that God’s will has been carried out. But her best moment may
be the one in which she comprehends fully what the cost of carrying out
God’s will may be, opening her mouth in silent shock — half pain, half
martyred ecstasy — as she is wounded for the first time.
“Jeanne le Pucelle” contains none of the sunny playfulness that
characterize Rivette’s “Celine and Julie Go Boating” or “Haut/bas/fragile,”
his most accessible films. It may be too rarefied, even too cerebral a pleasure
to ever appeal to moviegoers unfamiliar with his style; Rivette may be
the least known great filmmaker outside France, though he doesn’t even
attract large audiences there. But the film’s resolute plainness honors
the spirit of its subject and allows for Joan’s sanctity without becoming
hamstrung by reverence.
At 70, Rivette still seems like one of the most
contemporary filmmakers working. “Each new work,” writes Jonathan Romney,
“has the freshness and discomfort of a first-time director facing the same
problems of how to invent a cinematic fiction and see it through to a
finished (but always raw, unpolished) product.” That’s the description of a
filmmaker particularly suited to liberate history from the mustiness of
information and the aggrandizement of myth. Rivette’s Jeanne is
flesh and blood before she’s a saint. That’s why her victory is a marvel,
and it’s why her fate scorches us as well.
Here’s a startling news item: “The Intouchables,” a lively if largely predictable Parisian comedy about a wealthy quadriplegic and his ne’er-do-well immigrant caretaker, has become the biggest international success in the history of French cinema. Indeed, according to some sources — and these things are notoriously difficult to measure on a global and historical scale — “The Intouchables” is now the biggest non-Anglophone film of all time, with a worldwide gross approaching $300 million.
But beyond the business headlines, what’s really fascinating about “The Intouchables” is the way it exposes the gulf in racial attitudes between France and the United States, along with another gulf that’s just as wide, the one that has film critics and cinephiles on one side and popular audiences on the other. Viewers in numerous countries have eagerly devoured this feel-good fable about two men of different races and classes who forge an improbable friendship (dubbed by some wags “Driving Monsieur Daisy”). While the audience for foreign-language film is inherently limited in America, there’s no reason to believe it won’t do well here also. At the same time, heated transatlantic debate has erupted over whether “The Intouchables” traffics in offensive racial stereotypes, with Variety critic Jay Weissberg writing an uncharacteristically angry review that accused the film of “Uncle Tom racism” and compared the Senegalese caretaker character to a “performing monkey.”
When Harvey Weinstein first acquired “The Intouchables” in the wake of its smash success in France, he clearly imagined another dark-horse Oscar contender, in the wake of “The Artist.” The film has racked up audience awards at film festival after film festival, and currently stands at No. 93 on IMDb’s user-generated “Top 250″ list. Omar Sy, the charismatic Afro-French actor who plays Driss, the caretaker, won this year’s César award (the French Oscar equivalent) for best actor, beating out actual Oscar winner Jean Dujardin. But with the looming possibility that “The Intouchables” could spark a divisive, soul-searching racial debate — which was precisely what squelched the Oscar hopes of “The Help” — those expectations have been downplayed. (That isn’t why “The Intouchables” is being released this week, with Weinstein and most of the film-biz aristocracy in Cannes, but the coincidence is oddly useful.)
Let me come clean right now and tell you that I enjoyed “The Intouchables” quite a bit. If you’re looking for a lightweight summer change of pace, with just a smidgen of Continental flair, here it is. Both Sy and co-star François Cluzet (of the hit thriller “Tell No One”) are marvelous, the former playing a guy who’s constantly in motion, both physically and psychologically, and the latter playing a depressed and repressed guy who literally can’t move, but whose real imprisonment has more to do with his spirit than his spinal cord. Don’t go expecting serious French art cinema, please; those who have described this movie as something like a mid-’80s Eddie Murphy comedy dressed up with classy Parisian settings are correct. But here’s the question, and I can’t answer it for you: Is that such a bad thing, in itself?
Once is not enough for a movie that’s made this much money, of course, and Weinstein already has an American remake in the works, possibly to star Colin Firth as stick-up-butt wheelchair dude. The real Eddie Murphy has gotten too old to play the loosey-goosey, pot-smoking sidekick, but there’s no shortage of guys who could do it: Jamie Foxx is the default setting these days, but I’d go for the suddenly hot Kevin Hart from “Think Like a Man.” I’m not claiming it’s aesthetically or sociologically valid to remake a French movie that already feels like a reheated Hollywood throwback, by the way. I’m saying it’s a cruel reality, like Dutch elm disease or Adam Sandler, and there’s no way to stop it.
To get back to the case at hand, I do understand what the haters find so offensive about “The Intouchables.” (The infelicitous English title, by the way, reflects the fact that they couldn’t really get away with calling it “The Untouchables,” could they?) I was pretty taken aback by Weissberg’s vituperative review, and I tend to believe that “Uncle Tom” is one of those expressions that white people should pretty much never use. On the other hand, I can only applaud him for abandoning the balanced, analytical mode of trade-magazine criticism and saying exactly what he damn well thinks. (As for comparing a black man to a monkey — well, I understand what Weissberg was getting at, but it’s an error of rhetoric, the sort of comment that makes nuance and context disappear.) And I know for sure, from hearing friends and acquaintances in and around the movie business complain about this film, that Weissberg is not alone.
I believe that Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, the writing-directing duo who made “The Intouchables,” are innocent of any bad intentions. In fact, “innocent” isn’t a bad word overall, for this movie and the worldview it represents. The French may pride themselves on being the most worldly and sophisticated of all people, but the debate in France about race and immigration and multiculturalism — which ramped up sharply after the suburban riots of 2005 — can sometimes sound strikingly naive to American ears. Until very recently, mainstream French opinion has resisted thinking about the nation in anything except homogeneous terms, despite growing Arab and black minorities (both immigrant and native-born) and evident social problems with segregation and discrimination. (The French census, for instance, is prohibited from collecting data on race or religion, so no one really knows how many French people are black or Islamic.)
There can be no question that the characters in “The Intouchables” are stereotypes, in the broad sense. Cluzet’s character, Philippe, is an aristocratic zillionaire who lives in an astonishingly luxurious flat in central Paris. Since being injured in a paragliding accident, he’s lived inside a cocoon of money and privilege, surrounded by antiques and modern art and a bevy of assistants. Sy’s character, Driss, is easygoing, good-hearted, lustful and uncultured, and his passions run toward pretty girls, getting high and vintage American R&B. Philippe hires Driss specifically because Driss doesn’t particularly want the job — he only shows up to get a signature for his benefits card — and feels no pity for Philippe.
Which is actually a pretty good reason. You get where this is going, most likely: Driss is a pretty inept caretaker, at least at first, but is the only person Philippe knows who will relate to him man to man. There’s a bit of borderline-homophobic humor about their enforced intimacy; there are interludes with hookers and fast cars and late-night conversations fueled by booze and marijuana. Driss learns to like Mozart and modern art; Philippe learns to get down with Earth Wind & Fire and gets some valuable tips about chicks. It’s probably fair to summarize this movie as being the story of a paralyzed white man who needs the help of a younger, stronger, more virile black man to reconnect with his own masculinity, and if you want to say that narrative reflects an underlying latticework of racist attitudes, I won’t argue with you. Then there’s the complicating factor that in the real-life story on which “The Intouchables” is based, the caretaker was of Algerian origin, and hence Arab rather than black. (The filmmakers have said they wanted to cast Sy, and built the story around him, but it’s certainly possible to render other interpretations.)
But one can concede all of that while still agreeing with French historian and multicultural activist François Durpaire, who has responded to Weissberg by arguing that the huge success of “The Intouchables” is likely to have positive effects in Europe’s emerging discussion of race and culture, even if the movie relies on crude generalizations. (Durpaire adds that if “The Intouchables” is offensive, so were the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies.) Movies are not meant to be seminars in sociology, after all, and most viewers will receive “The Intouchables” as an upbeat story about two guys from vastly different circumstances who turn out to have a lot in common and help each other, etc., rather than a lesson in racial semiotics.
Perhaps the strongest endorsement for “The Intouchables” has come from aging French ultra-nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has described it as an allegory about how the future of his nation depends on disenfranchised young immigrants from the suburbs. He thinks that’s a “dreadful” vision, mind you — but, seriously, who knew that guy was so smart?
“The Intouchables” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.
BERLIN, Germany – It started with a handshake, not a kiss. When Chancellor Angela Merkel and new French President Francois Hollande finally met in person on Tuesday evening, there was little of the warmth that marked her meetings with Nicolas Sarkozy in recent years.
Aides had downplayed the rendezvous as simply aimed at getting to know one another rather than about hammering out any policy. Yet the future of Europe could hinge on whether these two leaders find a way to work well together.
Rarely have two people met for the first time with so much baggage. Merkel refused to meet with Hollande during his election campaign, and made the highly unusual step of publicly backing his rival, fellow conservative Sarkozy. Hollande for his part seemed to be campaigning as much against Merkel as the incumbent, pledging to renegotiate the fiscal pact that she had championed.
Now the two have finally met face-to-face and the encounter seemed cordial if hardly warm. Following the ceremonial reviewing of the guard of honor – during which Merkel had to gently nudge Hollande in the right direction on the red carpet – the two held an hour -long meeting. They then addressed the throng of international journalists in a joint press conference during which Merkel remained stony-faced during much of Hollande’s comments, interspersed with the odd smile.
The pair did seek to downplay their differences and strike a friendly tone with Merkel even joking that the lightning that had struck Hollande’s plane on his way to Berlin was perhaps a “good omen.”
“I’m not sure whether there is sometimes more divergence perceived in the public realm than there really is,” the chancellor told the press conference. “We are aware of our responsibility, as Germany and France, for a positive development in Europe. Carried by this spirit I believe we will of course find solutions for the different problems.”
Both tried to show a united front on Greece, which risks ejection from the euro zone if it backs anti-austerity parties in the fresh elections likely after the parties failed to form a government. “Just like Frau Merkel,” Hollande said, he wanted Greece to remain in the euro zone while insisting that Athens meet the terms of the bailout agreement.
Yet when it came to the crux of the differences between the two, on austerity versus growth, it was obvious that the only thing that had been agreed so far was that they disagree.
After all, it remains to be seen how Merkel’s strict stance on rapidly reducing budget deficits can be married with Hollande’s plea for some kind of stimulus package to boost growth.
Hollande reiterated his promise to reopen talks about the fiscal pact, the agreement on strict budget discipline which he has said France will not ratify unless a growth element is also adopted.
“I said in the campaign, and I repeat today, that I want to renegotiate what was established at a certain moment,” Hollande told reporters. “Everything that can contribute to growth must be put on the table. I don’t want growth to be just a word, but tangible measures.”
He mentioned boosting competitiveness, as well as Euro bonds – essentially pooling the debt of euro zone members – something Merkel has so far flatly rejected.
He did not, however, mention tinkering with the European Central Bank’s mandate, surely a red line if ever there was one in Berlin.
For all the inauspicious beginnings, observers predict that the two will eventually hit it off. Both play on their modest, down- to-earth style and exude an air of pragmatism rather than charisma. Hollande depicts himself as “Mr Normal” in contrast to the Bling Bling of his predecessor Sarkozy, while the unassuming Merkel is often seen doing her own grocery shopping. And both are said to have a wry sense of humor in private.
Furthermore, Hollande’s gesture of appointing Germanophile Jean-Marc Ayrault as his prime minister will have gone down well in Berlin.
Yet, it is hardly a meeting of equals. Merkel is an old hand in European politics now, in her seventh year in office, while Hollande’s previous executive experience has been confined to serving as mayor of the small town of Tulle.
Furthermore Germany is the EU’s economic powerhouse, with its export-driven economy keeping the rest of the euro zone out of recession, according to figures released on Tuesday. And Berlin has long been calling the political shots in Europe, with the fiscal compact being dreamed up by Merkel, as a way of preventing EU states from getting into deeper debt in the future.
At the same time Merkel is increasingly isolated in Europe, as there is a growing realization that austerity is choking off growth. Hollande knows that other leaders, including conservatives like Italy’s Mario Monti, also want Berlin to budge on its debt reduction fixation.
Hollande came to Berlin straight from his inauguration ceremony in Paris. After beating Sarkozy on May 6 he will feel he has a mandate from the French people to push for a change of direction in Europe. Yet he also faces a tough economic situation back home, with just 0.1 percent growth in the first quarter and growing unemployment, now at a 13-year high of 10 percent. If the economy were to contract even further, it could make it very difficult to fulfill many of his campaign pledges, such as reversing Sarkozy’s pension reforms.
Merkel has her own problems, despite the strong economy. Her party, the conservative CDU, has just suffered a bruising defeat in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Her coalition is increasingly fractious, with Bavaria’s CSU leader Horst Seehofer publicly slamming the CDU candidate in North Rhine-Westphalia Norbert Roettgen on TV for his campaign, while the FDP is unpredictable due to an ongoing leadership crisis.
The fact that she needs a two-thirds majority in the Bundestag to ratify the fiscal compact means she is dependent on the opposition SPD. And while the party has broadly backed her euro policy, it has been emboldened by Hollande’s victory and the strong showing in NRW. On Tuesday the party’s leaders said that they would delay the vote on the fiscal pact, originally scheduled for late May, saying it wanted to see concrete growth measures as well as austerity.
That would leave time for Merkel and Hollande to agree to some sort of compromise solution.
The pair said they will seek an agreement ahead of the next big summit of EU leaders in June. “It will be very important that Germany and France present their ideas together at this summit, and we have talked about the preparation,” Merkel said.
They will see each other before that, meeting at an informal dinner of EU leaders on May 23, as well as at the forthcoming NATO and G8 summits.
However, Hollande is unlikely to show much willingness for compromise with Berlin just yet. After all his party is facing legislative elections in mid June and he will want to make sure he is not seen to be backsliding on campaign pledges.
Hollande wants his five-year term to start with his Socialist Party securing control of the National Assembly so that he can push through his agenda. Otherwise he faces a frustrating period of “cohabitation” with a prime minister from the opposing camp, such as occurred when conservative Jacques Chirac’s presidency coincided with the premiership of Socialist Lionel Jospin from 1997 to 2002.
As such Merkel cannot expect Hollande to veer from his insistence on growth measures. And for all his unassuming manner, he could well prove to be a more difficult partner than Sarkozy in the long run.
Nevertheless Merkel is also likely to stand firm on many issues. Asked on Tuesday night if she feared Hollande’s campaign promises she replied coolly: “I am seldom afraid, as fear is not a good counselor in politics.”
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The message from France and Greece this weekend was clear. Will President Obama and Republicans listen?
By Robert Reich
Socialist Party candidate for the presidential election Francois Hollande delivers a speech during a meeting in Lorient, western France, Monday, April 23, 2012. (Credit: AP/David Vincent)
Who’s an economy for? Voters in France and Greece have made it clear it’s not for the bond traders.
Referring to his own electoral woes, Prime Minister David Cameron wrote Monday in an article in the conservative Daily Telegraph: “When people think about the economy they don’t see it through the dry numbers of the deficit figures, trade balances or inflation forecasts — but instead the things that make the difference between a life that’s worth living and a daily grind that drags them down.”
Cameron, whose own economic policies have worsened the daily grind dragging down most Brits, may be sobered by what happened over the weekend in France and Greece – as well as his own poll numbers. Britain’s conservatives have been taking a beating.
In truth, the choice isn’t simply between budget-cutting austerity, on the one hand, and growth and jobs on the other.
It’s really a question of timing. And it’s the same issue on this side of the pond. If government slices spending too early, when unemployment is high and growth is slowing, it makes the debt situation far worse.
That’s because public spending is a critical component of total demand. If demand is already lagging, spending cuts further slow the economy – and thereby increase the size of the public debt relative to the size of the overall economy.
You end up with the worst of both worlds – a growing ratio of debt to the gross domestic product, coupled with high unemployment and a public that’s furious about losing safety nets when they’re most needed.
The proper sequence is for government to keep spending until jobs and growth are restored, and only then to take out the budget axe.
If Hollande’s new government pushes Angela Merkel in this direction, he’ll end up saving the euro and, ironically, the jobs of many conservative leaders throughout Europe – including Merkel and Cameron.
But he also has an important audience in the United States, where Republicans are trying to sell a toxic blend of trickle-down supply-side economics (tax cuts on the rich and on corporations) and austerity for everyone else (government spending cuts). That’s exactly the opposite of what’s needed now.
Yes, America has a long-term budget deficit that’s scary. So does Europe. But the first priority in America and in Europe must be growth and jobs. That means rejecting austerity economics for now, while at the same time demanding that corporations and the rich pay their fair share of the cost of keeping everyone else afloat.
President Obama and the Democrats should set a clear trigger — say, 6 percent unemployment and two quarters of growth greater than 3 percent — before whacking the budget deficit.
And they should set that trigger now, during the election, so the public can give them a mandate on Election Day to delay the “sequestration” cuts (now scheduled to begin next year) until that trigger is met.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012 2:44 PM UTC
With Hollande poised to win the French election, the EU is finally moving away from destructive austerity measures
By Paul Ames, GlobalPost
Socialist Party candidate for the presidential election Francois Hollande(Credit: AP Photo/David Vincent)
BRUSSELS, Belgium — The ground is shifting in Europe’s debt crisis. The edifice of economic austerity built under the guidance of German Chancellor Angela Merkel is starting to wobble.
There’s a new buzz in Brussels about pumping hundreds of billions into a Marshall Plan-inspired fund to get Europeans back to work, devaluing the euro to boost exports or sharing out the euro-zone debt burden.
“This generalized austerity is prolonging the crisis. I can’t accept that. We need growth in Europe,” says Francois Hollande, the Socialist leader tipped to win Sunday’s French presidential election.
“With every day that goes by, I have the feeling that my initiative is more and more understood in Europe,” Hollande said in comments posted on his website Monday.
Hollande is enjoying an eight-point lead over incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in opinion polls ahead of Sunday’s vote. His expected victory is the main catalyst behind the emerging pro-growth emphasis in Europe, but there are other factors.
Continuing grim economic news — Spain announced Monday that it had sunk into a second recession in just over two years — is fueling doubts that Europe’s three-year dedication to spending cuts and tax hikes may not be the best way to cure the continent’s economic malaise.
“Europe has misdiagnosed its problems in important respects and set the wrong strategic course,” former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers wrote in a column this weekend. “Only if growth is restored can the euro endure and European financial problems be resolved.”
The Spanish newspaper El Pais reported Sunday that the EU was preparing a 200 billion euro “sort of Marshall Plan” to fund infrastructure projects, green energy and advanced technology.
EU spokeswoman Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen said Monday that such figures were “highly speculative.” However, the EU is putting together a plan to boost growth for approval at what is expected to be a highly significant summit of European leaders on June 28-29.
Wary that the new focus risks further spooking markets, Ahrenkilde Hansen told reporters that going for growth did not mean a return to slack finances. “We are not talking about an alternative to fiscal consolidation,” she said. “The issue is not either fiscal correction, or growth. We need both.”
The late June EU summit is likely to be Hollande’s first if he succeeds in unseating Sarkozy.
Much has been made of the Socialist leader’s expected clash with Merkel due to his criticism of the fiscal discipline treaty that is the centerpiece of her response to the treaty.
Both Merkel and Hollande in recent days endorsed two of the key pro-growth ideas expected to be on the summit agenda: fast-tracking the use of remaining money from the EU’s budget for developing its poorest regions, which ran at 360 billion euros from 2007-2013, and boosting the firepower of the EU’s lending arm, the European Investment Bank.
EU Economics Commissioner Olli Rehn has suggested that lifting its capital by just 10 billion euros could enable the EIB to leverage lending of 180 billion euros.
Although they have continued to spar in media comments, Hollande and Merkel have been preparing the ground for non-confrontational relationship. There are signs of a softening of the Frenchman’s demand for a renegotiation of the fiscal discipline treaty.
Defeat for Sarkozy would however be a blow for Merkel, who offered unprecedented support for the incumbent in the early stages of the French campaign.
She also risks losing allies elsewhere.
The Dutch government, one of the strongest supporters of Merkel’s insistence on austerity for southern Europe, fell last week over its own budget-cutting plans and will face a stern challenge from the center left and far right in September elections.
Parties on both political extremes are seen profiting from a wave of discontent in Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Greece to find a successor to the technocratic government which has gone along with the tough conditions set by the EU in return for bailout packages.
Adding to the pressure over the past few days, several key players have joined the chorus calling for a growth initiative, including European Central Bank Governor Mario Draghi; top EU financial services official Michel Barnier; and the UN’s International Labor Organization.
“Austerity has, in fact, resulted in weaker economic growth, increased volatility and a worsening of bank’s balance sheets,” said an ILO report released Monday. “It is high time for a move toward a growth- and job-orientated strategy.
Monday, Apr 23, 2012 6:42 PM UTC
France's far-right party leader may help the embattled president win reelection
By Barry Neild, GlobalPost
Marine Le Pen reacts after the first round of French presidential elections on Sunday. (Credit: AP/Jacques Brinon)
LONDON, UK — Campaign strategists for both Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande will be scrambling on Monday to make sense of a first-round presidential vote that left neither with a clear path to victory — and showed a surprise level of support for a far-right candidate.
As many analysts expected, Socialist Hollande scored higher than incumbent Sarkozy in Sunday’s election, but thanks to a surge in the popularity of Marine Le Pen of the anti-immigration National Front party, a easy win is no longer the foregone conclusion that many predicted.
Hollande took 28.8 percent of the vote against Sarkozy’s 26.1 percent, meaning they will face each other in a run-off vote on May 6. But what was expected to be a simple referendum on differing plans to rescue France’s struggling economy has been complicated by Le Pen’s showing of 18.5 percent.
As horse-trading begins for the support of those who voted for the eight lower-polling candidates now eliminated from the race, the problem now facing both Hollande and Sarkozy is how they can capitalize on the far-right turnout.
Some analysts said center-right Sarkozy is most likely to benefit from Le Pen’s success, others argued it could derail him. Meanwhile, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the party his daughter now leads, said the result put the National Front on track for big wins in June parliamentary elections.
Le Pen’s success also raises the possibility that French opinion was swayed by a series of shootings in southern France last month involving a 23-year-old terrorist who claimed allegiance to al-Qaeda. At the time, Le Pen said the incident showed that the “Islamic fundamentalist threat has been underestimated in our country.”
That said, Le Pen has doubtlessly attracted considerable support for her protectionist economic policies and for being the only conservative candidate proposing to take France out of the euro.
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A still from "The Intouchables" 
Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande in Berlin on Tuesday, (Credit: Reuters/Fabrizio Bensch) 
