One of the big winners in the recent
French elections was the far-right Front National (FN) party. They won 15 mayoral races, giving them the
opportunity to run cities for the first time in years.
The FN is led by Marine Le Pen,
the daughter of the semi-fascist founder.
She is a very clever demagogue.
She has done a good job of making the party more acceptable –
eliminating the overly racist rhetoric, ejecting the skinheads, recruiting more
media-savvy candidates. It remains to be
seen whether she has really moderated the party’s extreme positions or just
hidden them.
So I was very interested to see
what she would do with her new-found power.
Would she take on some of important issues that she is always accusing
the mainstream parties of ducking? Would
it be unemployment, taxes, security?
Oh no, none of those. Instead, Madame Le Pen decided to take on one
of the burning issues of our time – school lunches. Yes, according to Le Pen, many school
districts in France have limited budgets and can only serve one main dish in
their schools. And because of religious
sensitivities, they have eliminated pork so as not to offend their Muslim
students.
Now, France has an aggressively
secular government. So Le Pen was making
the seemingly reasonable point that there should not be such religious
concessions in the public schools. She
would henceforth lead the charge to return sacred French bacon to the plates of impressionable schoolchildren. To
the barricades!
The only problem is that this shocking
elimination of pork has taken place in, oh, six small school districts in all
of France. And how many of the
newly-elected FN mayors are being forced to grapple with this agonizing
problem? That would be, um, zero.
I am looking forward to seeing
what grave national problem Le Pen next plans to confront. Toothpick imports?
KVS
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