He’s not, though. He talks about immigration and cultural assimilation the way that Le Pen does, but his solutions to the problems are different. He wants to tighten up immigration controls, to encourage immigration of people with useful skills into France and discourage the poor and untrained. At the same time, he wants to help Muslims integrate into French society, so that there isn’t a divide between being Muslim and being French. Le Pen just wants the immigrants out.
I’m not sure how irrelevant it is. Much of the France-bashing you hear in the US is a result of France’s refusal to go along with the adventures of W. To the extent that French-bashing is a reflection of resentment over their failure to go along with the Iraq war, then Bush-bashing in return is relevant.
I hate to break this to you Bob…but ‘French-bashing’ pre-dates Bush by several decades (and if we are talking about the Brits, several centuries 
). For that matter, US-bashing by the French pre-dates Bush by those same time periods. The current excuse for bashing the French may be their refusal to help us out for GWII…but the root causes on both sides, as well as all the good bashing fun, goes back long before that.
-XT
Well yes and a time-honored tactic in American politics used to be twisting the Lion’s (British) tail. Certainly the French are as much a traditional punching bag as any. But the real crap like Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast started in Bush’s Reign of Error.
OTOH, and despite any mutual cultural distaste, the U.S. and France were solid friends and allies from our Revolution onwards, until just a few years ago. Heck, we were even de facto allies with Napoleon, in the sense of being at war with Britain at the same time as he was.
Wanna bet, Bob?
Well…no. The US and France have almost ALWAYS had a up and down relationship. Names have flown back and forth for decades…even centuries…between the US and France. The whole ‘Freedom Fries’ and ‘Freedom Toast’ thing is just a new face on an old and traditional period mutual loathing.
While its true that the US and France WERE friends during the American Revolution as BG points out, we also went to war with France shortly after that (I think it was sometime in the 1790’s), and I don’t think anyone would characterize our relationship with France as ‘solid allies’ from our Revolution onward. Especially post-WWII there were a LOT of tensions between France and the US as both countries sought to assert their foreign policy and dominance in Europe. In fact, I think a lot worse things were said about France in the US (and vice versa) in the 60’s and 70’s than now…the ‘Freedom Fries’ thing is pretty mild compared to some of the stuff I remember from my own youth when France would pull one of its various stunts. It used to be that American’s getting treated like shit in France was practically a byword…so we are talking about a mutual thing here.
That said, the US and France have also had times where we stood shoulder to shoulder and sort of resembled ‘allies’.
Anyway, all this is obviously a hijack…France doesn’t stand at a crossroads because we are on one of the periodic spikes where both countries (and a large percentage of our mutual citizenry) tacitly loathe each other.
-XT
No, we didn’t.
Yes, we did (though we didn’t DECLARE war, if thats what you are getting at):
-XT
I know its a further hijack of the thread, but I found this when I was looking for a link for the Quasi-War between the US and France and thought BG and Bob might be intersted in reading some. You can see that the US and France have had a somewhat rocky time of it right from the beginning. There have been periods where we were very close (well I wouldn’t say ‘friends’ exactly 
) and other times when we pissed each other off to no end. And this is just from the GOVERNMENTS perspective.
Anyway, I’ll leave it at that…don’t want to further hijack. BG, you like starting threads…feel free to start one on the historical relationship between the US and France if you like. Might be interesting, especially since there are some French Dopers and could get their unique perspective.
-XT
This is interesting – Le Pen has urged his followers to abstain from voting next Sunday. The article doesn’t say why. 
Does France have a rule that a certain percentage of voters must particpate in an election for it to be valid?
Wasn’t I reading that the French had an 87% turnout for votes lately? If that’s so, we could learn one* fuck* of a lot about the responsibility of citizens in a democracy from the French, stinky cheese or no!
Because one of the candidates is a Socialist, and the other one is the son of an immigrant and a Jew, and Le Pen doesn’t like socialists, immigrants or Jews?
Then why doesn’t he just say that?
Because, saying, “Don’t vote for Sarkozy because he’s a Jew” or “Don’t vote for him because his father’s Hungarian” would probably violate France’s hate speech/incitement laws, and Le Pen is generally smart enough not to do that. Just saying "“Don’t vote for Sarkozy”, he’s safe.
Perhaps he just fears that a mainstream right-wing incumbent who antagonizes minorities might cause more harm to Le Pen’s career as a fascist clown.
Le Pen is pretty solidly entrenched as France’s fascist clown. He’s safe in that regard.
Or maybe Sarkozy has been more actively courting Bayrou – who in any case, does have more voters, who are likelier to “swing” either left or right depending on what deal is cut – and not so much LePen, and he’s being snitty about being taken for granted.
He says he’ll concentrate on the parliamentary elections, probably counting on nobody getting a real majority and himself enough seats to at least gunk up the works.
Yes, but he got 10.44% this time, down from 16.86%. Justified or not, after the controversy that he caused Sarkozy appeals to part of the xenophobic demographic. Le Pen went from a surprising second place to an also-ran, now that there is someone else who might pressure clean the ghettoes.