May Day, now and then

It's May 1. In France, that's the Fête du travail — Labor Day. It's a holiday, and since it falls on a Tuesday this year a lot of people are winding up a four-day weekend. In Paris and other big cities, the labor unions will hold marches and demonstrations this afternoon.

The weather has turned cooler, and there's a chance of rain. In France, we just lived through the warmest month of April since 1950, according to news reports. It's almost as if we've had a mini-summer, two months in advance. April was very warm if not frankly hot, and we had a total of 3 mm of rainfall for the whole month. That's one-tenth of an inch.

The cactus my friend CHM brought me from California
has enjoyed our unseasonably hot April weather.

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For the extreme right, namely Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National party, May 1 is Joan of Arc Day in France. While the rest of the country is honoring working people, the far right has its own celebration around France's patron saint, who according to legend saved the country from English domination in the early 15th century, at the end of the Hundred Years War.

Le Pen will participate in a ceremony in Paris, and he will appear on the evening news tonight to tell his supporters how he thinks they should vote. He will endorse Nicolas Sarkozy, I suppose. I'm sure Sarkozy would just as soon Le Pen keep quiet, because some number of voters will certainly view such an endorsement in a negative light, and it might help mobilize the opposition on the left.

It's possible that Le Pen will ask his supporters — he got 11% of the vote in the first round, much less than he got five years ago — to stay home rather than vote for either candidate. He is nearly 80 years old, so it's unlikely he will ever be a candidate again. Five years ago he was one of the top two vote-getters, but this year he came in fourth. On some level, he must be angry that Sarkozy lured some of his voters away, spoiling his last chance to be president, or at least a major power broker.

The latest: at noon today, during his speech marking Joan of Arc Day, Le Pen asked his supporters not to vote on Sunday. He says abstaining will best make their point. Now that doesn't mean that all or even a large number of the four million people who voted for Le Pen on April 22 will actually stay away from the polls on May 6, but it does mean that the hard-core Front National members are less likely to vote for Sarkozy.

Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S.A. — 01 May 2003

Meanwhile, centrist François Bayrou has decided not to endorse either of the two remaining presidential candidates. It's possible that a lot of his seven million supporters — he got 18% of the vote in the first round — just won't go to the polls on Sunday, or will cast a blank ballot as a protest.

Bayrou and Ségolène Royal, who scored 26% in the first round, had a "debate" last Saturday, during which they compared and contrasted their ideas and beliefs. It was broadcast by one TV channel and one radio station in France. Royal decided to appear in public with Bayrou, I think, because she thought it might be an opportunity to convince a larger number of his supporters to vote for her this coming Sunday.

Walt, Collette, and the Jeep somewhere in New Mexico,
headed east on May 01, 2003

Sarkozy, who got 31% in the first round, has refused to talk to Bayrou, saying basically that there's no need for a winner to negotiate with a loser. Most of the members of Bayrou's party in the parliament (something like 25 out of 30) have now endorsed Sarkozy. But Bayrou's UDF party is very small, and the percentage of the vote he got indicates that his support goes far beyond his party's membership.

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I'm thinking about all this and I'm thinking about May 1, 2003, for some reason. That's when we were driving across the country from California to North Carolina on our way to Saint-Aignan. We had gotten rid of a lot of our belongings in January and February and then sold our house in March, having the rest of our furniture, clothes, and kitchen equipment packed into a container for shipment to France.

Spring 2003 — Tehachapi > Tonopah > Tucumcari

The container was sitting in a warehouse in Oakland. On May 1, we were enjoying touring around in New Mexico. I remember that we called the movers from our room at a Motel 6 in Tucumcari and gave them the go-ahead to put the container on a ship. We needed to be in France to receive the container when it arrived, and we were just betting that we'd be granted visas in time to get here before it did.

We didn't know how long we would end up staying in North Carolina, but my mother was willing to put us up at her house for the duration — including the dog. That's how mothers are.