Hey! Over here…Yeah… F-r-a-n-c-e.

Yesterday was Pentacote, minor holiday in the catholic world that was also, until recently, another work holiday in France, a country where work holidays outnumber varieties of cheese.

Until recently, I say, because two years ago, Pentacôte was officially downgraded to a simple workday in France just like any other.

This downgrade was the official government response to intense public outrage two years ago following the brutal heat wave in August 2003 that left 15000 elderly dead from dehydration and other heat-related causes. An outraged French public, upon returning home from their annual month-long August holidays and finding that tante Ghislaine and oncle François were no longer with them except in spirit, demanded explanations from the government. State officials, who had spent the better part of the blistering month on the various beaches of the world themselves, had to come up with some sort of official-sounding measure that would renew frenchpersonnes’ confidence that a) of course the French govt was fully capable of controlling the weather if it had only not been on holiday itself, and b) they (frenchpersonnes) could continue to take the month of August off without having to worry whether grand-mère and grand-père, left behind in the unventilated Paris apartment, were drinking the recommended minimum daily quantity of Evian.

(Continued)

I didn’t think that I could ever again be surprised at french political perfidy, but the ‘national’ reaction to Mittel’s hostile buyout attempt on Arcelor amazes me.

Here you have a highly successful european citizen of ‘third-world’ (Indian) descent, wanting to buy a franco-luxo-spanish steel consortium. This steel consortium used to be composed of several horridly-run state monopolies (commonly called ‘national champions’) that were cobbled together at great coups de taxpayer’s money (in 2001).

The day before Mittel announced his intentions, Arcelor showed how it felt about takeovers by completing its own hostile one of a Canadian steel group. The usual stupid white men, De Villepin, Breton (who I thought was a business champion) & Co. thought nothing of Arcelor’s hostile takeover of a wimpy Canadian company.
But, before they had any time to savor La Grande Victoire, the tables got turned in the worst possible way. They poof and paff (which French politicians do better than anyone, anywhere), claiming that hostile takeovers are nice things when it’s France doing the taking over, but …(poof, paff). That the attacker is some guy who isn’t a nice white french elephant, but comes from a place where they have real elephants, well, you can just hear the snotty comments going back and forth in Matignon and Elysée.

How perverse can politicians get?