french election summary

A great concise summary of the French election's surprise result (in case you haven't been following it), by (who else) Kwame Holman, plus interviews with longtime observers: France's Election Shock [PBS NewsHour]. PBS also provides video and audio versions of the report.  

 Rushdie on Le Pen

From today's Post, Salman Rushdie on the French elections:

France: Dangerous Illusions... [Washington Post]

It's an old adage in politics that the electorate is never wrong, but in this case, by golly, it was. Maybe it's the French electorate that should resign instead of Jospin, and make room for new voters more interested in shouldering their responsibilities.

It's a terrible truth about our awful times that the people who seem to care least about freedom and democracy are the ones who have the readiest access to these treasures. In the years following the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against me, the loss of my right to vote (when one lives at an "unknown address" one can't register as a voter) was one of the privations I felt most keenly. Yet whenever I mentioned the fact, nobody seemed to feel I had lost anything particularly important. Since then, voter disillusion and cynicism have continued to increase. The disenfranchised citizens of the world's many tyrannies have every right to feel disgusted that those who possess these privileges value them so little and squander them so readily.