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FORGET unemployment and the national debt.

Source : « thesundaytimes.co.uk » du 15/04/2012, page 23.(Je cite).

« No election campaign issue arouses more interest in France than whether François Hollande, the Socialist candidate, will marry his girlfriend.

He and Valérie Trierweiler, a 47-year-old, twice-divorced journalist, have been together since 2006 but the frontrunner in the opinion polls has yet to get down on bended knee.

It raises the possibility that France, liberal in its sexual mores but conservative when it comes to presidential tradition, might for the first time elect an unmarried president, not to mention an unmarried première dame.

Asked by a reader of the newspaper Le Parisien last week if he had something against marriage, Hollande, 57, who has never taken the plunge, said “not at all”,adding: “I don’t rule out anything on that front. But it’s a question that concerns only Valérie and me.”

 Another interviewer suggested that being unmarried might deter the protocol-conscious Queen from hosting Hollande and his girlfriend on an official visit to Britain. “It’s our life, we’ll decide together,” was his reply.

 Marriage has never seemed much of a priority for the former Socialist first secretary.

 He lived with Ségolène Royal, his ex-girlfriend and the former Socialist presidential candidate, for 30 years and had four children with her.

 He was once quoted as saying marriage was “too bourgeois”for them.

 Trierweiler, who has three children from her second marriage, was recently seen shaking hands with Royal at a campaign event in Rennes but relations are frosty.

 Hollande said last year he did not think voters would mind having an unmarried president because standards had changed under Sarkozy,the first French president ever to divorce and remarry in office.

Does that mean he has no intention of proposing toTrierweiler?

 “Valerie gives me what is most important, her love and confidence,” he said last week. “Then there is her view as a journalist, always useful.” He added: “She makes me happy,that’s the most important thing.”

 Trierweiler is keen not to parade her private affairs in public. “The first you’ll hear of it,” she said recently, referring to a possible marriage, “is when it’s already happened.”

 IN NEWS REVIEW

 Britain’s Frog Alley goes to le ballot box P3 A TALE of brutish goings-on among French Socialists is threatening to embarrass the party’s presidential candidate only days before polling begins.

A former driver for François Hollande, the Socialist candidate, is suing him and one of his closest aides for failing to pay him six months’ salary that he says he is owed. He also accuses the Hollande camp of trying to scare him with “death threats”.

Hitherto unreported in the French press, the claims are an embarrassment to a politician who promotes himself as a friend of the oppressed and champion of better working conditions.

Mohamed Belaid, the chauffeur, claims he was engaged as a “clandestine” worker without an employment contract.

“I drove Hollande everywhere,”he told The Sunday Times last week. “I drove him to parliament, to television studios, to his dry cleaner. I wa expected to be on call seven days a week, 24 hours a day.”

Belaid, 39, claimed that Faouzi Lamdaoui, one of Hollande’s closest lieutenants, had offered him £1,340 a month to be Hollande’s driver. He said he received only a fraction of that sum and a promised employment contract never materialised.

Convinced that Hollande and Lamdaoui were taking advantage of him, he resigned after six months but when he aired his grievance in public two men turned up on his doorstep and threatened to cut his throat unless he kept quiet.

“I’m very disappointed,” he said. “I completely trusted him [Hollande]. He’s a man of state. He should be setting an example.”

The Socialist party dismisses the Belaid affair as evidence of a “dirty tricks” campaign by President Nicolas Sarkozy to undermine a rival widely tipped to wrest power from him after next Sunday’s vote.

A spokeswoman denied that Hollande owed Belaid any money and described as “nonsense” claims that he and Lamdaoui were behind any threats.

Nicolas Cellupica, a lawyer, said he had filed a lawsuit against Hollande and Lamdaoui on behalf of Belaid. In it, he complains about “death threats” and demands payment of six months’ salary. The court has three months to consider the case.

“This has nothing to do with my political convictions,” said Cellupica, acknowledging that he is an active member of Sarkozy’s centre-right UMP party. “Belaid came to me in February. I hadn’t heard of him before then. This is about defending the rights of a client who is trying to feed his family.” The lawyer added that he had proof of Belaid’s claims. Belaid said he had begun work as Hollande’s chauffeur at the end of 2008 when the Socialist leader had given up his post as the party’s first secretary and therefore lost his right to a driver in Paris.

Belaid said that Lamdaoui, like him of Algerian origin, kept on promising him a work contract that would entitle him to full benefits. Lamdaoui, who is in charge of Hollande’s campaign logistics, would occasionally pay ¤200 or ¤300 (£165-£247) in cash when Belaid threatened to quit.

Occasionally Belaid raised with Hollande the fact that he was not getting paid and did not yet have a contract.

“He would say to me, ‘Take it up with Lamdaoui’,” said Belaid. Eventually his patience ran out and in June 2009 Belaid refused to do any more jobs for Hollande.

He went to an industrial tribunal but could not afford a lawyer and his case was thrown out. His next step was to hold up a banner outside parliament demanding payment.

Then he received his first death threat. He says that one of the same men of norAfrican origin who visited his house in 2009 reappeared outside his home last Friday and threatened him again by passing his hand in front of his throat in a cutting motion.

Belaid said he had captured the moment on a video that he had presented to police.

“They are trying to scare me,” he said of Hollande and Lamdaoui.

Hollande’s supporters claimed the lawsuit was politically motivated. Another example of the “dirty tricks”campaign, they said, was a report on an anti-Hollande website that the son of Valérie Trierweiler, the candidate’s girlfriend, had been arrested recently outside his school for smoking marijuana.

Trierweiler refused to discuss the report, which has not been mentioned in the French press.

Belaid, who has since found work as a supermarket manager, claims the Socialists were always eager to recruit people of immigrant origin such as himself.

“They use us to bring in the vote,” he said. “I was always being encouraged to bring in other people.” He added: “But do they really care about people like me? I don’t think so.”

In a visit to immigrant suburbs of Paris last week, Hollande, who has promised higher taxes for the rich and earlier retirement for the poor, urged people to vote for him next Sunday in the first round of the two-stage election.

“Some are richer than you, but you are more numerous,” he said, to applause. Polls show him neck and neck with Sarkozy in the first round but he leads by a wide margin in the second, decisive, round on May 6.

Belaid, at least, will not be voting for Hollande. “The Socialists have let me down,” he said.

“I won’t have anything more to do with them.”(Fin de citation).

Le Sunday Times évoque donc, dans un article récent, reproduit ci-dessus,  une affaire que la Presse française, fidèle à ses réflexes « d’omerta séléctive », s’est bien gardée d’évoquer.

Car d’une manière plus générale, la Presse anglo-saxonne s’intéresse de beaucoup plus près que nos journaleux aux questions qui fâchent nos hommes politiques…

 Ainsi, on apprend que Hollande n’est pas près d’épouser sa copine, et que son ancien chauffeur, aurait travaillé pour lui, sans être payé.

Il aurait été menacé de mort par le directeur de cabinet de Hollande, Faouzy Lamdaoui, au cas où il rendrait publique cette affaire.

Selon le Sunday Times, Mohamed Belaid, ancien chauffeur de François Hollande, accuse les équipes du candidat de l’avoir fait travailler illégalement en ne le payant que par intermittence et « au black ».  

 La présumée victime accuse également Faouzi Lamdaoui, le chef de cabinet du président de Conseil général de la Corrèze, de l’avoir physiquement menacé chaque fois qu’ il a essayé de rendre publique cette information.

Une nouvelle illustration du « deux poids, deux mesures » dans le traitement des informations « nauséabondes », concernant les deux candidats à la Présidence de la République.

Alors que des flots d’informations plus ou moins vérifiables ont été déversées sur l’entourage, la famille, les amis de Sarkozy, la presse est curieusement discrète sur les turpitudes supposées de l’entourage de Hollande.

Une affaire semblable à celle qui est évoquée ci-dessus, avait concerné l’ex-épouse de Hollande, Madame Royal qui avait été traînée devant les tribunaux par deux de ses collaboratrices qui l’avaient accusée de non-respect des lois sociales…

Je n’ai pas souvenance que Médiapart ait consacré la moindre ligne de ses articles sulfureux pour évoquer les « affaires » ci-dessus, qui manifestement, n’ont pas éveillé la curiosité de ses fins limiers…

Mais on imagine sans peine l’exploitation à laquelle cette affaire aurait donné lieu, si elle avait concerné Sarkozy…..