Carla Bruni, the utmost of the bling-bling Right
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Here he is, finally! He managed to do it. After a life of political battles and desert crossings, after hundreds of speeches, after five years spent on television broadcasts and on newspapers’ front-page, here he is. Nicolas Sarkozy has become Paris Hilton!
Laid on papers, the story sounds nice. The President gets a crush on a young and beautiful woman, ex-model, daughter of a (very) wealthy family, engaged on the Left and recently named official singer of the cultural Paris.
Like in movies
The synopsis is perfect and the Anglo-Saxon press was not mistaken. This press that hurried to attend the conference given by the chief of State, asking him the only valuable question : when is the wedding scheduled? We feel like in this movie, “The American President”. You know, this thing that is regularly broadcasted on TV for Christmas, which describes America like Europeans would like it to be … A widowed president, Michael Douglas, falls in love with a beautiful lobbyist (don’t worry, she’s green) and … Well, that’s it …
Here, the problem is that the President is not a good democrat taking care of civic rights and despising the moralistic speeches made by the bad republicans. The true problem is that Nicolas Sarkozy is a President in real life!
Bling bling
Carla Bruni at the President’s arm, spending a holiday in Egypt paid for by Vincent Bolloré – a finance tycoon – it is not only holy bread for tabloids all across the world, it is also the ultimate achievement of a whole process, a whole mutation, which is called in France “the bling-bling Right”.
What does “bling-bling Right” mean? “Bling-bling” comes from American rap singers and their subtle taste for golden jewelleries weighting four kilos. It means that you’re not ashamed of exposing your material success; it means that being part of the super-rich has become the utmost hype trend!
But in France, the “bling-bling” has something of cultural struggle. In this country, it’s been decades since big fortunes were submitted to a strict system of moderation, subtle and nuanced elegance and feigned detachment. All this culminated with the “bo-bo” phenomenon (or bohemian bourgeois). Roughly speaking, the more money you earn, the more you get dressed as a hippy!
It became unbearable. The entire industrial and financial bourgeoisie, uncomfortable in the aristocratic standard of cultural and intellectual elite, has always been looking for its revenge.
After all, Nicolas Sarkozy is just the tree that hides the forest. We are over with complexes, with Judeo-Christian refrains, with this convenient contempt for earthly things. Hurrah for big cars, for golden watches and private jets! Without forgetting, of course, beautiful women to look good on pictures!
Nuclear power in swimming-suit
You may ask me, what’s the problem? After all, it’s true that French people have a problem with success, with winners, with money. Anyway, is it so bad to show what reality is?
Except that this reality only concerns a small group of people. Nicolas Sarkozy is not the manager of a firm ranked on the Stock Market. He is President of the Republic, which means that he will have to take decisions that will engage a whole country. It often makes me smile when I think about this person running in a yellow swimming-suit along beaches of fine sand, who gets the nuclear fire power… He, then, has the duty to be neutral, to be reserved because the electorate must be able to think that the choices he takes, and especially the more difficult ones, are taken for objective reasons.
It is true, wealthy people, people who succeed are not meant to show moderation. But if the President of the Republic himself doesn’t act with a minimum of elegance, who will ?
Alexis Brunelle
Translation : Sophie Helbert