Election in Paris

Well, decision day approaches. On Sunday March 15 the people of Paris will vote in the first round of an election for Mayor of Paris - along with many other local government elections across the country. 

In France, although the voter cannot allocate preferences in the Australian style, the election is held in two rounds. In the second round, the following week, most candidates are eliminated, and the two leading candidates contest the election, as explained.

As a result, Anne Hidalgo, the current mayor may be re-elected, though in the second round. Hidalgo was born in southern Spain sixty years ago and is a dual French-Spanish citizen. She has been mayor since 2014, and is supported by the socialists (PS), communists (PCF), and various centrists and independents, with 23% support in the January opinion poll. There is a nice article  about her in The Guardian.

The main competition seems is from Les Républicains (LR), the centre-right opposition. Their candidate, Rachida Dati, was a minister under Sarkozy and she is the current mayor of the 7th arrondissement. France24 suggests that she is a strong challenger.

The governing party, La France En Marche (LFEM), the party of the President, Emmanuel Macron nominated Benjamin Griveaux (16%) as its candidate. When he resigned as candidate in late January over a sex video, he was replaced by Agnès Buzyn a doctor and formerly Minister of Health in the national government.

The flamboyant Cédric Villani, a dissident member of the President's party, is a distinguished mathematician and winner of the Fields Medal in 2010, but his vote has slipped in recent polls, as the field as narrowed. However, he is also greenish in colour, and was a strong supporter of Hidalgo in 2014 when she was elected.

Europe Ecologie Les Verts (EELV) has nominated David Belliard, who wants to free Paris from the car. Like that of Villani, Bellisrad's support has recently fallen, as many of his supporters appear to have transferred their allegiance to Hidalgo, who also has a strong environmental element in her program and wants to pedestrianise the city centre, among other things.

There are three other candidates. Aimer Paris (To Love Paris) has as candidate Serge Federbusch, who is supported by the extreme right Rassemblement National (RN). Libenons Paris is the party of Marcel Campion, who owns the Paris ferris wheel, and has had a long career in Paris carnival. Décidons Paris is a list headed by Danielle Simonnet, of the left.

Recent comment following the resignation of the Macron (LFEM) candidate has suggested that the main challenger to the long hegemony of the socialists (PS) - since the mayoralty of Jacques Chirac from 1977-1995 - is Rachida Dati of the PR. Dati is a high profile former minister under Nicolas Sarkozy and is waging a strong campaign. France24 summarises the situation close to the end of the campaign.

So for whom should we vote? My decision is clear, although unfortunately I am without the right to vote. Not only was David Belliard born on the same date as I was (although 31 years later), but he supports the reduction of cars in Paris - the pedestrian candidate par excellence. Bonne chance, David.

ALIA Elections - two years ago and now

Two years ago I established this blog as part of my campaign to be elected vice president of ALIA. Now, looking through the ALIA election material for the Board elections this year, and thinking back, I was struck by two things.

First, it was so much easier to vote this time, with the introduction of online voting. I don't know why we didn't do it before, and I certainly don't understand why anyone would ever not vote again. Everyone - please vote, it is so easy.

Second, the candidates, with one exception, don't really seem to have Web 2.0ed much at all. I have found three blogs for the five candidates. Richard Siegersma's engaging blog has a number of posts on a variety of issues, and even a few comments. Kate Sinclair has advoKate - great name, but it needs more than one post. And Lothar von Retzlaff has a blog entitled Lothervonretzlaff, but alas, also a single post. Neither Gill Hallam nor Stuart Ferguson has a blog that I can find, but I am happy to be corrected.

The ALIA Board has taken our elections into the Web 2.0 zone - what about the candidates?

Word of the day

Today's word is ruddslide ("did you mean mudslide?"), presumably from landslide, and refers to the Australian political events of 24 November. This recent coinage (three days old) has astonishingly achieved 55,000 results in a Google search today. There is a much less common synonym ruddbath (mudbath or bloodbath, I wonder?), but this term has virtually no results, despite being equally clever.

Why so many, so quick? The answer is blogs: everyone has a blog nowadays. The term was possibly coined by the Sydney Morning Herald on the 3rd of November, but even so, it had barely stirred until the 24th. Then the bloggers began . . .

Of course, references to the ruddslide are well and truly outnumbered by references to Natalie Gauci. Just check it out, if you need some real life perspective on what preoccupied Australians over the weekend.

Word of the Day

I used the word ostensibly in an email exchange with Julie, and she suggested that it was a particularly appropriate word, especially in a pre-election environment. I wonder why she said that?

The Free Dictionary defines ostensible as "represented or appearing as such" and provides as an example "His ostensible purpose was charity, but his real goal was popularity." And here is another nice example of the use of the word, from David Flint on the Crikey website ". . . measures against fraud at general elections . . . were significantly eased in the 80s, ostensibly to make voting easier. (Few voters at the time were aware that voting was difficult.)"

And from a cornucopia of usage examples, mainly in political contexts, in Webster's Online Dictionary: "Although citizens ostensibly vote for the President and Members of Parliament, they do not have the right to change their government."

Quite right, Julie!

Have a nice Easter . . . last chance to vote

Here are a few thoughts about different topics.

The main topic of course is that if you have put off voting in the ALIA elections, you are now cutting things very fine. It is Saturday, and your vote must be received by ALIA national office (which is in Canberra) by 5.00pm on Wednesday. I think you should post your vote today. Although I guess

People sometimes ask, why don't you have a blog post about [insert current topic of interest to questioner]? Well, the latest one of these, from a late voter, was Why can't we vote online? I pass that one on. Perhaps next year we will set something up to enable online voting; All those envelopes do seem a little old fashioned, and people lose them amongst the mass paperwork of modern life.

I have been trying out Google Alerts. Google Alerts are compilations of Google searches sent to you by email and based on search terms you provide. your choice of query or topic. I have set up an alert based on the word Swinburne, which is the name of my employer, Swinburne University of Technology. Its a wonderful service, and an illustration of the fact that we have to get used to the fact that lots of things we used to do are done well in other ways. As you can see, I'm using the word Swinburne in this post to see if Google indexes it. I'll let you know.

And a wonderful welcome to my newest grandson Liam Ferguson, born on Good Friday!

Please vote

I seem to have encountered fairly recently most of the candidates in the current ALIA elections. Margaret Allen was of course active in the 2006 ALIA conference in Perth. Richard Sayers is the CAVAL trainer, and we had a chat at the recent gig to farewell Steve O'Connor (CAVAL CEO) on his departure for Hong Kong. Kate Watson called in to Swinburne not long ago to talk about repositories. And Graham Black is, of course, a noted member of CAUL, and we meet at CAUL things. I'm very glad that we have such a good field of candidates for this election. I haven't met Kevin Dudeney or Damian Lodge, but I'm sure they are nice people too. ALIA has an unfortunate tradition of a low turnout for elections. No excuse this time - please vote!