Word: joffrin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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During Nicolas Sarkozy's first major Elysée press conference in January 2008, left-leaning editor Laurent Joffrin boldly asked whether the unprecedented powers the French President had consolidated in his hands - Sarkozy had just passed constitutional reforms to expand the President's role - hadn't created a veritable "elected monarchy" within the republic's democratic framework. "Monarchy means hereditary. Do you think I am the illegitimate son of Jacques Chirac, who installed me to the throne?" Sarkozy mockingly retorted, referring to his bitter relationship with his predecessor. "A man as cultivated as you saying something so stupid...
...Twenty-two months later, however, Joffrin might be forgiven for having a quiet chuckle. The Elysée has backed a move to appoint Sarkozy's son Jean to head the administration managing the business district La Défense. Jean is just 23 and a little over a year into his law degree. Appointing him to such a high-profile position smacks of nepotism, cronyism and regal high-handedness, say Sarkozy's critics. "Who for an instant thinks that the nomination of a boy entering his second year of legal studies to the presidency of an institution that manages...
...this crime wasn't anti-Semitic, what crime is?" agreed Laurent Joffrin in his editorial for the daily Libération as the trial opened. Joffrin warned that anti-Semitic thinking that has long been present among France's extreme right- and left-wing political groups is gaining traction in France's blighted suburbs. "In the exclusion of the projects, in the racism that strikes minorities, and in their social despair," Joffrin wrote, "the old plague has found favorable terrain...
Today, Libé has a new benefactor in the form of Edouard de Rothschild, and a new unstarry-eyed editor, Laurent Joffrin. The paper flirted briefly with break-even in 2007 and it's trying to find a way to go post-ideological, sort of. The Net, conferences, French open-shirted philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy shilling with advertisers - the new Libé will try almost anything. Joffrin even invited Carla Bruni, wife of France's rightist President Nicolas Sarkozy, to serve as celebrity editor for a day, but that was a step too far and Joffrin was forced...
...said that the Elysée is intensely observing the slightest sign of revolt," wrote Laurent Joffrin in Friday's edition of Libération - whose cover featured French students waving their fists in protest over the headline "After Greece: Can France Ignite?" "It's a wise precaution: divided, anguished, disillusioned, France has a Greek profile...