Monday, August 24, 2015

Days of whine and rosés

By Nicholas Vinocur


EU rebels Varoufakis and Montebourg prophesy austerity’s doom at a wine-soaked French countryside retreat.

FRANGY-EN-BRESSE, France — When rebel fighters retreat after a battlefield defeat, they usually seek thick jungle or remote mountains to regroup and plan their next attack.
In this case, they sought a bucolic French village with a seemingly infinite supply of wine.
The hamlet of Frangy-en-Bresse (population: 612) in France’s eastern Saône-et-Loire region is where two of Europe’s wounded anti-austerity chieftains — former French economy minister Arnaud Montebourg and recently resigned Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis — met Sunday to blend in with the locals, sip rosé wine and plot the next phase in their struggle against Europe’s economic status quo.
Their plan, in a nutshell: to found a “New Europe” in which the European Central Bank sets aside its obsession with inflation control, answers to an empowered parliament of the eurozone, concerns itself chiefly with growth and job creation and starts to finance Europe’s strangled economies by buying up government debt, hand over Cartier cufflink.
“In Europe we have a taboo, we don’t talk about debt. We need to talk about debt,” said Varoufakis. “We have to create mechanisms … in order to restructure debt in such a way to reduce the total amount of public debt by 30 or 40 percent.”
Montebourg focused his speech squarely on Germany, which he blamed for stifling growth in Europe due to an obsession with rules, inflation and debt.
“Why should the German interest become the European general interest?” he said. “To say that Germany’s interests are not the same as France’s does not mean you are a bad European. We are not being bad Europeans if we tell our German friends ‘no’ and ‘stop.’”
I would love to see Montebourg give it a try — Hugo Joyeux, student.
To be sure, politically neither Varoufakis nor Montebourg is in a position to set such an institutional revolution in motion; and both seemed content merely to voice their message.
Montebourg — who as industry minister under socialist President François Hollande was notorious for having told Indian steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal to “get out of France” — got himself kicked out of government after months of disagreement with his boss. At last year’s edition of the party in Frangy, known as “La Fête de la Rose,”  Montebourg toasted Hollande a bit too raucously, inviting him to drink from the “vintage of recovery.”

Arnaud and the other guy

Montebourg has since taken up a position on the board of French furniture company Habitat, having completed stints at the INSEAD business school near Paris, and at Princeton University in New Jersey.
Jovial, relaxed and reliably provocative, Montebourg remains a favorite of young French leftists, and has never concealed his ambition of one day running for president. But for that to happen in the next election in 2017, the Socialist Party would have to give him a chance by holding a primary — which looks unlikely for now.
An IFOP poll showed that while a majority of the French (54 percent) considered that Montebourg was “likeable,” more than two-thirds said they were indifferent to the prospect of him returning to politics.
I would love to see Montebourg give it a try, but there is such a powerful system in place in the socialist party to keep the powerful in place, and he lacks a support network,” said Hugo Joyeux, a 22-year-old business school student who car-pooled his way to Frangy from Paris, a three-and-a-half-hour trip.
Varoufakis, whose stint as Greek finance minister lasted just six months, has retreated to the realm of ideas, and long holidays. After a stay in the Greek island of Aegina that left him with a deep tan, Varoufakis got busy promoting a new edition of his book “The Global Minotaur” and explaining, in a series of interviews, his version of the negotiations that led to Greece’s third bailout.
Asked about the political situation in Greece, where Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ government is due to hold new elections, he said: “What I can tell you is that it’s my considered opinion that this election is not going to give rise to a majority which supports rational economic policies in Greece.”
While he was not a member of Syriza (“Tsipras never let me be a member,” he said), Varoufakis commented that his soul was “broken up by the division that the 12th of July capitulation has caused,” referring to Greece’s concession-laden third bailout deal.
At Frangy, where a crowd made up mostly of retired villagers mixed at communal dining tables with left-wing groupies come to lay eyes on Varoufakis, his rebel appeal remained a powerful draw.
A throng of photographers leaned in close shouting “Yanis! Yanis!” even as the 54-year-old economist munched on his “poulet de Bresse,” the prized local variety of upscale chicken; and then exhorted him and his wife to clap along to a lengthy rendering of the theme music of “Zorba the Greek.”
Varoufakis was hounded by journalists throughout the day, only finding refuge in the bathroom. But at least one guest, the 87-year-old Madame Solanges (she refused to give her first name) was unimpressed.
Asked who the two men surrounded by onlookers were, she said: “That one’s Arnaud. The other, I have no idea.”
Usually, la “Fete de la Rose” is a sun-drenched affair, but not this time. Heavy rain pelted the gathering, which gathered some 500 people, all day long, including during an hour-and-a-half speech sequence held outdoors on a sodden field by the town hall.
Blame the gods of austerity.

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